Nobody has more respect for women than I do. – Donald Trump
President Donald Trump is a tough guy to please. But women seem to have an especially hard time pleasing him no matter how hard they try.
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During the Republican primary, he was especially upset over Carly Fiorina’s face, and what he imagined to be Megan Kelly’s menstrual cycle. This, after Kelly, one of the debate moderators, quoted some of his descriptions of women.
His boasting about assaulting women on the Access Hollywood tape was just “locker room talk.”
The sixteen women who came forward during the later stages of the campaign to accuse him of the very things he said he did on the tape were all liars who were after his money.
His friends arranged payments of $150,000 and $130,000 to women who were planning to publicly describe sexual affairs with President Trump that never actually happened.
But in the last week, he has turned on two of the women who have been perhaps the most supportive – his communications director, Hope Hicks, and his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Hicks, who had loyally served Trump for longer than almost anyone else, was guilty of admitting to the House Intelligence Committee that she had occasionally told “white lies” to protect the president. Immediately after the president supposedly angrily lashed out at her for this indiscretion, she resigned.
Sanders made a similar error, defending Trump against the two women who were paid off not to disclose their sexual affairs. Again, he allegedly angrily let her know just how badly she had screwed up.
Let’s step back for a minute and sum things up. Trump has a very long history of mistreating women. One might argue that he treats men just as poorly, but that’s not entirely true.
During the primary debates, he told Jeb Bush that he looked tired and implied that Marco Rubio had a small you-know-what. Perhaps not too classy, but evidently no more malicious than, say, locker room talk. But he went far over the line in his ad homonym attacks on Megan Kelly and Carly Fiorina.
President Trump had long depended upon these two very loyal female employees to help clean up his messes. When that job proved impossible, he lashed out at them. By doing so, wasn’t he just showing his respect?
About the Author
Steve Slavin has a Ph.D. in economics from NYU and taught for over thirty years at Brooklyn College, New York Institute of Technology, and New Jersey’s Union County College. He has written sixteen math and economics books including a widely used introductory economics textbook now in its eleventh edition (McGraw-Hill) and The Great American Economy (Prometheus Books) which was published in August.