The Karen in Chief - 2020-05-28
The Karen in Chief May 28, 2020,
The United States feels like a nation of Karens these days, so it's only appropriate that the president would be the Karen in chief.
A Karen, if you've somehow missed the memo, is the type of person who demands to see the manager or calls the cops, like the dog owner who summoned the NYPD to Central Park after an African American man asked her to leash her dog. As my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany writes, "They're obsessed with banal consumer trends and their personal appearance, and typically criminally misguided, usually loudly and with extreme confidence."
The term is most commonly applied to middle-aged women—but why abide by that sexist standard? A man can easily be a Karen, as Donald Trump is proving this week. When Trump gets sufficiently angry about anyone who dares criticize him, he is quick to work the referees, attempting to use the force of the law to bully the critics into submission and to try to intimidate would-be critics from opening their mouths. That's what Trump is doing in resurfacing old and spurious accusations of murder against the TV host Joe Scarborough, and in preparing an executive order to punish social-media companies after Twitter dared to fact-check his words.