For a quick lesson in how political insults are born, look no further than Fredo. On Monday night, the name was trending on Twitter, thanks to a viral video showing an altercation between the CNN anchor Chris Cuomo and a guy at a bar in Shelter Island, New York. The man had called Cuomo “Fredo,” having apparently picked up the nickname from “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” “Punk-ass bitches from the right call me Fredo,” Cuomo retorts, getting in the man’s grill. “My name is Chris Cuomo. I’m an anchor on CNN. Fredo is from ‘The Godfather.’ He was the weak brother.” Cuomo goes on, “They’re using it as an Italian aspersion. Any of you Italian? Are you Italian? It’s a fucking insult to your people. It’s an insult to your people. It’s like the N-word for us. Is that a cool fucking thing?” The man stammers, claiming that he thought it was Cuomo’s actual name, and Cuomo explains, “You call me Fredo, it’s like I call you ‘punk bitch.’ You like that?”

Cuomo’s detractors were soon posting videos of CNN commentators using “Fredo” to diss Representative Devin Nunes and Donald Trump, Jr., as proof of Cuomo’s hypocrisy. Sean Hannity offered an unlikely defense, saying that Cuomo “has zero to apologize for.” CNN backed up Cuomo, too, stating that he had been “verbally attacked with the use of an ethnic slur,” which prompted Trump, Jr., to call Cuomo’s self-justification an “excuse just as fake as his news.” Conservatives gleefully decried the false equivalency between “Fredo” and the N-word. The gun-rights advocate Dana Loesch tweeted, “Is Fredo a pejorative? Yes. It refers to the dumbest Corleone. Is it racist? No. . . . This is all so mind-numbingly idiotic.” Just when you thought things couldn’t get more mind-numbingly idiotic, the President of the United States, aroused on Tuesday morning by the smell of a fresh taunt, weighed in. “I thought Chris was Fredo also,” he tweeted. “The truth hurts.”

Political metaphor tends to flatten all cultural references. Kabuki theatre, a rich and venerable art form dating back to seventeenth-century Japan, has become Washington speak for “empty spectacle.” “Groundhog Day,” the genius existential Bill Murray comedy, is code for “mindless repetition.” It’s dismaying to see Fredo Corleone, brilliantly played by John Cazale in “The Godfather” and “The Godfather: Part II,” reduced to a political weapon, deployed in a disingenuous spat over what constitutes racist hate speech. Trump, Jr., was likely embracing the chance to fling the nickname at someone else and make it stick, having been dubbed the Fredo of the Trump family since his father rose to political power. (For my money, I get more of a Fredo vibe from Eric Trump. Don, Jr., is more like the hot-headed Sonny, with Ivanka as the stealthy, power-hungry Michael, and Tiffany as Connie, the little sister who mostly sits on the sidelines.)

The implication of calling someone Fredo, like that of the alt-right insult “cuck,” is of weakness, specifically a failure to live up to the masculine ideal. But Fredo is more of a complex, tragic figure than political mudslinging would allow. In Mario Puzo’s original novel, Vito Corleone’s second son is described as “a child every Italian prayed to the saints for. Dutiful, loyal, always at the service of his father, living with his parents at age thirty. He was short and burly, not handsome but with the same Cupid head of the family, the curly helmet of hair over the round face and sensual bow-shaped lips.” Cazale, whom Francis Ford Coppola and his casting director, Fred Roos, spotted in the Off Broadway play “Line,” looked nothing like that: he was drawn out and pale, with a forehead notably lacking in curls. And yet he fit the character perfectly. Cazale, one of the great (and undersung) character actors of the nineteen-seventies, excelled at showing weakness, cowardice, and pettiness. He was usually cast alongside a more robust leading man, whether it be Al Pacino (in the “Godfather” movies and “Dog Day Afternoon”), Gene Hackman (in Coppola’s “The Conversation”), or Robert De Niro (in “The Deer Hunter”). But he never reduced his characters to their most mockable flaws, infusing his performances with understated humor, sweetness, and melancholy. Think of him as the slow-witted accomplice to Pacino’s bank robber in “Dog Day Afternoon.” When Pacino asks him if there’s any special country he wants to escape to, Cazale whispers, “Wyoming.” The line—both funny and heartbreakingly innocent—was Cazale’s ad lib.

