Literary Corner: Sarcasm

What Radio France Internationale found when they went looking for suburban women—"femmes de banlieue"—outside Raleigh on Election Day. Photo by Anne Corpet/RFI.

Suburban Women Blues

by Donald J. Trump

You remember I was saying, "Suburban women --?"
I say, "Suburban women love me. Please
love me, I've been so good to you."

"I've been so good to you. I got rid
of the worst regulation in the history of suburbia.
I got rid of that regulation so now you can actually
have a house without a building going up next to it
that you're not going to be happy about.
Without crime increasing by ten-fold and this and that."

So I said, "But suburban women,
please, please love me."

And CNN put me on, "Donald Trump,
Donald Trump is begging, he's begging
and crying for the vote of suburban women,"
right? These people are sick.

So you have to be very careful when you're sarcastic.
Sarcasm doesn't work. Sarcasm doesn't work with the --
wow that is a group of people back there! Look at that.
The fake news! That's a big group.
That is a lot of fake news.

It strikes me that there's an arguable case he really was being "sarcastic" in the normal dictionary sense of the word:

Sarcasm is speech or writing which actually means the opposite of what it seems to say. Sarcasm is usually intended to mock or insult someone.

That is, he is not begging suburban women to love him, at all. He's not even talking to suburban women, but to the enraged rural men that make up his rally audience, and expressing his rage against suburban women, for being stupid cows who are seemingly unable to understand what he did for them in dismantling the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing HUD rule, which required federal agencies and local governments to show that they were addressing patterns of segregation, discrimination, and disinvestment in return for HUD funds, which secretary Ben Carson rescinded in late July. He went out on a limb to protect them from invasion by apartment buildings for ooga-booga monsters, and they pocketed the bribe without turning over the quid pro quo of voting for him, apparently because they wanted him to be all nice and seductive about it, like some kind of Cary Grant character. Hell no! You expect me to beg for it? "Please love me, suburban women!"

That's how some kind of Cary Grant character would campaign. Not Donald Trump! And those idiots at CNN—that whole group of people back there" cowering in the press cage as he hurls his insults—don't get it, of course. No sense of humor.