Yesterday, the guy Donald Trump had earlier endorsed for the House of Representatives who’d been accused of sexual crimes lost his Republican primary election. But the day before was even worse.
Monday was a rough day for Trump’s ongoing lifelong war against women who dare stand up to him. In the morning, the Supreme Court told him for the second time to take a hike on his appeal of a jury’s finding that he’d raped E. Jean Carroll and had to pay her a bit over $5 million.
In the afternoon, he reprised his disgusting and condescending slams on women, this time against CNN’s Kristen Holmes, calling her a “fake reporter,” saying she was “loud” and “boisterous” when she dared ask him why he’d ordered the military to scale back our exercises with our longtime ally South Korea in deference to the tender feelings of his dear friend Dictator Kim Jong Un.
And then, amazingly, it got even uglier when his staff followed up and went after Holmes’ children. The official Rapid Response called her a “humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession” and spit out the following genuinely disgusting venom because she dared ask about Trump sucking up to the North Korean dictator:
“Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”
Her employer, CNN, responded with quiet dignity, pointing out that she’s one of the most respected journalists covering the White House and that she’d simply done her job by asking a tough, relevant question.
Trump seems to have had a problem with women his entire life. He claimed that his personal Vietnam-era challenge wasn’t getting shot at in a foreign jungle but avoiding STDs from his much-publicized promiscuity. He cheated on each of this three wives, the last including having unprotected sex with (and paying off for their silence) both a porn star and a Playboy bunny.
He particularly seems to prefer women who are immigrants from poverty-stricken countries, presumably because they’re more desperate and easy to control; the only American he married he was basically forced into because he got her pregnant while he was married to Ivana, his first wife, and then dumped her after starting an affair with Melania, who retains her Slovenian citizenship and has passed it along to their son.
And it goes way beyond his personal life. Nine months ago he attacked Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey on Air Force One, snapping “Quiet. Quiet piggy” at her because she’d asked if there was anything serious about him in the Epstein files. Just a few days later it was ABC’s Mary Bruce’s turn to be verbally slapped around when she asked about the murder of Washington Post’s reporter Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia’s MBS, who’d given billions to Trump’s son-in-law.
As the Society of Professional Journalists noted at the time, these weren’t isolated incidents but reflected a consistent and long-term pattern of Trump’s hostility against women. His press secretary tried to paper it over by claiming that Trump was “just being frank,” and claiming that his condescending, insulting language was why people elected him.
Sadly, that observation is probably right-on-the-mark. Trump’s MAGA followers are notorious for their misogyny and bad manners, from “rolling coal” to “fuck your feelings” tee shirts to laughing at his jokes at the expense of women like Kamala Harris.
His hot mic moment with Billy Bush is probably the most revealing self-portrait any American politician has ever given the electorate:
“I moved on her, actually. You know she was down on Palm Beach. … I moved on her and I failed. I’ll admit it. I did try and fuck her. She was married. … And I moved on her very heavily in fact. I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said ‘I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.’ I took her out furniture. I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there, and she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big, phony tits and everything. …
[he sees the attractive young woman who is meeting their bus]
“I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful - I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
And MAGA’s reaction to Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women? A giant shrug. Or perhaps, for many of the men in his base, envy.
In addition to his name appearing in the Epstein files more often than anybody other than Epstein himself, including multiple FBI interviews alleging he’d raped a 14-year-old and beat up a 15-year-old for biting him when he forced her to give him a blowjob, at least 27 women have publicly accused him of sexual misconduct going all the way back to the 1970s.
Jessica Leeds says he groped her on a commercial jet flight, Kristin Anderson testified that he thrust his hand up under her skirt in a nightclub, Jill Harth said he did the same thing at a business dinner with her boyfriend sitting right beside her, and Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos said he tried to force himself on her in a bungalow in Beverly Hills.
For Stacy Williams it was a Trump groping at Trump Tower as Jeffrey Epstein watched, smiling, and his first wife, Ivana, described a night in 1989 when the hair replacement surgeon she’d recommended didn’t work out right so he tore out fistfuls of her hair and raped her (she later recanted).
