It just sounds insulting. We don’t know why. Matt Lewis at the Daily Beast has some thoughts: For Donald Trump, the first step is always to label his victim. Indeed, assigning a good bad nickname appears to be a sine qua non in the Trump playbook. Once he gets that part right, the job is half-done. For example, “Crazy Joe” (which gave way to the superior “Sleepy Joe”) never resonated the way “Crooked Hillary” (or Lyin’ Ted, “Low Energy Jeb,” and Lil’ Marco) did. And now that “Meatball Ron” has become his leading moniker for Ron DeSantis, Trump might have landed on another keeper. Back in 2016, when Trump first started gaining traction, a few outlets dug into why his nicknames were working. Some people saw it primarily as a symptom of the coarsening of discourse and dirty political fighting he reveled in; but others spotted an evil genius at work. One theory argued that our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, and Trump understood how to succinctly capture the most negative framing of a person’s fundamental nature. “Trump realizes campaigns, especially for president, aren’t about issues—they’re all about personalities, especially for independent voters,” Brad Bannon, a Democratic strategist, told Roll Call. Evan Siegfried, a Republican strategist, concurred, saying, “The bottom line is: Trump’s nicknames stick.” There are linguistic reasons why some of his name-calling packs an especially powerful emotional punch. “‘Crooked Hillary,’ is exponentially more powerful than the statement ‘Hillary is crooked,’” wrote Jon Allsop in Columbia Journalism Review back in 2017, “just as ‘the Big, Bad Wolf’ resonates more deeply than the claim that ‘the wolf is big and…