It all started on June 16, 2015, when he announced he’d run for president of the United States. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Donald Trump told the crowd gathered at his New York headquarters to hear the mogul’s first campaign speech. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Rapists? The savviest political types around all seemed to agree: This can’t possibly go anywhere.
But in the 508 days since, Trump has demolished everything we thought we knew about modern politicians and their filters, waging a campaign more successful than most everyone predicted with baffling declarations, shocking insults and wild hyperbole. In July, he said of Senator John McCain: “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK?”; in November, he said he knew “more about ISIS than the generals”; just last month, he said “nasty” Hillary Clinton would be “in jail” if he were president. He introduced the word “schlonged” to campaign coverage, discovered an inexhaustible mine of exclamation points in late-night Twitter rampages, pronounced with certainty, “I alone can fix it”—and coined a style so distinctive that “Trumpism” has come to define an entirely new genre of American political speak. Here, for your perusal—gathered from Twitter, rallies, interviews and more—is a (highly subjective) list of 155 of Trump’s most controversial, most eyebrow raising, most mystifying, even amusing “Trumpisms” this cycle