Trump on Women

The new Mayor of Miami, Florida, is a Democrat. And a woman.

In 2021, Republican Francis Suarez was reelected. He won with 78.6% of the vote.

Tonight, Ellen Higgins became the first Democrat elected mayor in the city in almost 30 years. Unofficial results from tonight’s election show she garnered 59% of the vote to Republican Emilio Gonzalez’s nearly 41%. That’s a ginormous swing.

Although the race is technically nonpartisan, it attracted national attention this year. It’s one in a series of off-year elections being viewed as bellwethers for the midterms.

Higgins’ big win won’t make Donald Trump happy.

For one thing, he put some skin in the game for her opponent. A Trump endorsement is no longer a magic touch, more like a kiss of death.

For another thing, Higgins is a woman. And in case you haven’t noticed, the president has real problems with women. As in, he doesn’t like them, and he can’t stand it when they best him. There are, of course, the nasty comments he sneered at Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris in their respective races. And the firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook combined with the attempt to smear her name with allegations of mortgage fraud, as well as the prosecution of New York Attorney General Tish James, who successfully took on Trump’s company in court. They are both Black women.

Trump spews abuse at his perceived enemies, but reserves the worst of it for women. Just ask E. Jean Carroll, whom he called a liar and attempted to belittle by saying she wasn’t his type—even as he misidentified a photo of her as his second wife, Marla Maples, during a deposition. Ms. Magazine tried to explain Trump’s history of demeaning and silencing women like this in January of this year: “Trump employs personal attacks to discredit women critics, avoiding accountability while amplifying misogyny.”

The last few weeks have been full of presidential misogyny directed toward journalists. He’s engaged in the kind of waspish retorts to legitimate questions that should raise eyebrows in political settings, but of course, this is Donald Trump, and the malicious, hateful treatment of women is already baked in. Most people barely raise an eyebrow.

On Saturday, Trump called CNN’s Kaitlan Collins “stupid and nasty” on Truth Social because she had the temerity to question him about cost overruns with his ridiculous White House ballroom project. In other words, the president of the United States heaped unmerited criticism on a female journalist for simply trying to do her job.

We discussed Trump’s effort to silence Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey last month, cutting her off by saying “Quiet, Piggy!” as she pushed him for details on his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Then there was Trump’s press conference with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman just a few days later, when he tried to browbeat ABC’s Mary Bruce for asking a question about the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The assessment of the intelligence community during Trump’s first term in office was that MBS was complicit. For asking an important, direct question, Trump launched the epithets “terrible person” and “fake news” at Bruce. He lectured her about “her attitude,” like she was a schoolgirl, not an experienced journalist, and said, “I think you are a terrible reporter. It’s the way you ask these questions.”

Next up for abuse at Trump’s hands was Katie Rogers, who wrote a piece about Trump for the New York Times, headlined: “Shorter Days, Signs of Fatigue: Trump Faces Realities of Aging in Office.” He didn’t respond to it very well and took to Truth Social again, where he raged that she was “a third-rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out.”

Just a couple of days later, it was CBS News reporter Nancy Cordes’ turn. After the tragic National Guard shooting in Washington, D.C., she tried to fact check Trump when he lied and said the Biden administration failed to vet Afghan nationals who entered the U.S., as that country was falling to the Taliban. “Are you stupid?” he said to her. “Are you a stupid person?”

None of this is new, of course. Donald Trump has a problem with women. And our country has a problem too—Americans let him get away with it. Before he was elected for the first time, the country saw the Access Hollywood Tape, where he brags about grabbing women and talks crudely about his effort to seduce a woman he wasn’t married to by taking her furniture shopping. Americans knew when they elected him the first time.

And before that, in April 2015, Trump retweeted a supposed joke: “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America #MakeAmericaGreatAgain.” He later deleted the post.

After his poor debate performance, Trump seemed to insinuate that Fox News Channel anchor Megyn Kelly was hard on him because she was menstruating. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever,” he said in an interview with CNN in August 2015.

In a September 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, he said this about his Republican primary opponent Carly Fiorina: “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president? I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not s’posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?”

There are no excuses. Too many Americans were okay with it, or at least willing to overlook it.

When we discussed the “Quiet, Piggy!” incident, I wrote: “It tells you all you need to know about this president’s attitude toward women. Of course, that hasn’t been in doubt since we saw him on tape saying, ‘Grab them by the p*ssy.’ He’s called a stream of women who stood up to him, like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Kamala Harris, ‘nasty women.’ In 2014, Trump called New York Times columnist Gail Collins ‘frumpy and very dumb.’ We could be here all night listing the misogyny, but the sad truth is, MAGA doesn’t care. The men like it and the women, inexplicably, are willing to tolerate it.”

Who is condemning Trump’s continuing attacks on women? Virtually no one. Perhaps there’s a view that professional women, the journalists and the politicians, are just supposed to take it. He’s not being roundly criticized for it. But if no one stands up to Trump during his public forays into unacceptable behavior, if this is the example America’s boys and girls are growing up with, who will stop it when it happens in private? And what will we become?

We’re in this together,

Joyce