At a recent press conference, a news correspondent asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt who selected Budapest, the home of right-wing leader Viktor Orbán, as the site for a meeting between United States President Donald Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Leavitt’s reply was as concise as it was juvenile: “Your mom did.”
The fusion of imperial prerogative with adolescent snark is telling. There was no need to plant stories in the media about Budapest as a desirable site for a summit, or generate some pabulum rendering its status as a right-wing hotbed with a degree of plausible deniability: just “your mom.” No data, no warrants, no evidence, just a schoolyard jape. Yet, the comment contains a world.
Sorry, no. 2016 was the Before Times, until the “grab them by the pussy” tape came out and nothing came of it.
That would have been a political career ending coffin nail at any other time. We’ve been in the upside down ever since.