There isn’t much that leaves me gobsmacked. Chalk it up to nearly seven decades of observing my fellow humans, particularly the last decade or so — especially the last week or so — of the increasingly twisted spectacle we call public life. Members of Congress lobbing insults about each other’s appearance during a hearing? Sadly predictable.
An upside-down American flag symbolizing the “Stop the Steal” movement that tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election flying outside the home of a U.S. Supreme Court justice? From our Editorial Board, get inside the local, city and state political scenes.
By clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy . Sadly inevitable. A professional football player telling college graduates during a commencement speech that women should forgo careers, get married, and embrace their vocation as wives, mothers, and homemakers? Sadly timeless.
But I was genuinely floored by one piece of recent news — and it came from the hush money trial of Donald Trump in lower Manhattan. It wasn’t anything salacious or tawdry. It was in testimony from Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s personal secretary until 2019, as she described how his tweets are put together.
He dictates them to an aide, she said, with instructions on capitalization and punctuation marks. “It is my understanding,” Westerhout testified, “that he liked to use the Oxford comma.” The Oxford comma? Gobsmacking, on several levels.
That Trump cared about the use of the Ox.