The Scrapbook will leave it to others to comment on the propriety—or lack thereof—of the meeting Donald Trump Jr. arranged with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. But we will note an odd feature of the defense the president’s son made for himself last week.
In putting out the email chain documenting how the meeting was set up, Trump the Younger strove to explain how it is that he was acquainted, in the first place, with any of the Russians involved. The first email in the chain had come from publicist Rob Goldstone, “who was relating a request from Emin,” Donald Jr. wrote, “a person I knew from the 2013 Ms. Universe Pageant near Moscow.”
Now, never mind that Goldstone is a sketchy former Fleet Street hack, or that Emin is the pop-star son of a Russian real estate tycoon: What caught our eye wasn’t the ridiculous cast of characters but the title Donald Jr. gave the pageant in question—“Ms. Universe.” The official name of the enterprise is “Miss Universe,” of course (and we’d hate to see the swimsuit competition if the contestants were all inclined to demand being addressed as “Ms.”).
We thought that the appeal of Team Trump was supposed to be its bracing disregard for the conventions of political correctness. Is that no longer operative? And for what? If Don Jr. thinks he’s going to buy himself a little feminist forbearance by casually rebranding the Miss Universe pageant Ms. Universe, he’s even more of a naïf than we suspected.