Coppola had a soft spot for Fredo, who reminded him of his less accomplished uncles. “I think Italians that come from that little-town mentality are very hard on their own, and very cruel unto those who don’t quite cut the mustard at the same level that the star brothers or the star uncles do,” the director once said. In “The Godfather,” Cazale gave Fredo that sense of well-meaning haplessness, as when he fails to protect his father from an assassination attempt at the market. The second “Godfather” film brought Fredo into the foreground (not his natural place in the family portrait) and deepened him. Fredo’s involvement in a bungled attempt on Michael’s life (“I know it was you”), which leads Michael to succumb to his darkest instincts and commit fratricide, is at the movie’s tragic core, and it gives Cazale the most beautifully acted scenes of his career. The most iconic is the brothers’ conversation in the boathouse, when Fredo pitifully pleads for respect: “Send Fredo off to do this. Send Fredo off to do that. Let Fredo take care of some Mickey Mouse night club somewhere. . . . I can handle things! I’m smart! Not like everybody says!” Cazale delivers this feckless rant with wide-eyed rage and self-pity, flopping up and down in his lounge chair like a beached guppy.

But my favorite moment comes just before he’s whacked, as he sits with his young nephew Anthony by the lake with their fishing gear. Fredo recalls the time when he was a kid and went fishing with his father and brothers, and he was the only one to catch a fish—the secret, he tells Anthony, is to say a Hail Mary every time you put your line down. It’s probably the only time Fredo ever outshone his brothers, and you get the sense that he would have led a perfectly content life if he’d been born into a clan of, say, mild-mannered dentists. Fredo’s death is as wrenching as it is only because we care so deeply about him—he’s pathetic, sure, but he has reserves of humanity that he never got to express, holding himself to an impossible yardstick of power and violence when all he wanted to do was go fishing.

Like the character he became famous for, Cazale had a knack for getting passed over. He made only five films, but each was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Cazale never got a nomination. He died, from cancer, in 1978, at the age of forty-two, with his girlfriend, Meryl Streep, at his bedside. If there’s any solace in seeing Fredo become a political slingshot ball, it’s that Cazale’s portrayal is indelible enough to merit the attention. More than four decades later, Fredo’s still not getting any respect, but at least he’s getting noticed.

This past Wednesday, in Burlington, Iowa, Joe Biden gave a speech to address what he and his Presidential campaign are solemnly calling “the Battle for the Soul of Our Nation.” A response to the gun massacres in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, the previous weekend, his speech began with the declaration that “the words of a President matter.” This was the Biden that he and his campaign want the country to see: confident, direct, the anti-Donald Trump. “In both clear language and in code, this President has fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation,” the former Vice-President said. “His low-energy, vacant-eyed mouthing of the words written for him condemning white supremacists this week I don’t believe fooled anyone.”

A day later, in Des Moines, Biden addressed a group called the Iowa Asian and Latino Coalition, an organization that was started a few years ago to advocate for minority communities in a state that is ninety per cent white. The event took place at a plumbers-and-steamfitters union hall, in a stuffy room crammed with coalition members, the general public, campaign staff, and press. About twenty minutes into his remarks, Biden turned to the issue of education. “Does anybody here think that twelve years of education is enough for the twenty-first century?” he said. “I don’t know anybody who thinks that.” He called for increased funding to Title I schools, increased teacher pay, and universal pre-K. “We have this notion that, somehow, if you’re poor, you cannot do it,” he said, speaking of academic success, before adding, “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” There were groans in the room, and a smattering of hesitant applause. Biden quickly corrected himself. “Wealthy people,” he said. “Black kids. Asian kids.” Within moments, reporters had put the quote on their Twitter feeds. Trump’s campaign, delighted, clipped the video and tweeted about it, too.

