Every day around 6 p.m., when wandering around the White House drinking Diet Coke and tweeting no longer engages him, the president holds a press conference that is theoretically about the coronavirus but almost always ends up being about Donald Trump. Often during these rallies, he is rude to reporters to excite and delight his base. As more and more American die (45,013 as I write), the president grows more desperate to hold on to his white grievance voters.
This causes him, consciously or unconsciously, to pick big, splashy, tabloid-style fights with reporters. And usually female reporters. On Sunday, the president of the United States said to CBS News’ Weijia Jiang, “Nice and easy. Nice and easy. Just relax.” Trump also told her to “lower her voice.”
It wasn’t the first time the president had been inappropriate with a female reporter. It wasn’t even the first time that week the president had acted out on a female reporter. Trump regularly attacks female journalists—berating them, demeaning them, calling them fake. Some of Trump’s defenders will point to the lame excuse that he is terrible to all journalists. A few weeks ago, he told NBC News’ Peter Alexander that he was “a terrible reporter, that’s what I say.”
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But it’s not the same. Trump may be shitty to all journalists, but he treats women like low-IQ, attractive nuisances that he might want to have sex with if they didn’t talk so much. Some female journalists delight him—actually, only one, OAN’s Chanel Rion, who asks such hard-hitting questions as “Mr. President, do you consider the term ‘Chinese food’ to be racist because it is food that originated from China?” Tuesday night, she asked Trump—no lie—to comment on the polls showing massive, almost “perfect” support for his immigration order. This is a woman journalist the president can support.
Yes, Trump’s daily grievance sessions seem to devolve into him just yelling insults at reporters who ask him questions he doesn’t like. But women journalists are subjected to a whole other level of dehumanization, and women of color are antagonized on an even more profoundly humiliating level. He told PBS Newshour’s Yamiche Alcindor to “be nice.”
Trump tends to act out on women journalists when things aren’t going his way. And a brutal pandemic killing 45,000 Americans in just over a month followed by a crash of his beloved Dow is a case of things not going Trump’s way in a big way. Last week, Trump obsessively attacked the most visible New York Times female White House reporter, Maggie Haberman—twice. Trump was mad at Haberman because she wrote a story that noted that Trump’s new Chief of Staff Mark Meadows cries. Trump went on to say “It’s OK if he did... I think he was crying, probably, really for the wrong reason they had it down... but he's not a crier...” And then he called the story “nasty.”
Later, he went on a long rant about Haberman and said she should give back her Pulitzer Prize. “In fact, it turned out that the crime was committed by the other side. The crime was not committed by this side. It was committed by the other side, a bunch of bad people. You saw the reports coming out over the last two weeks. They got caught. So Maggie Haberman gets a Pulitzer Prize? She’s a third-rate reporter, New York Times. And we put her name up here last week. You saw that. People thought it was a commercial. It wasn’t a commercial. It was like a commercial, but it wasn’t a commercial. It was just clips.”
Trump was trying to make Haberman the story, and deflect from his own dismal pandemic response, which has led to America having the highest coronavirus death count in the world. Making the journalist the story is a way to disempower them, to keep them on the defensive.
But this should come as no surprise. Trump is famous for lashing out at women when they say things that displease him. You’ll recall Megyn Kelly, and the “blood coming out of her wherever.” Then there was Mika, “bleeding badly from a face-lift.”
Trump has given up trying to appeal to anyone but his base, and his base enjoys his attacks on the media—in fact they relish it. His base also enjoys the president’s misogyny and racism. Even the women and the black people (all five of them). Trump’s base needs something to fight against. They consider themselves to be oppressed, and they need an enemy, someone they can hate. Often it’s AOC or Nancy Pelosi, but a woman journalist fits this bill, too, and a woman of color journalist, even better: She provides the opportunity to engage in both misogyny and racism, two of the defining characteristics of the Trumpism. Trump’s obsession with Ilhan Omar gave him the chance to be misogynistic, anti-Muslim, and racist, thus sending his base over the moon.
I’m always reticent to say that the president is doing things intentionally, because he’s largely animalistic in his instincts. It’s probable that Trump is just a racist and a misogynist, and his base interprets his inability to hide this as refreshing honesty and not an inability to function like an adult. But it’s impossible to know what goes on in the president’s goldfish-size “brain.”
Fundamentally, Trump only cares about two things: kleptocracy and winning. These daily briefings are a place for Trump to create a villain, to find a woman (preferably of color) and deem her rude or badly behaved. By disparaging women journalists, fighting with them and treating them like children, he sends his base a very clear signal, and this signal resonates, whether they admit it or not.
The president has a lot of trouble with women questioning him. He thinks of women as sex objects. The idea that women could ask him questions he doesn’t like is just enraging to the dimwitted reality-television host who believes that “when you’re a star they let you do it, you can do anything.”
Listen to Molly Jong-Fast’s podcast with Rick Wilson, The New Abnormal, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
