Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:18 pm
In an interview with Las Vegas TV station KSNV on Wednesday, Donald Trump blamed “entertainment” for his nasty comments about women.
“And you know, a lot of this is done in the entertainment business. I’m being interviewed for Apprentice long before I ever thought in terms of running for office,” Trump responded, according to a CBS News’ Sopan Deb.
Donald Trump was abusing women long before The Apprentice came along, so his excuse is even more childish than it seems on the surface.
“But a lot of that was done for the purpose of entertainment. I can tell you this: There is nobody — nobody — that has more respect for women than I do,” Trump continued gaslighing. He added that he was going to do really well with women and that he is up in the polls with married women. However, a Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind poll concluded, “Clinton’s lead among women looks almost insurmountable, with over half of women (56%) favoring her over Trump (32%).”
If there is nobody that respects women more than Donald Trump, we are all screwed.
Donald Trump is losing in the polls and so he’s been ordered to clean up his act and roll out Mr. Nice Guy just in time for the election. He and his handlers figure if they can con you about his tax returns, why not sell the man who destroys women to women.
Here’s the thing: Being publicly degraded and humiliated on a near daily basis by a man running for the highest office in the world isn’t “entertainment.”
Trump has continued his abuse of women while running for president and his supporters act out on his signals. Female reporters said in a The Cut New York Magazine piece there’s an emotional price for hearing people shout “‘Hang the bitch,’ ‘Kill her,’ ‘C*nt’… You shouldn’t be at the point where you hear ‘C*nt’ and you think, Oh, they’re angry at Hillary, or you hear ‘B*tch,’ and you’re like, Oh, they’re talking about our former secretary of State.”
The Trump message to women and little girls, “No matter how high you climb, how smart you are, you will always be nothing more than a piece of meat. An object to be sneered at over your sexuality and gender.”
Donald Trump refers to women he wants to “f*ck” as an “it”.
Donald Trump doesn’t tell supporters not to use that language. How could he, it’s language he uses. It’s not just women, either, because misogyny uses being a woman as a smear. When Trump was running against Ted Cruz, he called the Texas Senator a “pussy” during a rally.
Donald Trump’s nasty language has emboldened his followers and even our children to bully others. When women hear Trump’s patronizing, condescending comments and tone, they are often triggered because it’s reminiscent of an earlier episode in their life. Some women respond to Trump as the “Big Daddy” that’s going to save them because he’s the Toxic Male with Power, but many others recognize the danger to their jobs, their relationships, and their sense of self.
Women recognize the bigotry and hatred behind Trump’s words, and they know it’s threatening to them personally. They know this kind of language supports victim-blaming and thus invites rape and abuse of women because “they deserved it.”
Donald Trump has actually used those words to justify his verbal abuse of Rosie O’Donnell. He embodies toxic masculinity. This is not “entertainment”. Donald Trump is damaging the psyches of women around this country, harming little girls’ self-esteem, and teaching little boys that it’s not only okay to treat women like crap, but something they must do in order to avoid being bullied themselves. A toxic male might even hate a feminist man more than they hate a woman with a political opinion.
Women know this kind of language means they will be treated like they are stupid, their opinion scoffed at during the next meeting at work, their performance graded on their appearance or discounted because of their lack of sex appeal to vapid, wannabe “alpha males”. (By the way, those women don’t want to be with the wannabe “alpha male”, which makes their presumption of male privilege even more insulting.)
Donald Trump has been triggering anyone who has a sense that they could be a Trump target, according to Everyday Feminism. In Slate, the talk of Trump terror is real, “Some of the therapists told me they are talking their patients through their Trump terror while trying not to succumb to it themselves.” Therapists concur, according to The Atlantic, “Among people who are not Trump supporters, we’re hearing a higher level of concern and dismay than I’ve probably heard in any election cycle, in 25 years of clinical work.”
This is not “entertainment”.
I join other women covering this election to say that I have twice had to seek out coping strategies for the misogyny and hate thrown at me on a daily basis by Trump supporters. Threatening a woman writer with rape should not be the normal response to a political article. This is a historical intimidation tactic used to silence women, and it’s still happening in many countries. It’s not exactly a part of “making America great again.”
To those who aren’t experiencing it personally, the implicit violence behind Trump’s words is still inescapable and triggering.
Donald Trump doesn’t care at all that he’s hurting millions in this country, including young girls. He doesn’t care that young girls hear him calling a beauty queen “Miss Piggy” and now they wonder how they can ever avoid the same fate. He will never apologize, and that’s obvious because like all abusers, Donald Trump is not sorry that he hurt you. He’s sorry that he’s being punished for hurting you.
Donald Trump is now going to roll out his Mr. Nice Guy routine, because he thinks that little of the emotional damage he’s already inflicted on people around this country — the thousands if not millions who can’t bear to hear anything about this election because of Trump’s disturbing attitude. I hear from these readers almost daily. This is not “entertainment.”
Hurting women and young girls is entertainment for Donald Trump, and that says all you need to know about him.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Connect with Sarah on Post, Mastodon @PoliticusSarah@Journa.Host, & Twitter.
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