Joni, Joni, Joni. You have been in the Senate for a while now. You should know one of the top rules of damage control is that when you’ve done something stupid, you shouldn’t prolong the drama by drawing attention to it. Unless your last name is Trump. But yours, Senator Ernst, clearly is not.
So when a snarky exchange from a recent town hall went viral — your constituents yelling that the Medicaid cuts Republicans are pushing will cause people to die and you firing back, “Well, we all are going to die” — the smart move would have been to let it lie. Sure, some of Iowa’s 3.2 million residents, over 700,000 of whom receive Medicaid assistance each year, might have taken offense. But hey, forget ’em if they can’t take a snarky joke, am I right?
Instead you panicked and put out a video “apology” that was way worse than your original comments. Not because it was too mean. We’re all pretty much used to that these days. But because you were trying so hard to be clever and witty and you failed.
Generally speaking, your awkward mishmash of insulting sarcasm and tongue-in-cheek proselytizing would have been tough even for someone very funny to pull off. But there you were, look of faux distress on your face, claiming to “sincerely apologize” for not realizing that some people at the town hall didn’t understand that we are all going to “perish from this earth” — nice hat tip to Abe Lincoln, by the way — and that “those who would like to see eternal and everlasting life” really should “embrace my lord and savior Jesus Christ.” Toss in a snarky remark about the tooth fairy, wrap it all up by setting the entire performance in what appears to be a cemetery, and voilà! So cringe.
Like Ernst, I get that we are in an era of never-back-down politics, where brutality is seen as strength and regret is for losers. But Donald Trump is the ultimate showman. He delivers his hateful rhetoric with a dash of panache. He keeps his insults simple. Most important, he never looks as though he’s trying too hard.
This shtick is harder to pull off than most people realize — or can ever hope to achieve. But if you’re going to embrace the childish nihilism of MAGA, Senator Ernst, you really need to up your game.
Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle
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