How poking fun at Donald Trump’s lisp could backfire

There is a lot to criticise Donald Trump for. You could fill books with it – people have. His policies, his conduct in and out of office, his personal behaviour … the 34 counts of falsifying business records to commit election fraud he was found guilty of this year… take your pick.

He doesn’t appear to be a very nice man. That’s just my opinion. Whichever way you slice it, there is so much juicy material to choose from when critiquingthe once-and-maybe-future-president … that there really is no need to pull him up on a speech impediment.

And yet, that seems to be the takeaway from last night’s excruciatingly dull and occasionally deeply weird conversation between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, hosted on Musk’s X platform (which, coincidentally, I used to work for). Not the policies, not Trump’s praising of Kim Jong Un and President Putin, or his accusation that Kamala Harris (who the pair painted as radically left-wing, with very little justification) is “stealing his policies”.

The main take-away was thatTrump seems to have developed a lisp, something which his campaign actively denied and his supporters pinned to audio issues. Denying reality is another strong Trump criticism — the lisp is very clearly there.

The thing is … so what? The issue is with what Trump is saying, not with the way he’s saying it. Lots of people have lisps, millions in fact. Something like 11.5 per cent of the US population has some form of speech impediment. As the old saying goes, “Donald Trump won’t hear you making fun of the way he speaks, but your friend with a lisp might”.

Those of us on the political left often pride ourselves in being the “good guys”. We think we’re better than the other side: They’re nasty. We’re nice. It’s a reductive