Donald Trump tried to insult Jon Ossoff with Pee-wee Herman. The joke is on him

There’s a scene in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure that every kid and adult who grew up with it can recite by heart. Spoiled rich boy Francis Buxton, who would go on to become President of the United States (kidding, kind of), wants Pee-wee’s bike badly enough to try to buy it outright, and when Pee-wee won’t sell, Francis starts throwing insults instead, i.e., crazy, nerd, idiot.

Pee-wee doesn’t fight back. He just repeats the same phrase after every jab, “I know you are, but what am I?” calmly, until Francis is the one who storms off furious. Technically, it’s a childish conversation. It’s also, 40 years later, the single best response available to a Donald Trump who slings insults at everyone in his path, “stupid,” “piggy,” “scum,” and never seems to notice how much those words describe him instead.

Which brings us to what happened in Georgia. At a rally in Marietta on Wednesday, Trump went after Sen. Jon Ossoff by comparing him to Pee-wee Herman, though he screwed that up just like he screws everything else up. He called him “Pinky Herman” before catching himself and declaring that Mike Collins “is going to beat Pee-wee Herman.”

Related: These 12 Democrats are the early top contenders for the party’s presidential nomination in 2028

Worth pausing on “Pinky” for a moment. It’s easy to read the slip as an accident of an 80-year-old demented man reaching for a name he can’t immediately remember. It’s also hard not to notice that “Pinky” softens Pee-wee into something smaller and more effeminate, a jab that ostensibly and falsely would question Ossoff’s masculinity as much as his politics.

Whether or not Trump even knows that the late Paul Reubens, the man who created and played Pee-wee, was gay, is up for grabs. Reubens confirmed he was gay only after his death, in the 2025 documentary Pee-wee as Himself, describing decades of hiding “out of self-hatred or self-preservation.”

Related: Who Do We Mourn, Pee-wee or Paul Reubens?

Because you should never give Trump the benefit of the doubt, the instinct to label Herman “pinky” as an “effeminate” insult seems like something the detestable Trump would do.

To his credit, Trump isn’t actually wrong about Ossoff. Like Pee-wee, Ossoff is boyish, earnest, soft-spoken, outwardly honest, and easy to sum up in a single image. However, the problem isn’t the comparison. It’s that Trump has no business talking about Pee-wee Herman.

Pee-wee was small by design and delighted in it. Trump has spent forty years refusing to be small at all, not in ego, not in bullying, not in how much he lies, cheats, and steals.

Pee-wee was honest to a fault, incapable of subtlety even when it would have helped him. At this point, Trump's dishonesty is as inseparable from him as Pee-wee Herman's bow tie.

Pee-Wee was thin, naturally pale and agile - the antithesis to the morbidly obese, spray tanned, cankled Trump..

But nowhere is the gap wider than with kids, which is the part that should actually anger anyone about Trump invoking Pee-wee’s name. Pee-wee’s entire legacy, the Playhouse, the movies, the tributes that poured out when Reubens died, was built on the idea that children’s imaginations deserved to be taken seriously.

Chairry, Clocky, the Magic Screen were a whole universe engineered to make a kid feel like the center of it all. Trump, by contrast, used this year’s White House Easter Egg Roll, an event literally for children, to deliver a rant about Joe Biden’s autopen to a group of confused kids, one of whom can be heard asking, simply, “What?”

The bigger stuff is that Trump’s presidency has violently targeted children. He has pursued stripping birthright citizenship from children born on U.S. soil, pushed deportations that split kids from parents, and gutted aid programs that keep children fed and housed.

And when tariffs started squeezing family budgets, Trump’s answer wasn’t an explanation; it was a lecture that the effusive Pee-wee would have never given. “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,” he said, adding that they “don’t need to have 250 pencils; they can have five.”

A grown man - well, that’s up for debate - telling other people’s kids to make do with less, from a man whose own children have never sacrificed anything. The news this week that Donald Trump Jr.'s investment firm has gone from managing a few hundred million dollars two years ago to overseeing more than $3 billion tells you that the Trump children have unlimited quantities of dolls and pencils.

Pee-wee Herman built an entire career on making children feel like they mattered. Donald Trump is building his entire presidency on making them wait, want, and suffer, all the while watching him only talk about himself.

So when Trump invokes “Pee-wee Herman” as an insult, the character’s own comeback is fitting. Trump calls Ossoff a name meant to diminish him, and the phrase snaps back at the bully: “I know you are, but what am I?” Trump is what he insults.

Opinion is dedicated to featuring a wide range of inspiring personal stories and impactful opinions from the LGBTQ+ community and its allies. Visit Advocate.com/submit to learn more about submission guidelines. We welcome your thoughts and feedback on any of our stories. Email us at voices@equalpride.com. Views expressed in Voices stories are those of the guest writers, columnists, and editors, and do not directly represent the views of The Advocate or our parent company, equalpride.