He’s a b-tchy little queen. Such a b-tchy little queen. The make-up, the cattiness, the whining, and, especially, the resentment of successful women. Example #1001 occurred at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, when Donald Trump told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that she should “smile more,” called her award “fake,” bizarrely, and compared her to actress and trans activist Dylan Mulvaney. It made no sense, but that’s the beautiful thing about being a Karen – you don’t have to make sense, you just have to be aggrieved. And nobody has ever been more aggrieved than our billionaire president.
Collins handled the insults with far more graciousness than they deserved, telling Jon Stewart in the following days that she wasn’t surprised by the insults, and saying of the president’s response to her work, “it’s not really about me and I don’t want it to be about my reaction. I think if you let it become about that, then it becomes a back-and-forth between the two of us.”
Trump’s attacks on Collins are only the latest example of his going after reporters; This is a man who routinely calls journalists “traitors” and the “enemy of the people,” sues them when he doesn’t like their reporting, threatens, insults, and mocks them. But it’s clear he retains a special focus on the women who cover him. From his gross menstrual blood remarks about Megyn Kelly during his first campaign to calling April Ryan a “loser” to snapping “quiet piggy” at Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey, Trump appears to take special delight in denigrating women.
Which is why the condescending suggestion to Kaitlan Collins about smiling more rankles so badly. It’s more than the blatant chauvinism. (I mean, has he ever told Peter Doocy to smile more?) It’s the psychology beneath it. What Trump cannot have–in this case, the adulation of CNN’s young star reporter–he attempts to take or destroy.
It’s a pattern we’ve seen again and again. Trump has always treated women as objects of either supplication or amusement. Preferably both.
After a lifetime of watching his boorish behavior, I’m sure nobody was particularly surprised at Trump’s crass remarks. Why would they be? But just because we are not surprised doesn’t mean we shouldn’t maintain a modicum of shock. Not at him, but at our continued non-reactions to his abhorrent behavior.
Why do so many of us continue to roll over and take it when this buffoon takes them to task for the crime of doing their jobs?
In the larger scheme of things, perhaps it doesn’t matter much that our president took a couple unfunny swipes at a millionaire female reporter. Hell, it may even be a boon to her ratings. But what does matter is what every previous president but this one has understood: that a Commander-in-Chief’s words affect more than those at whom they were directed. Leaders set the tone. When a leader sets a sexist tone, sexist acts follow. When a leader sets a violent tone, violent acts follow. When a leader sets a stupid tone, stupid acts follow. In this president’s case, it’s all three.
And yet here we are, having endured a decade of this man’s antics without a single journalist standing up in the Oval Office and telling him to f–k all the way off when he insults one of their own. Presumably it’s because they have too much “respect for the office” to ever do so, but from this fella’s point of view, if you respect the office so much you need to tell a person utterly demeaning that office that he needs to f–k all the way off.
Trump understands better than most that the press is too feckless to ever do such a thing because they need him as much as he needs them. He’s not wrong when he boasts about being the best thing for cable news; he understands that spectacle–the more lowbrow the better–will always win the contest for our attention. It’s why people like me keep writing columns like this.
Which puts me in the uncomfortable position of arguing against the very things that keep me employed. I don’t have a solution other than not electing this guy in the first place. Now that he’s in office, though, I really don’t understand pretending he’s just a normal occupant who does normal president things? I don’t understand why the press continues to give him the benefit of the doubt, why they report anything he says as factual, or why somebody doesn’t sock him in the mouth. (Ok, I fully understand why nobody socks him in the mouth, although it would have been nice if somebody had done so when he was a private citizen.)
Michelle Obama told Democrats to take the high road when they go low. That didn’t work. Nothing works because too many people enjoy the Trump carnival, even when we profess disgust at it. Which is why the worst insults in this era don’t come from the man himself—not even from his followers so emboldened to take things to the next level. They come from our own inability to respond. The greatest insult is that we keep falling for the same dumb, attention-grabbing tricks Sideshow Don continues to ply on us rubes. Kaitlan Collins may have gotten the business, but the country as a whole continues to suffer the consequences.
