Donald Trump Hates Women
It’s the one position he’s never changed.
Ron Galella/WireImage
Donald Trump holds one core belief.
It’s not limited government. He favored a state takeover of health care
before he was against it. Nor is it economic populism. Despite many
years of arguing the necessity of taxing the rich, he now wants to slice
their rates to bits. Trump has claimed his nonlinear approach to policy
is a virtue. Closing deals is what matters in the end, he says, not
unbleached allegiance to conviction. But there’s one ideology that he
does hold with sincerity and practices with unwavering fervor: misogyny.
We have been collectively blithe about this fact. On its face, Donald
Trump’s hateful musings about women and his boastful claims of sexual
dominance should be reason alone to drive him from polite society and
certainly to blockade him from the West Wing. Yet somehow his misogyny
has instead propelled his campaign to the brink of the Republican
nomination. Each demonstration of his caveman views—about Megyn Kelly’s
menstruation, about Carly Fiorina’s face, about the size of his
member—produces a show of mock-horror before Trump resumes his march to
the nomination. It fits a familiar pattern. Trump rose to fame on the
basis of our prurient interest in his caddishness and amusement at his
vulgar provocations.
Trump wants us to know all about his sex life. He doesn’t regard sex as a private activity.
It’s something he broadcasts to demonstrate his dominance, of both
women and men. In his view, treating women like meat is a necessary
precondition for winning, and winning is all that matters in his world.
By winning, Trump means asserting superiority. And since life is a
zero-sum game, superiority can only be achieved at someone else’s
expense.
This was a view etched in Trump from an early age. He was the
archetypal brat. His father, himself a successful real estate developer,
endlessly expressed a belief in his son’s greatness. “You are a king,”
his father would tell Donald, according to his biographer Michael D’Antonio.
His son took that to mean he could set his own rules. In elementary
school, he gave one teacher he didn’t like a black eye; others were
pelted with erasers. At birthday parties, he would fling cake.
Not even Trump’s father’s wealth, nor his father’s faith in his son’s
destiny, could save Trump from incessant discipline. At the age of 13,
he was shipped off to the New York Military Academy, which employed
brutal tactics for the remaking of delinquent character, even resorting
to violence to assert control over the boys. “In those days they’d smack
the hell out of you. It was not like today where you smack somebody and
you go to jail,” Trump has recalled. The struggle for domination
permeated the culture of the place, especially the manner in which boys
treated one another. According to one NPR report,
Trump would tear off the sheets of boys who didn’t make their beds
properly; he would laugh while his classmates spoke, putting them in
their place.
But Trump’s primary method for asserting dominance was sex. The school’s yearbook—the perfectly named Shrapnel—anointed
him the official “ladies man” of the class. He began his lifelong
practice of advertising his bedroom exploits as a means of demonstrating
his authority over the rest of the locker room. Decades later, he’s
still trumpeting his sexual exploits. When Tucker Carlson once mocked
him on air, Trump called the pundit and left a voicemail: “It’s true you have better hair than I do. But I get more pussy than you do.”
Such boasting is an essential part of his patter. In 2001, he phoned into The Howard Stern Show to discuss his feats of cuckoldry. The occasion for the call was the guest appearance of a gossip columnist from the Daily News named A.J. Benza, who was shilling for his book, Fame, Ain’t It a Bitch.
The tome included the admission that Benza’s girlfriend had left him
for Trump. Most men who would go on to become major-party nominees would
have run in the other direction from such a spectacle; Trump couldn’t
resist. “I’ve been successful with your girlfriend, I’ll tell you that,”
Trump told Stern’s audience. “While you were getting onto the plane to
go to California thinking that she was your girlfriend, she was some
place that you wouldn’t have been very happy with.” It was characteristic bit of braggadocio. As he wrote in The Art of the Comeback:
“If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often
seemingly very happily married and important women, this book would be a
guaranteed best-seller.”*
It’s an entirely Darwinian view, where the alpha male has his pick of
females, both as a perk and a means of flexing his power over lesser
men. It’s the mindset that made his assertion of his penis size in a
national debate almost an imperative—if he let the attack on his manhood
slide, his entire edifice might crumble.
Trump considers himself such a virile example of masculinity that
he’s qualified to serve as the ultimate arbiter of femininity. He
relishes judging women on the basis of their looks, which he seems to
believe amounts to the sum of their character. Walking out of his
meeting with the Washington Post editorial board this week, he paused to pronounce
editor Karen Attiah “beautiful.” When he owned the Miss USA and Miss
Universe pageants, he would screen all the contestants. His nominal
reason for taking on this role was to make sure that his lackeys weren’t
neglecting any beauties. His real motive was to humiliate the women. He
would ask a contestant to name which of her competitors she found
“hot.” If he didn’t consider a woman up to his standards, he would
direct her to stand with her fellow “discards.” One of the contestants,
Carrie Prejean, wrote about this in her book, Still Standing:
“Some of the girls were sobbing backstage after [Trump] left,
devastated to have failed even before the competition really began ...
even those of us who were among the chosen couldn’t feel very good about
it—it was as though we had been stripped bare.”
