Donald Trump tried to insult Jon Ossoff with Pee-wee Herman. The joke is on him

There’s a scene in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure that every kid and adult who grew up with it can recite by heart. Spoiled rich boy Francis Buxton, who would go on to become President of the United States (kidding, kind of), wants Pee-wee’s bike badly enough to try to buy it outright, and when Pee-wee won’t sell, Francis starts throwing insults instead, i.e., crazy, nerd, idiot.Pee-wee doesn’t fight back. He just repeats the same phrase after every jab, “I know you are, but what am I?” calmly, until Francis is the one who storms off furious. Technically, it’s a childish conversation. It’s also, 40 years later, the single best response available to a Donald Trump who slings insults at everyone in his path, “stupid,” “piggy,” “scum,” and never seems to notice how much those words describe him instead.Which brings us to what happened in Georgia. At a rally in Marietta on Wednesday, Trump went after Sen. Jon Ossoff by comparing him to Pee-wee Herman, though he screwed that up just like he screws everything else up. He called him “Pinky Herman” before catching himself and declaring that Mike Collins “is going to beat Pee-wee Herman.”Related: These 12 Democrats are the early top contenders for the party’s presidential nomination in 2028Worth pausing on “Pinky” for a moment. It’s easy to read the slip as an accident of an 80-year-old demented man reaching for a name he can’t immediately remember. It’s also hard not to notice that “Pinky” softens Pee-wee into something smaller and more effeminate, a jab that ostensibly and falsely would question Ossoff’s masculinity as much as his politics. Whether or not Trump even knows that the late Paul Reubens, the man who created and played Pee-wee, was gay, is up for grabs. Reubens confirmed he was gay only after his death, in the 2025 documentary Pee-wee as Himself, describing decades of hiding “out of self-hatred or self-preservation.”Related: Who Do We Mourn, Pee-wee or Paul Re