President Donald Trump came up with a nickname Friday for Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg: Alfred E. Neuman — the freckle-faced, gap-toothed nerdy cover boy of Mad Magazine.
But Buttigieg came back with his own zinger, slying dinging the 72-year-old president’s age, saying the outdated reference was a “generational thing.”
Trump told Politico Friday that “Alfred E. Neuman cannot become president of the United States,” when he was asked in a phone interview what he thought of the mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
Asked later about his new moniker, Buttigieg, 37, said he had “to Google” the reference to the mascot of a humor magazine launched in 1952.
“I guess it’s just a generational thing. I didn’t get the reference. It’s kind of funny, I guess,” said Buttigieg.
He added that he was “surprised” Trump wasn’t “spending more time trying to salvage this China deal.”
Others also piled on Trump. New York Times political reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted that the Neuman reference would have worked better 20 years ago.
Mad got a bit of dig in at Buttigieg:
Trump appeared to imply in the Politico interview that Buttigieg, who is gay, isn’t tough enough to take on America’s international rivals. “He’ll be great representing us against President Xi of China,” Trump said sarcastically. “That’ll be great. I want to be in that room, I wanna watch that one.”
Buttigieg, a former Rhodes scholar and Navy Reserve intelligence officer, served in Afghanistan. Trump dodged the draft decades earlier because of “bone spurs.” He told shock jock Howard Stern that he suffered his own “personal Vietnam” during that time dodging sexually transmitted diseases sleeping with women. “I feel like a great and very brave soldier,” he said (video below).