He went on Howard Stern’s radio program and bragged that when he owned the Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants he’d walk into their dressing rooms while they were naked so he could “inspect” them, proudly adding that he gets away with that sort of thing all the time.
Former contestants agreed, saying he’d ogled them on multiple occasions. Buzzfeed found four women from the 1997 Miss Teen USA pageant he also owned who claimed he’d walked in on them naked, too, when some of them were only 15.
And let’s not forget the anonymous plaintiff who called herself Katie Johnson who said in sworn testimony in a lawsuit that both Trump and Jeffrey Epstein repeatedly raped her at Epstein’s mansion when she was 13 and hoping to become a model. Her lawyer, Lisa Bloom, said she’d been essentially forced to drop the suit because she was terrified by multiple death threats, and it seems she’s been in hiding ever since.
And then there’s the Epstein birthday book that the Wall Street Journal discovered and publicized, which not only discussed Trump and Epstein sharing a “wonderful secret” but also included a page from a Mar-a-Lago member who joked about selling Trump a “fully depreciated” woman for $22,500.
When I was watching Trump attack CNN’s Kristin Holmes, the look on his face and the ferocity of his words, I was reminded of his brilliant niece, psychologist Mary Trump, telling me on my program about how his father Fred was a high-functioning sociopath, a story she also told in her bestselling book Too Much and Never Enough. I could easily imagine Fred talking the same way to a 7-year-old Donald before he sent him off to a military academy to get him out of his hair.
While we don’t know Fred’s opinion of women (other than that his father made his first fortune running a brothel), we do know he was arrested in 1927 at a Klan rally in Queens, and 46 years later the Justice Department charged him and Donald with refusing to rent their apartments to Black people.
Apparently, the lesson young Donald learned in that house was that empathy is a defect leading to weakness, contempt is a way of showing strength, and there’s nothing in the world worse than being a “loser.” Such men typically view women as objects to own rather than human beings, and Donald certainly seems to be acting that out on an astonishingly regular basis.
So, it should be no surprise that he’d put three people on the Supreme Court who’d end women’s constitutional right to control over their own bodies; women have been dying in ER’s ever since, and now MAGA-type woman-hating and abusive men are using everything from abortion bounty laws to Flock cameras to stalk and control the women they think they own.
The most alarming part of all this is that Donald Trump still has 92% support among Republicans who identify themselves as MAGAts, although that cohort of the GOP has fallen to around 60% of the party’s voters.
Dictators are famous for their obsessions with masculinity, and we’re seeing that in spades among Trump and his lickspittles. He tweets pictures of himself as a superhero or a manly-man virtually every day, all while Whiskey Pete Hegseth proposes shooting up our troops with testosterone like he and Bob Kennedy do.
The Tate brothers — who face rape, human-trafficking, and other criminal allegations around the abuse of women — are in tight with members of the Trump family. Justin Waller, a Tate associate, said Andrew Tate has even been giving young Barron “dating advice.”
Whether this is blowback against the Me Too movement or Trump has simply succeeded in bringing the rapists, rape fans, and misogynists out of the woodwork is hard to know, but the damage the role model of this man and his family are doing to a generation of American boys and young men coming up will probably be inestimable.
And where are the few Republicans left who find this a horror show? If they haven’t already joined the Lincoln Project or similar recovering-Republican groups, they appear to be hiding, hoping it’ll all go away soon.
Sadly, it won’t. It’s going to take a generation to clean up America from the damage this sick man has done and is doing.
Louise’s Daily Song: “Grab Them By The Pussy”
Comments on Tuesday’s Daily Take:
Trump Drops “Good Genetics” Bomb and Reopens a Dark Chapter in American History
The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould is a good book that describes how we cherry pick or manufacture data to support our hypotheses
~ Burton Raabe
Yes, we are still a racist, sexist, misogynistic country or at least 33% is. Why women or members of minority groups continue to support these politicians is just frustrating and will lead to a financial/market downfall as greed and incompetence seem to be part of this too. I feel like the Dems are bringing a knife to a gun fight ( and don’t get me started on the stupidity of Biden’s inner circle and Merrick Garland). Maybe Jon Ossoff will be the new Obama.
~ Mitch Moncrief
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