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Biden has a history of talking about race in ways that make him look, at best, like an old and out-of-touch white guy. At an Upper East Side fund-raiser, in June, he spoke warmly of his days in the Senate working alongside segregationists. “At least there was some civility,” he said. Those words set off weeks of discussion about whether Biden, despite his lead in the polls and his decades at the heights of power in Washington, was the right person to lead the Democratic Party’s repudiation of a President who has championed racism and nativism. With Biden’s “poor kids” comment getting immediate attention, his campaign tried to get ahead of the story by putting out a statement, saying, “Vice President Biden misspoke and immediately corrected himself during a refrain he often uses to make the point that all children deserve a fair shot.”

But the story was bigger than the single quote. Biden misspoke several times during his trip to Iowa—the state where, in 1987, his first run for the Presidency fell apart, after he plagiarized Neil Kinnock, the former British Labour Party leader, in his stump speech. At the Iowa State Fair, on Thursday, he screwed up one of his new slogans, telling a crowd, “We choose truth over facts!” At the Asian and Latino Coalition, he referred to Margaret Thatcher when he meant Theresa May, and spoke of using biofuels to power “steamships.” (On Monday, the group announced that it had decided to endorse Kamala Harris.) On Saturday, after an appearance at a gun-control forum hosted by Moms Demand Action, Biden told reporters that the students who survived the shooting in Parkland, Florida, last year “came up to see me when I was Vice-President,” even though the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School occurred a year after Biden left the White House. The media narrative soon became, simply, What about those gaffes?

A political gaffe, in a definition once offered by the writer and editor Michael Kinsley, is “when a politician tells the truth—some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say.” In this sense, although Biden has described himself as a “gaffe machine,” his problem isn’t gaffes. When Representative Kevin McCarthy crowed, in 2015, that the Republican Party’s partisan investigations of the Benghazi attack had succeeded in hurting Hillary Clinton’s popularity—that was a gaffe. In contrast, Biden’s misstatements this weekend weren’t “obvious truths.” They were ugly confusions, maybe, or embarrassing flubs—the press, the public, and even Biden’s surrogates spent a few days searching for the right way to describe them. On Friday, Tim Winter, the chairman of the local county Democratic Party, introduced Biden at a fairgrounds event, in a town called Boone. “Let’s talk about Joe Biden’s heart,” Winter said. “The media sometimes calls these gaffes, or slipups. And what they really are is a man with a good heart showing his caring leadership, even when it is politically incorrect to do so.”

Trump’s supporters made similar arguments in 2016. We take him seriously, they said, not literally. Obviously, Trump and Biden are not comparable, politically or personally, but it is becoming easier to imagine that, if Biden does become the Democratic nominee, the Party and its supporters will be in for months of apologizing and explaining things away. After this weekend, Biden’s campaign criticized national reporters for focussing on Biden’s words at the expense of the issues. But Biden’s the one out there every day saying that “words matter.” Maybe that’s the gaffe. In Boone, the Washington Post reporter Matt Visor took a photograph of Biden standing to the side of the event as he prepared to speak, his arms draped over a fence, his head bowed, his aviators on. It was a look of quiet confidence, a reminder of the Biden of Wednesday. “America is an idea, an idea—it’s bigger than any ocean,” Biden said during his remarks. “The only thing that can take America down is America.” At that moment, a red S.U.V. drove past the event site. “Biden sucks!” the driver yelled out his window.

The last public event of Biden’s Iowa trip was on Saturday afternoon, in Central City, about a half hour north of Cedar Rapids, where he spoke at a fund-raiser for local Democrats. His campaign has been careful with how much time Biden gives to reporters and the unfiltered public, but in Central City Biden stuck around, lingering outside the venue as people came up to him with questions and requests for selfies. A mother and daughter told him about a struggle that the daughter, who might have been in high school or college, was facing. In response, Biden said, “Everybody has something to deal with.” He spoke of a stutter that he lived with in his youth. “It’s the only sort of generic impediment that people still laugh at—when someone does that. But it is debilitating. It makes you feel like you can’t be smart. Like you must be some kind of idiot,” he said. He was standing with his hands on his hips, holding eye contact with the mother and daughter, confiding in them, speaking of how he’d overcome certain challenges, but also of how he still lived with them. “It’s hard to ask a girl to go to p-p-prom,” he said, stuttering for effect. He spoke about his mother. “Even though she was no speech therapist, she’d say, ‘Joey, look at me. Read your studies. You’re so smart,’ ” he said. “But it’s all about confidence. Giving people confidence. Because there’s—everybody has something to deal with. Everybody.”

