Photograph Source: mathiaswasik – CC BY 2.0
United States President Donald Trump is a racist, a nativist, a narcissist, a bully, a classist, an authoritarian, an eco-exterminist, and a neofascist. Given all that and the front-page impeachment drama sparked by Trump’s arms-for-dirt shenanigans, it can be all too easy to forget that he is also – consistent with all the rest – a malignant woman-and girl-hating sexist. This alone should disqualify from holding the most powerful position in a world that is slightly more than half-female.
In April of 2015, two months before announcing that he was entering the 2016 presidential race, Trump tweeted this about the woman who was widely expected to be the Democratic Party presidential nominee in 2016: “If Hillary [Clinton] can’t satisfy her husband, what makes her think she can satisfy America?”
This vicious and juvenile comment was, of course, a match for Donald “grab ‘em by the pussy” Trump’s extensive prior history of saying and tweeting demeaning and disgusting things about a long list of females, including Rosie O’Donnell, Kim Kardashian, Lindsay Lohan, Bette Midler, Nancy O’Dell, and Princess Diana along with his own wives, his daughters, and numerous other women and girls (see Jeva Lange, “61 Things Trump has Said About Women,” The Week, October 16, 2018).
During the presidential campaign, Trump referred to news broadcaster Megyn Kelly’s menstruation as follows: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
Candidate Trump told a rally crowd that it was “disgusting” for Hillary to have taken a bathroom break during a Democratic presidential debate. He insulted Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina’s looks, saying “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?”
The presidency hasn’t changed Trump one bit. Trump has been the same old woman- and girl-hating sexist pig ever since the oligarchic American political system excreted him into the White House. As U.S. chief executive, Trump has called his onetime extramarital lover Stormy Daniels “Horse Face.” As president, he has referred to MSNBC talk show host Mika Brezinski as “Low IQ Crazy Mika” while tweeting about he refused to let her attend a party at one of his resorts because she was “badly bleeding from a face-lift.” He called his reality television and White House Assistant Omarossa Manigault-Newman “a crazed, crying low-life” and a “dog.” He tweeted that U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) “would come to my office ‘begging’” and ready to “do anything” for campaign contributions.
Trump nominated an accused sexual predator, Brett Kavanaugh, to the Supreme Court, defending him after Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford courageously called out the right-wing jurist for attacking her. At a rally in Mississippi in the fall of 2018, Trump mocked Ms. Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, casting doubt on her testimony. Trump (who has been accused of sexual assault by seventeen women so far) imitated Ford, taunting her for not knowing the answers to questions such as how she had gotten to the high school party where Kavanaugh accosted her.
Trump rejected multiple allegations of sexual abuse made against Kavanaugh by Dr. Blasey- Ford and other women. He called the charges “a hoax” and apologized “on behalf of our nation” for the “terrible pain and suffering” that Kavanaugh, according to the president, had “to endure.”
Trump later referred to the “#Me Too movement – the rising outrage against sexual assaults on women – as a “very scary time for young men in America.”
Combining racism and nativism with his sexism, President Trump has called the long-serving Black Congresswoman Maxine Waters “a low IQ person.” Earlier this year, he sickeningly told four progressive Congreswoman of color to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
When advice columnist E. Jean Carroll went public last Spring with the charge that Trump raped her in a department store dressing room 20 years ago, the sexist-in-chief denied the claim by telling The Hill that “she’s not my type.” The implication was clear that Trump viewed rape as about sexual attraction and that he saw some women as worthy of sexual assault by virtue of their looks. It was an old and lethally chauvinist narrative, one that Trump twice in October of 2016 – the same month in which he called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” during a nationally televised and not-so “presidential” debate. As Laura McGann explained at Vox:
“In two other instances, he has conflated sexual attraction with sexual assault in his attempt to discredit accusers. Jessica Leeds said Trump groped her when they sat next to each other on a plane. ‘He was like an octopus,’ she told the New York Times. ‘His hands were everywhere.’ Trump’s response: ‘Believe me, she would not be my first choice,’ he said at a rally. ‘That I can tell you. You don’t know. That would not be my first choice.’”
“He dismissed reporter Natasha Stoynoff in the same way. Stoynoff said she fought him off after he pinned her against a wall and kissed her on his Florida estate in the 2000s. She was there to interview him and Melania Trump for People magazine about their first year of marriage.”
“ ‘You take a look. Take a look at her,’ Trump said at a rally. ‘You tell me what you think.’ The remarks are gross, arrogant, and petty. But, more important, they’re an attempt to obscure what the accusations are really about. Trump is not being accused of having consensual affairs with these women. He’s being accused of violence.”
As the World Health Organization (WHO) reports, sexual desire isn’t the prime motivator for sexual violence. “Although sexuality and aggression are involved in all forms of sexual violence,’ the WHO finds, “sex is merely the medium” whereby offenders like Trump “express various types of non-sexual feelings such as anger and hostility towards women, as well as a need to control, dominate and assert power over them,… The hostility, aggression and/or sadism displayed by the perpetrator are intended to threaten the victim’s sense of self.”
“In that sense,” McGann notes, “calling the accuser unattractive is another attempt to humiliate her.”
At his latest fascist-style permanent campaign rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania last week, the president Trump told an adoring Trumpenvolk crowd that U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren “has a fresh mouth.” The meaning of this insult was understood by his audience: Trump was calling Senator Warren an uppity woman who talks back inappropriately to male superiors. (Trump also repeated his mocking racist reference to Warren as “Pocahontas,” a derisive term he fixed on her in 2016 to make fun of the Senator’s claim of Native American ancestry.)
When a woman protester was removed from Trump’s Hershey rally, the president screamed “Get her out” and shamed the security guard who expelled her for being “politically correct” by removing the woman without violence. “Get her out. Get her out,” Trump commanded while his devotees pointed and shrieked at the demonstrator, a courageous young member of the group Refuse Fascism who donned a #MeToo hat and held up a sign saying “Grabbing Power Back.”
“See, these guys want to be so politically correct,” Trump said. Consistent with his long history of urging his supporters and security guards to attack protesters, Trump mocked the security guard for not putting his hands on the woman. “I don’t know who he was,” Trump said. “He didn’t do the greatest job.”
Trump marked the week in which Articles of Impeachment were rolled out against him by using his Twitter account to mock Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old school girl who has become the global symbol of youth’s anger and concern over the climate catastrophe that the ecofascist Trump is doing much to deny and advance.
The painfully narrow Articles came out with the approval of the U.S. House Speaker he demeans with the nickname “Nervous Nancy [Pelosi].”
One can stand (as I do) well to the left of centrist and corporate Democratic politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton and the liberal Elizabeth Warren while also and necessarily deploring the sexist language with which Trump and other right-wing neofascists attack these and other women. (The same goes for race and other identity markers, of course: one need not accept the insipid center-right neoliberalism of Barack Obama, Cory Booker, Deval Patrick or Pete Butiggieg in order to denounce right-wingers’ racist denigration of the first three politicians to denounce right-wing gay-bashing of the last one.)
It’s quite sick, the way this sexist pig of a U.S. president tweets and talks about women and girls. Beyond the sexist and misogynist comments and tweets, moreover, Trump’s political and policy conduct is just as bad, if not worse. The proudly white and male Trump administration has waged a vicious policy war on women’s sexual and reproductive rights and protections. It is packing the federal bench from the Supreme Court on down with jurists who oppose women’s right to an abortion. Trump is on friendly terms with arch-patriarchal right-wing Christian Fascists who would like to remove women from the workplace, deprive them of the vote, introduce mandatory motherhood, and return women to fully subordinate positions in “the home where they belong.”