On Friday night, Jay Z and Beyoncé performed at a concert for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in Cleveland. At that concert, Jay Z performed some songs featuring bad words, including an infamous one that starts with the letter n (one that black rappers are “allowed” to say, but white racists aren’t, much to the latter’s eternal befuddlement).
When Donald Trump got wind of Jay Z’s performance, he was gobsmacked by Clinton’s hypocrisy. After all, the Democratic nominee has spent much of her campaign arguing that Trump is a bad role model for America’s youth, in part because he has deployed vulgar language when describing women (and/or when describing how he enjoys sexually assaulting women). And yet, here was Clinton allowing a rapper to use vulgar words at an event for her own campaign.
“Can you imagine if I said that? He used every word in the book,” Trump said of Jay Z, before a crowd of supporters in Florida. “I won’t even use the initials because I’ll get in trouble. They’ll get me in trouble … He used language last night that was so bad and then Hillary said, ‘I did not like Donald Trump’s lewd language.’ My lewd language. I tell you what, I’ve never said what he said in my life. But that shows you the phoniness of politicians and the phoniness of the whole system, folks.”
Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway couldn’t agree more.
One has to admit, they have a point: Why is Hillary Clinton okay with an African-American rapper using the N-word in a song — but not okay with the Republican nominee for president using the word pussy when bragging about how his status as a celebrity allows him to grope women with impunity? What principle could possibly make one of these things permissible, while the other, a source of outrage?
It just really makes you think about the phoniness of the whole system, ya know?
