Donald Trump is no stranger to attacking high-profile women. But today he’s really been going into overdrive, throwing insults at seemingly every woman he can think of.
In a single interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, Trump took aim at Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, using specifically gendered insults for all of them.
A “madwoman” a “ditzy airhead wife” and “she yaps” are all words the president of the United States used to describe women this morning.
— Caitlin Huey-Burns (@CHueyBurns) August 13, 2020
Regarding AOC, he attacked the Congresswoman’s intelligence—something he has often done with BIPOC and specifically women of color. “AOC was a poor student,” he said. “I mean, I won’t say where she went to school, it doesn’t matter. This is not even a smart person other than she’s got a good line of stuff. I mean, she goes out and she yaps.”
Ocasio-Cortez had this great response:
Let’s make a deal, Mr. President:
You release your college transcript, I’ll release mine, and we’ll see who was the better student.
Loser has to fund the Post Office. https://t.co/OXnmJxufIw
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) August 13, 2020
As for Harris, he accused her of being too “angry,” calling her a “madwoman.”
“And now, you have—a sort of—a madwoman, I call her, because she was so angry and—such hatred with Justice Kavanaugh. I mean, I’ve never seen anything like it. She was the angriest of the group and they were all angry. … These are seriously ill people.”
Imagine watching Brett Kavanaugh stir himself into a frenzied rage during his confirmation hearings and coming away thinking Harris is the angry one.
But calling women—especially Black women—”angry” is an age-old sexist, racist trope and Trump is leaning into it hard with Senator Harris. In another tweet today, he called her “mean” and “condescending” and last night, his campaign sent out a weirdly childish email to supporters, calling her “the meanest, most horrible, most disrespectful” person in the Senate. “Kamala is HORRIBLE” was the subject line.
Please get me out of kindergarten. https://t.co/X8RyDGTxN5
— kristen johnston (@thekjohnston) August 13, 2020
As for Pelosi, he kept that sexism simple and just called her “stone-cold crazy.”
Earlier in the day, Trump also tweeted a sexist attack on MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, calling her Joe Scarborough’s “ditzy airhead wife.”
Trump likes to tweet at the Morning Joe hosts while they’re on the air and they’ve often hit back in real-time in what be one of the world’s worst ways to have a conversation. Thursday morning, after Scarborough asked Trump to “please stop watching our show, okay,” Brzezinski laid into his gendered attacks not just on her but so many women:
What’s your thing with women? You have a lot of problem with women, like you’re scared of them or something. I think the Kamala thing has you freaked out. but I’ve noticed it’s all over the place. You get really like stressed out by women. You have to say things that are sort of triggering about women that are like back from the 1950s. You’re calling us ‘housewives’ when you talk about voters. Every time Kaitlyn Collins from CNN or Paula Reid from CBS, every time they ask you a question, you scurry off the stage. You get scared like a little baby.
Sexist attacks on powerful women run in the Trump family. Earlier today, Eric Trump liked a now-deleted tweet from a self-described “Digital Keyboard Warrior” for Trump Sr. named Lori Hendry, who used a gross slur to describe Kamala Harris.
“Raise your hand if you think Harris was a whorendous pick,” she wrote. “May have misspelled.”
If only all of this blatant sexism were enough to keep all women from voting for Trump in November. But as we saw in 2016, a whole lot of (white) women are willing to overlook a lot in order to uphold that sweet, sweet patriarchy.
(via Axios, image: Yana Paskova/Getty Images / Drew Angerer/Getty Images / Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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Published: Aug 13, 2020 04:35 pm