CNN’s Chris Cillizza is America’s most goldfish-brained political hack. The writer formerly known as “The Fix” has made a small fortune with such incisive political commentary as “Ivanka Trump is hot and loves her dad” and “GOP choke slams were a win.” Name a pathology of our political media and Cillizza has it in spades. He’s a chronic both-sideser. He’s an empty vessel for propaganda. And where many pundits rigorously maintain a pose of value neutrality, Cillizza gets there quicker by running a lobotomy spike through his critical faculties. He once dreamed of being a sportswriter, and in many ways that’s what he became. He lives in a world in which value judgments exist only in terms of wins and losses. Consider, for example, the time he used a frowny face to signify that 22 million people losing their health insurance was, in fact, not a win for Obamacare repeal.
But if there’s one thing Cillizza loves more than surface-level punditry, it’s tweeting. This is his natural medium, and the compressed form reduces his most doltish thoughts to a diamond-like clarity. At the time of publication, Cillizza has tweeted 114,487 times. And nearly each one is special in its own way. Sixty-one of those tweets, however, are special in much the same way: They all are premised on the notion that Donald Trump’s coinage “bigly” is a very funny word.
Nothing goes to the heart of Cillizza’s fatuousness quite like his “bigly” tweets. It’s a mindless callback to nothing whatsoever — not quite a joke but a joke-like object, vaguely remembered as something he’s pretty sure people thought was funny. It’s inoffensive to both sides of the aisle and requires no active thought on his part — the Cillizza special.
For your reading pleasure, and arranged in chronological order, here is every time Chris “The Point” Cillizza has used the word “bigly” in a tweet. Take it away, Chris.
Sixty-one pieces of searing insight from what CNN refers to as “one of the top political journalists in the US.” God help us all.