THE POLITICAL PRESS USED TO CALL GUYS LIKE THIS "IMPISH"

I am astonished to learn that a Trump White House has turned out to be a foul-mouthed bigot.

The new spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services in a series of now-deleted tweets made racist and derogatory comments about Chinese people, said Democrats wanted the coronavirus to kill millions of people and accused the media of intentionally creating panic around the pandemic to hurt President Donald Trump.

Michael Caputo, a longtime New York Republican political operative who worked on Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, was appointed last week as Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at HHS, a prominent communications role at the department which serves a central role in the federal government's response to the coronavirus pandemic....

In a series of tweets on March 12, Caputo responded to a baseless conspiracy theory that the United States brought the coronavirus to Wuhan, China, by tweeting that "millions of Chinese suck the blood out of rabid bats as an appetizer and eat the ass out of anteaters."

He followed up at another user, "Don't you have a bat to eat?" and tweeted at another user, "You're very convincing, Wang." ...

On March 8, he said a Democrat may try to inflict hundreds of thousands of American deaths from the coronavirus....

That same day, Caputo retweeted conservative actor Nick Searcy saying, "Democrats are pulling for the virus to kill a lot of people."

Caputo has always been like this -- but a decade ago, when he was running the gubernatorial campaign of the very Trumpian Tea Party candidate Carl Paladino, Javier Hernandez of The New York Times described him as "impish."

He has hired strippers to embarrass a political opponent. He cycles through eight pairs of eyeglasses to make himself more difficult to recognize. And he readily shows reporters the scar from a bullet wound he says was the result of a drunken encounter with a rival in Russia.

Michael R. Caputo’s impish spirit and no-holds-barred campaign style have helped propel his boss, Carl P. Paladino, a relatively unknown real estate mogul from Buffalo, to the Republican nomination for New York governor and have Mr. Paladino now menacing the once seemingly unstoppable Andrew M. Cuomo.

Cuomo would go on to beat Paladino by nearly thirty points. But please continue with the puff piece, Mr. Hernandez.

Behind each outlandish advertisement, slingshot tactic and red-meat riff of Mr. Paladino’s campaign is Mr. Caputo, his campaign manager, whose high-octane brain plays foil to his candidate’s high-velocity mouth....

From Mr. Caputo’s mind have come blistering attack advertisements, including one that featured a fake photo of Mr. Cuomo, the state’s attorney general, shirtless in the shower and covered in mud, as part of an effort to portray him as a slimy politician.

That's not "blistering." That's infantile.

Here's more Caputo charm, as reported by The Buffalo News in 2016:

He can offer insightful political observations one moment, then in the next, make crude sexual references to a critic’s mother online.

Caputo recently labeled Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz “cowardly” and called a promoter for Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz a “stupid bitch” on Twitter.

Of course, the man whose campaign he ran also had some problems with online communication.

Some of Paladino’s emails contain hardcore pornography. One contains a video clip involving bestiality. Other emails display an attitude of misogyny or blatant racism....

In December 2008, Paladino forwarded a message entitled “Obama Inauguration Rehearsal” including a video clip showing African tribesmen dancing in a village....

... an email marked as “XX” that Paladino annotated as “a keeper” to his recipients ... contained a 3MB .wmv video entitled “Miss France 2008 fucking” ...

One email entitled “demotivated” included several phony “motivational” posters....

It featured this:

Our political press finds these people "colorful" until it belatedly grasps that they aren't; The media used to treat Roger Stone the same way:

The 2 things Trump fan @RogerJStoneJr loves most: political warfare and his custom wardrobe. http://t.co/8z4eLU8bQj pic.twitter.com/0ltTAkecrG

— NYT Fashion (@NYTFashion) August 27, 2015

Stone, by the way, was Caputo's political mentor. No surprise there.