President Donald Trump engaged in one of his patented tangents Saturday when he insisted at a rally in West Virginia that the Democratic Party is really the “Democrat Party.”
“You notice I say ‘Democrat Party’? I hate how it sounds; that’s why I say it, because it’s really their name, you know,” he said. “It’s not the Democratic Party, which flows nicer. Their real name is the Democrat Party.”
No, it’s not.
Despite Trump’s insistence to the contrary, Democrats formally adopted Democratic Party as their official name at their national convention in 1844.
Trump also said at the rally that the “Democrat Party is radical socialism, Venezuela, and open borders. It’s now called, to me, you’ve never heard this before, the party of crime.”
The term “Democrat Party” is used by many Republicans leaders and right-wingers as a means to irritate some Democrats. They eschew saying “Democratic” to apparently avoid linking the party to the definition of the word in its lower-cased usage ― relating to or supporting democracy or its principles.
“Democrat Party” was often used by the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.), orchestrator of many of the Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s.
Former President George W. Bush also employed it to needle the Democrats.
Check out Trump’s riff in the video above.
