Step by slimy step, US president Donald Trump has made us numb to his crudeness and cruelty.
The solipsistic Trump, with the parasitic tech emperors and the internet itself, is degrading American values, making honour and integrity seem anachronistic.
Still, some moments shock beyond the pale. Whatever the pale is any more.
On Air Force One recently, Trump cut off Catherine Lucey, a Bloomberg News journalist pressing him about the release of Epstein files that could further implicate Trump in the lurid mess. Stabbing his finger at her face, the president of the United States snapped at Lucey: “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.”
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt later preposterously said, “The president being frank and open and honest to your faces, rather than hiding behind your backs, is, frankly, a lot more respectful than what you saw in the last administration.”
It was nauseating, if not surprising. Trump loves to call people who annoy him “pigs” and “dogs,” and in the case of his inamorata Stormy Daniels, “horseface”.
It was misogynistic, but Trump bullies both men and women, attacking their looks and character and hurling nasty, intensely personal epithets and nicknames. He mocked Chris Christie, once an ally, as “a fat pig,” “a slob” and “sloppy.”
When I interviewed him decades ago in his more appropriate incarnation as a flashy developer hogging attention in New York, he would rate the looks of supermodels and actors, dropping snap judgments like “Sadly, Heidi Klum is no longer a 10.” Sometimes he sent me pictures of female journalists from newspapers, commenting with a Sharpie scrawl on who he thought looked good or bad.
Politicians were never insult comics before Trump. But in the 2016 primaries he learned that sneering deflected from substance.
Trump followed up his “Quiet, piggy” moment by berating another female journalist, Mary Bruce of ABC News, who asked Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, during his appearance with the president, about his culpability in the dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. US intelligence said that the crown prince gave the order.
“You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that,” Trump chided Bruce. When she later asked why Trump was waiting for Congress to release the Epstein files when he could do it unilaterally, he called her question “a horrible, insubordinate and just a terrible question.” He said that Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, should look into revoking ABC’s broadcast license.
Trump even defamed Khashoggi, saying that a lot of people didn’t like him and noting cavalierly that “things happen.”
Yes, Things Happen when you have no morals and your family is doing lucrative business deals with the Saudis.
By contrast, Trump was his most charming self Friday in his “fascist vs socialist” meeting with New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. He had blasted Mamdani earlier as a “communist” and “Jew Hater” and threatened to withhold federal funding for New York and send in troops. But by the end of their Oval Office news conference, the two were so lovey-dovey, a Fox News anchor warned that JD Vance might have to move over for Mamdani. And Trump, who once warned that wealthy New Yorkers and businesses would flee if the democratic socialist were elected, dramatically flipped, saying he would feel very comfortable moving back to Gotham under this mayor.
It just proved that Trump admires charismatic winners more than he cares about ideology – or consistency. Mamdani was prepared, focusing on their common ground while flattering Trump by noting his election statistics and hometown roots, and avoiding Dear Leader fawning. He strategically embraced Trump as he touted the affordability issue, which the billionaire president loved. Seeing Americans restive at his fixation on foreign conflicts, Trump is feigning a newfound interest in grocery prices.
The president was so taken with Mamdani, he even jovially told him, in response to a Fox News reporter’s question, to go ahead and repeat his campaign claim that Trump is “a fascist”. Trump also defended Mamdani from the incendiary falsehood of Elise Stefanik, the Republican who’s running for governor of New York, that the Muslim mayor-elect is a “jihadist.”)
Stefanik, a Trump henchwoman, broke away from the president on this issue, doubling down and posting Friday evening that Mamdani is “Kathy Hochul’s jihadist”.
Unfortunately, we don’t get to see this genial Trump very much these days. He’s mean when he’s cornered, like the snapping turtle I had as a pet when I was a child. Republicans got creamed in the recent elections. To extend the porcine metaphor, Trump’s polls are dropping, to use a Dave Barry phrase, “like a pig out of a helicopter”.
The president, ordinarily a master at recasting reality, had to give up his ludicrous attempt to paint the Epstein files as a Democratic hoax. Labelling Marjorie Taylor Greene, his former acolyte who now says she identifies with the Epstein victims, a “traitor” backfired.
Friday night, Greene announced in a social media post that she was leaving Congress and said she didn’t want to face a “hateful” primary stirred by Trump.
“Standing up for American women who were raped at 14, trafficked and used by rich powerful men,” she wrote, “should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the president of the United States, whom I fought for.”
She said, “I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.”
And Trump’s jeering post about Rep Thomas Massie of Kentucky, the Republican co-sponsor of the bill to get the files released, wasn’t well received. Trump mocked Massie, a widower, for marrying again 16 months after his wife died. “Boy, that was quick!” This coming from the man who went straight from cheating with Marla Maples during his Ivana marriage to marrying her at the Plaza a year later.
Maligning members of his own party raised questions about why he was so desperate to hide the files of a child molester who was once his pal; the two bonded over their leering predilection for young women.
In a rare show of rebellion, republicans refused to bend the knee and pretend that it was okay to shield a sexual pervert and give his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, treats in prison and pardon dreams just because Trump didn’t want the details of his involvement with Epstein to surface.
In emails Democrats released, Epstein wrote that “Trump had spent hours at my house” with one of the victims and that he believed Trump knew more than he had acknowledged, and called Trump “evil beyond belief”. You know you’re in trouble when someone evil beyond belief calls you evil beyond belief.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
