I thought I just heard US Rep Donna Shalala (D-FL) say on NPR that Donald Trump has an Oedipus complex. It gradually became clear that what she had actually said was \u201cedifice complex\u201d\u2014which is pretty clever, but perhaps not a great choice of phrase for radio, where a slightly staticky signal could easily result in sounding like \u201cOedipus complex.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
At any rate, the joke is clever enough that I was surprised I hadn\u2019t heard anyone else say it. So I did a web search on the phrase, and discovered that there\u2019s a Wikipedia article<\/a> about it. The phrase goes back much further than I\u2019d have expected:<\/p>\r\n In the Philippines, the term \u201cedifice complex\u201d was coined in the 1970s to describe Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos\u2019 practice of using publicly funded construction projects as political and election propaganda.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n The phrase has, of course, also been applied to Trump, including in a New York Times<\/cite> opinion piece<\/a> by Paul Krugman from December. But the joke\u2019s connection to Trump goes back much further; in particular, a 2002 article about Trump et al selling the Empire State Building<\/a> (I hadn\u2019t known he had co-owned it!) has a headline that starts with the phrase \u201cComplex Edifice.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-puns"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17746"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17748,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17746\/revisions\/17748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\r\n