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The goat was both a joke and a statement of fact. Last week, at podium training for the U.S. Gymnastics Championships, when the athletes have a chance to try out the equipment inside the arena before the competition begins, Simone Biles wore an iridescent gray sleeveless leotard with her name written in studded crystals on the back, and, below, also in crystals, the cartoonish head of a goat. On Twitter, Biles posted a picture of herself with the back of the leotard on display, one muscular leg extended, hair in a knot, and a smile on her face, in profile. In the photo, the goat appears to be giving the rest of us side-eye; the caption reads “podium training :).” In July, Biles competed at a qualifying meet in a leotard that had her name on the back, and some gymnastics fans took offense—it is unusual, though not unprecedented, for gymnasts to wear leotards emblazoned with their names. (The men often have them in N.C.A.A. gymnastics, for example.) There was a backstory about Biles having her name on the leotard, though there didn’t need to be: she is using her name to make history. The goat, she said, was a lighthearted way to “jab back” at the “haters.” But, really, no one can dispute it, at this point: Biles is the greatest of all time.

On Friday, the first night of the women’s competition, Biles, on the balance beam, stood for a long time, then did two back handsprings, soared high into the air, and, seeming to rise even as she peaked, began to twist and flip. She completed a double-double with control and ease, and just a slight hop on the landing. If—when—she does the dismount in international competition, the move will be named the Biles. Her second pass on floor is already known as the Biles, because she was the first to do that one, too; there is also a Biles on vault. On Sunday, during the all-around, Biles, her hair trailing behind her like an exclamation point, became the first woman to perform a triple-double—two flips and three twists—in competition during a floor routine. Only a few men can do it, and the way Biles does it is better than the way most of them do. The triple-double is so difficult that U.S.A. Gymnastics has argued that a new tier needs to be added to the code of points, gymnastics’ rule book, to account for it. When Biles performs it in international competition, that will be named after her, too.

There are certain irresolvable tensions within the ideals of sportsmanship: winning is the ultimate goal, but it isn’t everything; it’s all fun and games, but you better take your job seriously; be proud, but don’t show it. These unwritten rules have always been less kind to women than to men, who are typically given some leeway when it comes to embracing their greatness and making their names. Traditionally, of course, women have given up their names altogether, in marriage, and feats of physical prowess have not often been encouraged. “There is some sort of double standard for females in sports,” the soccer player Alex Morgan said last month, after the ecstatic celebrations of the U.S. National Team were criticized, during the Women’s World Cup. Women, Morgan said, are encouraged “to feel like we have to be humble in our successes; we have to celebrate, but not too much; we have to do something, but in a limited fashion.”

Biles does not do anything in a limited fashion. (Watch that triple-double again.) That may, in the end, be her most enduring legacy. She is arguably the most dominant athlete in the world right now. At the national championships, she had a bad first day—a mistake on floor left her furious, and she muttered that her bars routine was “a piece of shit”—and still won the competition by five points. Serena Williams does not win every tournament; Michael Phelps sometimes lost a race. Biles has not lost an all-around title in six years. In that time, she has won twenty-five medals at the Olympics and at world championships. She has been competing against only herself for a long time.

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One of the many remarkable things about Biles is that she makes empowerment and self-confidence seem uncomplicated. “I feel like every day in training I amaze myself even more, so we’ll have to see what’s to come,” she said last month, in an interview during the qualifying meet, after performing the double-double dismount from beam and the triple-double on floor, during podium training. There was no palpable egotism in the comment; it was, like the goat, a statement of fact. In a way, Biles offers a new example of an old ideal. The pride that comes with challenging yourself isn’t something to hide. It’s the point.