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Death and Taxes

Did Steve Bannon Invent a New Slur?

Steve Bannon calls Don Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner "Jumos"

After quotes from Michael Wolff’s forth-coming tell-all Fire & Fury: Inside the Trump White House surfaced featuring ousted White House chief strategist Steve Bannon roasting the ineptitude of various Trump campaign officials and/or relatives, NBC News correspondent Peter Alexander shared a previously unquoted passage from the book.

“The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these Jumos up to his father’s office of the 26th floor is zero,” Bannon reportedly told Wolff, referring to the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting where Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya under the premise that she had dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Putting aside the fact that one of President Trump’s former advisers publicly disputes his old boss’s claims that he never met with Russian operatives during the campaign, the real question here is: What the fuck is a “Jumo”?

The consensus among Spin staffers is that Bannon was probably referring to the Russians as “Jamokes,” which Urban Dictionary defines as a “clumsy loser who is incapable of doing normal human tasks.” The term probably got lost in translation when the interview recordings were transcribed, likely by someone other than Wolff. However, the Russians managed to finagle a highly sketchy meeting with three top Trump campaign staffers with little more than an email, so who are the real jamokes here?

Urban Dictionary does contain an entry for “Jumo,” which it defines as a “Dominican expression for when you are extremely drunk.” That entry doesn’t seem to apply to this situation. An alternative definition states that “Jumo” is an “act of total awesome-ness,” which doesn’t seem to fit either.

The term jamoke sounds tame for Bannon, a self-described “street-fighter” who always looks like he woke up three hours late for a custody hearing. After all, he reportedly called Rep. Paul Ryan “a limp-dick motherfucker who was born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation” and Hillary Clinton “a fucking bull dyke.” Jamoke sounds like the edited-for-television version of an insult Bannon would reserve for the Russian interlopers who might just bring down the president he once referred to as a “blunt instrument” for his creepy, nativist agenda.

Knowing Bannon’s white nationalist tendencies, it could also just be a slur he invented. We reached out to both Michael Wolff and his publisher for verification and will update if we hear back.

UPDATE: After this post went live, a few tipsters suggested that “Jumos” is short for “Junior Moscow Officers” based on a post from the unreliable lefty blog Palmer Report. Although this purely conjecture coming from a flimsy source that provides constant Snopes fodder, the explanation makes about as much sense as anything else.