White House senior advisers Jared Kushner and Stephen K. Bannon walk on the South Lawn of the White House on March 15. (Andrew Harnik/Associated Press)
You know fissures in the White House are serious and knives are out when people start giving one another derogatory nicknames.
Which is where we stand today. Axios reported Wednesday morning on a couple of nicknames circulating within the White House for former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn, the head of the National Economic Council:
[Stephen] Bannon allies are bitter about the role they believe economic adviser Gary Cohn has played in undercutting their guy to POTUS. In private conversations, they call him “Globalist Gary.” In text messages, the shorthand is CTC (Carbon Tax Cohn) or one simple emoji:
That is an amazing anecdote. And it comes just days after The Washington Post reported on some other nicknames in the Bannon vs. Jared Kushner battle and CNN first reported the “Globalist Gary” epithet. So we thought it high time they be ranked.
As always, these rankings are from worst to best and are not to be questioned.
Lazy alliteration. Not that I'm above lazy alliteration. But this is lazy alliteration.
We get it; they are from New York, where Wall Street is. Guess what? So is President Trump.
It's not a good derogatory nickname if the other side would gladly use it for itself.
It's succinct and reminds me of all those 1990s-era sports franchises who decided nicknames ending in “s” were no longer preferable: the Orlando Magic, the Miami Heat, the Colorado Avalanche, the Minnesota Wild and the Tampa Bay Lightning. The ’90s were fun.
This is the Bannon side's answer to “Breitbart.” It's also nice and succinct and not overly pluralistic. But some have also noted that it could be seen as having anti-Semitic undertones. Oh, and Bannon himself used to work for Goldman Sachs (albeit a long time ago), so … not quite ideal.
This, of course, refers to Cohn having met with former secretary of state James Baker and others about a carbon tax proposal. It's insider-y, yes, but it's so obscure that it's memorable. I've already begun employing it in my everyday life.
I often referred to @CillizzaCNN as "Carbon Tax Cillizza."
— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) April 12, 2017
No points for creativity here, but this nickname epitomizes the disdain in this internal White House battle. The opponents of Bannon aren't just “cucks” or “RINOs;” they're simply “the Democrats.”
This has the benefit of rolling off the tongue, and the "-ite” suffix sounds vaguely religious — which is kind of the point.
As Prince demonstrated so capably, your nickname doesn't actually have to be an actual word. And this gets the Bannonites' point across far more succinctly and creatively than any of the above. I literally laughed out loud when I first read this.