Since November, despite the criticism he faced at the time, Mr. Trump has periodically hit out at his potential rival.... he has insulted Mr. DeSantis in casual conversations, describing him as “Meatball Ron,” an apparent dig at his appearance....I'm pretty sure DeSantis's appearance is not the point of the nickname.
Sure, Urban Dictionary's definitions of "meatball" include some references to appearance ("fat narcissist, especially one prone to deception and theft"; "A fat Bitch who can't jump"), as well as intelligence and savvy ("Noun: Usually applied to persons of evidencing a lack of common sense"; "Meatball is a term to describe a rather dumb person. We all know the kind of people who never get the joke when its told. That is a meatball and they usually lack common sense"). But then there's this definition:
a miserable, short italian kid who always thinks hes right"Meatball" was also a term used by some of the women on MTV's Jersey Shore to refer to themselves. (Urban Dictionary: "a girl who is very short, under 5 ft 1, thick, with a big ass and boobs to match. She is always a blast to be around and knows how to party! Made popular by Snooki and Deena." Snooki, who was born in Chile but was adopted by an Italian-American family, said she would have endorsed Trump if he'd run for president in 2012, then appeared on the post-Trump Celebrity Apprentice in 2016.) At the Racial Slur Database, "meatball" is listed as a slur referring to Italians ("Self-explanatory"). And in The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, "meatball" is defined as "a dim-witted, gullible person," but one example of its use is from the 1988 crime novel Shakedown by Gerald Petievich, best known as the author of To Live and Die in L.A.:
I'm pretty sure that's not just a generic insult.
Trump grew up in a city that was very conscious of ethnic tribes. We know he still sees the world the way he saw it when he was a young man working alongside his racist father. A recent news story noted that Mary Trump, Donald's niece, told Rachel Maddow in 2020 that residents of Jamaica Estates, the neighborhood where the former president grew up, were "scandalized when 'the first Italian family moved in.'"
So, yeah, maybe I'm hypersensitive because I'm also of Italian descent, but I think this is about DeSantis's ethnic background. Bender and Haberman should have suggested that possibility, too. But letting Trump give the nickname a soft launch in the nation's Paper of Record is excellent journalisming, isn't it, Maggie?
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