In just a few minutes, Matt Whitaker will testify before the House Judiciary Committee. I will be live-tweeting it. Before I do, I want to explain why I use the term Big Dick Toilet Salesman to refer to him, in part because some have rightly pointed out that it is disrespectful.
During the Bush Administration, I used a lot of the common monikers for the President. In retrospect, I regret using some of those phrases. The exceptions are “W” (because it’s an easy way to distinguish him from Poppy) and “PapaDick” and “BabyDick” for Cheney and his daughter (because it emphasizes their continued corruption). I regretted using other derogatory terms because ultimately, the focus on coverage should be about someone’s actions, not their appearance or stupidity.
For that reason I’ve tried to avoid any of the monikers for Trump that similarly focus on his character flaws rather than the actions those flaws lead to.
But the entire point of Matt Whitaker’s appointment, the only reason he is a national figure, is about Trump deliberately choosing a fraudster to lead the Department of Justice in hopes of manipulating the rule of law. Whitaker is not qualified in any normal sense of the word. He is there exclusively because he managed to pitch himself to Trump using the very same skills he used to sell whacky patents for things like Big Dick Toilets. He should not have accepted the position, but did so because he was selling yet another oversold novelty.
That should always be at the forefront of discussions about Whitaker to emphasize how illegitimate his appointment was. And so I use the term.