Humiliating women by decrying their ugliness is an almost recreational pastime for Trump. When the New York Times columnist Gail Collins
described him as a “financially embittered thousandaire,” he sent her a
copy of the column with her picture circled. “The Face of a Dog!” he
scrawled over her visage. This is the tack he took with Carly Fiorina,
when he described her facial appearance as essentially disqualifying her
from the presidency. It’s the method he’s used to denounce Cher, Bette
Midler, Angelina Jolie, and Rosie O’Donnell—“fat ass,” “slob, “extremely
unattractive,” etc.—when they had the temerity to criticize him. The
joy he takes in humiliating women is not something he even bothers to
disguise. He told the journalist Timothy L. O’Brien, “My favorite part [of the movie Pulp Fiction]
is when Sam has his gun out in the diner and he tells the guy to tell
his girlfriend to shut up. Tell that bitch to be cool. Say: ‘Bitch be
cool.’ I love those lines.” Or as he elegantly summed up his view to New York magazine in the early ’90s, “Women, you have to treat them like shit.”
Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photos by Lorenzo Bevilaqua/ABC via Getty Images, Noam Galai/WireImage.
When presented with the long list of his demeaning comments, Trump has responded, “I respect women, I love women, I cherish women.” Indeed, he has hired and promoted women within his companies. “They’ve been among my best people,” he wrote in The Art of the Deal.* The line reveals more than he intends. He’s perfectly comfortable with female underlings, his people—less so when women question him sharply, as Megyn Kelly has, or compete against him, as Carly Fiorina did. He’s perfectly blunt about this power dynamic. In a 1994 interview with ABC News, he explained, “I have really given a lot of women great opportunity. Unfortunately, after they are a star, the fun is over for me.” He means it. He brought along one his deputies, Carolyn Kepcher, to appear on The Apprentice. But he couldn’t stand her growing fame, and fired her for becoming a “prima donna.”
Women labor under a cloud of Trump’s distrust. “I have seen women
manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye—or perhaps another body
part,” he wrote in Trump: The Art of the Comeback.
Working moms are particularly lacking in loyalty, he believes, and thus
do not make for good employees. “She’s not giving me 100 percent. She’s
giving me 84 percent, and 16 percent is going towards taking care of
children,” he told Mika Brzezinski. (Further evidence of his dim view of working moms: Trump once notoriously blurted that the pumping of breast milk in the office is “disgusting.”)
This is one reason that evangelicals, both men and women, gravitate
to Trump, despite his obvious lack of interest in religion and blatantly
loose morals. He represents the possibility of a return to patriarchy,
to a time when men were men, and didn’t have to apologize for it. While
he celebrates his own sexuality, he believes that female sexuality has
spun out of control and needs to be contained.
The best example of this view is a reality show called Lady or a Tramp, which Trump developed for Fox but never aired. The premise of the show was that Trump would take “girls in love with the party life” and send them off for a “stern course” on manners. “We are all sick and tired of the glamorization of these out-of-control young women,” he told Variety, “so I have taken it upon myself to do something about it.”
The best example of this view is a reality show called Lady or a Tramp, which Trump developed for Fox but never aired. The premise of the show was that Trump would take “girls in love with the party life” and send them off for a “stern course” on manners. “We are all sick and tired of the glamorization of these out-of-control young women,” he told Variety, “so I have taken it upon myself to do something about it.”
How will Trump cope with a general-election race against a woman?
We’ve seen hints. Describing Hillary Clinton’s 2008 primary loss, he
resorted to a crude metaphor—she’d been schlonged by then–Sen.
Obama. As always in Trump’s world, sex is power. When Clinton suggested
that Trump has “demonstrated a penchant for sexism,” he fired back by
invoking the sins of her husband: “She’s got one of the great
women-abusers of all time sitting in her house, waiting for her to come
home to dinner.”
There’s a case for subjecting Bill Clinton to far harsher scrutiny,
but Donald Trump is the last person with the moral standing to make it.
The former Newsweek reporter Harry Hurt III described Trump’s history of assault in his book, The Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump.
In 1989, Trump had returned home from a painful scalp-reduction
surgery, intended to remove a bald spot. His ex-wife Ivana had suggested
the doctor—and he blamed her for his suffering. He held her arms and
began pulling hair from her scalp, then tore off her clothes. Hurt
writes: “Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more
than sixteen months. Ivana is terrified … It is a violent assault.
According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes,
‘he raped me.’ ” When the story resurfaced last summer, Trump’s campaign disavowed it.
When Hurt was writing his book, Trump’s lawyers forced the author to
include a statement from Ivana in the book, “A Note to Readers,” which
softens the account but doesn’t disavow it: “As a woman, I felt
violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited
towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not
want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”
The scene offers a graphic summation of Trump’s retrograde beliefs
and real brutality. What’s worse, the same spirit informs his politics—the
rampant cruelty, the violent impulses, the thirst for revenge, the
absence of compassion. Misogyny isn’t an incidental part of Donald
Trump. It’s who he is.
*Correction, March 25, 2016: This article
originally misstated that the “If I told the real stories of my
experiences with women ... ” quotation came from Trump’s book The Art of the Deal. It came from The Art of the Comeback. The article also originally misquoted Trump as writing “They’re among
my best people.” He wrote, “They’ve been among my best people.” \
Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/03/donald_trump_has_one_core_philosophy_misogyny.html
Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/03/donald_trump_has_one_core_philosophy_misogyny.html
