President Donald Trump’s insults are an almost inextricable part of his brand at this point. While his most recent insult leveled at Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) didn’t totally stick the landing — it did show off something telling.

On Wednesday, Trump, attempting to once again call Ossoff “Pee Wee Herman” (like the Paul Reubens character, as he did late last month), instead repeatedly called him “Pinky Herman.” (And was laughed at a bunch.)

“Your terrible senator, Ossoff, he’s terrible,” Trump said in the speech at a rally in Georgia. “And the Democrats in Congress are voting with the communists every single time. They’re afraid of the communists.”

“I fought Ossoff, you know, we won,” he continued, seemingly referring to the Georgia special election nearly a decade ago. “We’ve had a great success against this guy. He reminds me of Pinky Herman. Did you ever see Pinky Herman?”

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Donald Trump, Pee Wee (not Pinky) Herman, and Jon Ossoff.

The Pee Wee/Pinky nickname might be considered an upgrade to some, including Ossoff, who previously critiqued Trump’s more vulgar attempt at a nickname — Jon Os(jerk!)off — claiming he “didn’t think it was his best work as nicknames go” and saying the “globally humiliated” president was “increasingly unstable.”

This is very on brand, as far as Trump insults go.

Battistella said that this particular insult is “interesting, because it suggests that Trump misspoke” but offers a more generous interpretation, based on Trump’s other contextual comments, that it “raises the possibility that he was trying to suggest that Democrats were Communists, reviving the ‘pinko’ insult of the past.”

Battistella says “Trump often goes to comparison” as inspiration for his insults and noted that these comparisons were “based in somewhat dated pop culture.”

“As is the case when Trump used adjectives, the comparisons are a stretch,” he said. “He is trying to belittle rather than present an accurate characterization.”

“Ironically, Trump’s opponents have portrayed him as Alfred E. Neuman,” he also noted, “and his assistant chief of staff has been characterized as “Pee Wee German.”

There is another weird pattern that’s hard to ignore.

When you have such plentiful data on insults from one individual, it’s hard not to notice certain patterns. This insult (and the Alfred E. Neuman ones) were notably leveled at white men.

“Trump does seem to use different types of insults when referring to white men than when insulting women and people of color,” Battistella said, noting attacks on Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Hakeem Jeffries and Jasmine Crockett’s intelligence over the years, referring to them as “low IQ” and “not smart.”

While he’s occasionally used this same line of insult on opponents like Tim Walz, the racist trend does still stand.

“So there seems to be a pattern there indeed,” he said.

The insult certainly won’t bother Ossoff. So what’s the point?

Ossoff’s previous response to Trump’s direct mockery was relatively indifferent. It’s hard to imagine this one — botched delivery and all — will get much more out of him.

But research from March 2025 by the Polarization Research Lab at Dartmouth College might offer insights into the actual endgame of these insults.

The researchers identified politicians who repeatedly use personal attacks on their peers — who they call “conflict entrepreneurs” — and tracked their behavior over 2.2 million public statements from the 118th U.S. Congress (Jan. 3, 2023 to Jan. 3, 2025).

They found that using these outcomes saw “no corresponding positive relationship with fundraising, vote margins, legislative success, or personal wealth” nor did it have “correlation between a legislator’s use of insults and the partisan animosity in their district,” per the research.

Instead of this more “traditional” success, researchers identified a very different victory for the most combative members of Congress: Media attention. They found that the more often a politician used these personal attacks, the less likely they were to engage in their actual jobs — discussing actual policy, co-sponsoring legislation, or gaining assignments to committees.

“These findings suggest that politicians are using the attacks as a strategy to become part of the national political debate without relying on conventional means of legislative work and policymaking,” Marc Jacob, assistant professor of democracy and global affairs at the University of Notre Dame and one of the study’s co-authors, said in a press release about the study.

Jacob went on to note that the media environment and increased attention on personal attacks over policy “incentivizes people to engage in incivility if the only way to break through is with insults.”

So while it doesn’t seem likely that these attacks will get Trump any closer to his professed policy goals, it can certainly be seen as a cry for attention.