Donald Trump said this about Ben Carson, a rival for the Republican nomination :
He was a doctor, perhaps an OK doctor, by the way.
The trope usually goes by Pope’s phrase “damning with faint praise”, but I’m sure RBC readers do not need reminding that its technical Greek name in rhetoric is diasyrm.
The put-down is feeble. You can’t take away from Dr. Ben Carson his outstanding medical qualifications and stellar career. He headed the department of paediatric neurosurgery at the teaching hospital of Johns Hopkins, which likes to think of itself as the best medical school in the world, possibly with reason. It is a great tragedy that in his very last operation in Baltimore before leaving medicine for politics, Dr. Carson heroically donated to his patient half the grey cells in his cerebral cortex.
It is Donald Trump‘s pathological vanity - he is in textbooks as an example of narcissism - that makes him far more vulnerable to diasyrm. Readers are invited to supply examples. To get you going, a better jibe from Lloyd George:
[Neville Chamberlain] would make a good Lord Mayor of Birmingham in a lean year.
My suggestions:
- Donald Trump has demonstrated far greater acumen as an investor than Bernie Madoff.
- Donald Trump is magnetically attractive to women, for six months.
- Trump’s dramatic hairdo would assure him a future as a hairstyling model for the leading trade magazine in North Korea.
- Trump regularly demonstrates his superior people-management skills in firing no-hopers on reality TV shows.
- Donald has never, ever had sex with a pig.
Entrants please remember the praise part. Straight insults do not count, however ingenious and deserved. Example: at Oxford, I once heard the young Quentin Hogg described as “a shining wit, as Dr. Spooner might have said”.
TheophylactDonald Trump says
Donald Trump has never gone bankrupt, with notably rare exceptions.
J_Michael_Neal says
Trump almost managed to break even in a casino.
Laertes says
Trump has had fewer sex tape scandals than other similarly-qualified reality TV stars.
kgus says
Trump seemed intelligent and dynamic on his cleverly edited The Apprentice.
AnBheal says
What's good for Trump is good for Atlantic City.
TheHersch says
Other than the phrontistery website you link to, and others that seem to derive from it or from a common source, I can't find much support for your definition of diasyrm>, which the OED defines as (merely) " A figure of rhetoric expressing disparagement or ridicule."
As to Donald Trump, he has demonstrated a remarkable talent for preening egotism.
JamesWimberley says
Your example shows that it's quite difficult to mount an effective rhetorical attack by ridicule any other way. My Spoonerism example is clever but a one-off. If you insist, let's split the label into "Popish diasyrms" and "non-Popish diasyrms".
EdWhitney says
Trump will bring to the White House a strong counterbalance to the emotional austerity measures of the Obama years.
snideissue says
If onanism counts, I don't think you can say that Trump has never had sex with a pig.
Donald Trump is not the looniest contestant for the Republican nomination.
J_Michael_Neal says
He's not completely bald.
byomtov11 says
Trump has an uncanny mastery of the law, especially the bankruptcy code.
Trump's investment record is almost as good as that of a monkey throwing darts at the stock pages.
TheHersch says
samefacts.com has been a bold and tireless pioneer in the field of blog comments sections with no preview function, causing well-meaning but hapless commenters to post comments with un-closed italic tags. (See my comment above!)
JamesWimberley says
I would have fixed this for you free as part of the outstanding value-for-money service the RBC offers its commenters, but since doing this would remove the point of your second comment, I judged it better not to do so. I agonized over this decision for all of five seconds.
Gary K says
Obama already won this competition 4 years ago at the WH Correspondents dinner. Referring to Celebrity Apprentice, he said “These are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night.” (And the real sting came when we found out the next day what was keeping him up at night.)
krlong014 says
Credit where credit is due: Trump can run a business better than Carly Fiorina.
AnBheal says
From time to time.
JamesWimberley says
If Bobby Jones* were alive today, Donald Trump could beat him on any golf course in the world.
(* Jones was born in 1902 and would be 113)
Thanks to all for your responses.