by Frank Holmes, reporter
The king of political nicknames is back.
President Donald Trump has a nickname for everybody.
He has a knack for finding the most memorable, defining flaw of each and every one of his opponents and turning it into their new identity.
In the 2016 primaries, he called Jeb Bush’s personality “low energy.” In the last presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s history of shady business deals turned her into “Crooked Hillary.”
The wild-eyed socialist programs of Sen. Bernie Sanders made him “Crazy Bernie.” Long before DNA tests revealed that Elizabeth Warren has only 1/1,024th American Indian ancestry, Trump saw through her Affirmative Action exploitation and labeled her “Pocahontas.” And Vice President Joe Biden’s absent-minded answers and slow answers earned him the title “Sleepy Joe.”
Now he has unveiled a new name for Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.
Speaking to thousands of supporters at a 2020 presidential rally last week, Trump said, “I saw Adam Schiff, this guy—the watermelon head.”
“He’s like a watermelon head,” he repeated.
The epithet shows Trump plans to keep fighting Schiff, who used his chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee to lead the Democrats’ failed impeachment efforts last year.
Trump paid Schiff the compliment of saying he is “no dummy” and isn’t misguided enough to believe his own lies—which ginned up the audience to start chanting, “Lock him up!”
“He should be. Honestly that guy should be locked up,” Trump responded.
From his perch in the House, Schiff has been at the fore of the “Russian collusion” scandal intended to take down President Trump before he ever took office, but which boomeranged on Democrats when the evidence exonerated the president.
As soon as Trump took office, Schiff claimed he had seen “pretty damning” proof that Trump had been compromised by Russian agents.
The media hung on his every word, as he insisted he had secret but “ample evidence in the public domain on the issue of collusion if you’re willing to see it.” The only way anyone could defend the Trump family is “if you are willing to blind yourself.”
Schiff touted rock solid corroboration of Trump’s crimes of “a size and scope probably beyond Watergate.”
It turned out, the evidence he was talking about was the discredited Steele dossier.
Meanwhile, he was the one caught red-handed talking to two pranksters who posed as foreigners offering to send Schiff compromising photos of Donald Trump—something critics said amounted to foreign collusion itself.
Schiff then led the impeachment campaign over what Trump describes as a “perfect” phone call with the newly elected president of Ukraine. Schiff claimed that he and his staff “have not spoken directly with the whistleblower.” But the New York Times later blew the whistle on Schiff revealing that the complaint came through Schiff’s staffers.
Instead of admitting he lied, Schiff lied again—this time cooking up a false account of Trump’s phone with Ukraine. The president countered by releasing the transcript of the call and accusing Schiff of “illegally” tampering with evidence during a trial.
Their impeachment drive passed the Democrat-controlled House but failed in the Senate.
Now, polls are beginning to show that, despite Schiff’s best efforts, Trump is picking up massive support heading into the 2020 election.
Schiff and his fellow Democratic House leaders are so depressed that they’ve threatened to leave country after a Trump reelection. “We may all be moving to Canada soon,” he said recently.
Schiff’s veins bulged in his forehead as he said it.
“Watermelon head” isn’t Trump’s first nickname for Schiff. At yet another rally, Trump called his congressional nemesis “Shifty Schiff,” after Schiff told CNN that his never had leaked any information about his multi-year Russian collusion investigation to the media.
Rush Limbaugh calls the California Democrat, “Pencil Neck Schiff”—a riff on the late professional wrestler “Classy” Freddie Blassie’s novelty song, “Pencil Neck Geek.”
The Trump campaign borrowed the name last March, printing up t-shirts that show Schiff wearing white makeup and a bright red, clown nose … with a number two pencil for a neck.
The t-shirts are still available from the Trump/Pence 2020 campaign website and retail for $34.
Donald Trump may be our most energetic president since Teddy Roosevelt, but he never wastes an ounce of energy. The fact that he gave Adam Schiff a nickname means that Trump believes he will win the November election and plans on butting heads with the Democratic Party’s leadership for another four years.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”