It is enough to review the newspaper archive to understand the complex relationship that the president of the United States, Donald Trump, has with women. He insults them, humiliates them and offends them as soon as they contradict him. Shameless, openly sexist and careless, yet another instance of Trump offending a woman occurred this week when the Republican insulted a Bloomberg reporter who asked him about his relationship with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. “Shut up, little pig,” the American president snapped at her on Friday evening while traveling on the plane Air Force One headed to Mar-a-Lago, where he escapes on weekends.
There is an embarrassing public record of Trump’s contempt and sexist attitude towards women. Last Tuesday, he threatened an ABC News reporter with taking away her television license from the network she works for after she asked her a question about her relationship with Epstein. “I don’t like your attitude,” the president scolded. “You should go back to studying journalism,” Trump added irritably at the White House, where he met Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohamed Bin Salman.
Trump’s insults provoked a rapid reaction on social networks, which filled with memes caricaturing the Republican. The president has also received criticism from members of the Democratic Party for denigrating women and journalists, who do their jobs only by asking questions.
Trump’s denigration of women is frequent. If they are also politicians or journalists, even more so. The New York tycoon often reproaches the media for putting him in difficulty with their questions. A couple of months ago he berated an Australian journalist who asked him about his business. “Shut up,” he shouted rudely. “You are harming Australia right now (…) your country wants to get along with me, your leader will come to see me very soon and I will tell him that you ask questions in a very bad tone,” he threatened.
The occupant of the Oval Office usually threatens media critical of his policies or management. He has sued ABC, CNN, won a case against the CBS network after suing it for editing an interview and is threatening to take the BBC to court for holding it responsible for the assaults on the Capitol in January 2021. He has also sued American newspapers and news sites.
“Trump focuses on insults to women more than men. And these insults always have to do with their appearance. They are insults that we believe have to do with women’s gender,” Elisa Lees Muñoz, executive director of the International Foundation for Women in the Media (IWMF, in its English acronym), told EL PAÍS by phone. “He knows what happens when a man in power insults a journalist. It is the beginning of a sequence whose words have consequences. And he invites many other men to begin an escalation of that same insult against women,” he adds.
“They know very well what they are doing when they start this type of behavior. It’s not just about stopping the woman at that moment, but about making everyone else understand what will happen to them if they bother her,” adds Lees, who denounces the democratic regression that society is experiencing. “No one wants to stick their head out to say what is true and what is right or wrong because they are afraid of putting themselves in the spotlight.”
“Even though the insults may seem harmless, when they come from the head of our government, they often unleash a torrent of insults towards the journalist,” says the expert..
While Trump doesn’t reserve insults just for women, he uses them more liberally against them. A few weeks ago he attacked Democratic Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. “AOC (the acronym for the socialist leader) has a low IQ,” said matter-of-factly the politician who made his fortune speculating in New York’s wild real estate world. Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to become speaker of the House of Representatives, was described as “an evil woman” when asked two weeks ago about the Democrat’s decision to retire after 40 years in the political arena. A year earlier he had blurted out: “She turned on him like a dog. She’s crazier than a goat.”
Trump’s brazenness and verbal incontinence with women contrasts with the coldness he maintains with his wife Melania Trump or with the distant relationship attributed to him with his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, a Scottish immigrant. He fell ill when the current president of the United States was a child and was unable to attend his education for some years. The daughter of a Scottish fisherman who came to the United States at age 18 to work as a domestic worker, her mother is one of the few women Trump admits to admiring. She was “a great person, warm, loving, intelligent and able to be firm when necessary,” Trump said in a video released in 2018 on Mother’s Day.
Beyond these words, in Trump’s countless interventions towards women there is more contempt than praise. Just a year ago, during the presidential election in which he faced Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, he said: “Kamala is mentally disabled.” At another point in the campaign he assured: “Kamala the liar, who is exposed as a fool every time she makes a program.”
The Republican didn’t hold back even when he attacked The View hosts Sunny Hostin and actress Whoopi Goldberg, whom he openly insulted. “What a foolish woman. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, women, she’s a fool,” he said of Hostin. “She was so dirty, disgusting. She was so dirty. Every word she said was dirty, disgusting. What a loser she is!” he insulted the interpreter.
