Olson: Trump’s ‘piggy’ insult is yet another stain on his record with women

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At least we still have the capacity to be outraged by President Donald Trump’s language.

“Quiet, piggy,” Trump told a Bloomberg News reporter recently in a press gaggle on Air Force One as she persisted in questioning him about his opposition to releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files. She wanted to know why, “if there’s nothing incriminating in the files,” wouldn’t he agree to make them public?

If Trump wanted to avoid a direct response, he could have done what anyone does when faced with an uncomfortable query: Avoid. Evade. Redirect.

That’s not what Trump did. He called the reporter a barnyard animal, a nickname evoking a bully’s painful playground taunt to a pudgy, unkempt classmate.

When Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was later asked about the “piggy” comment, she told reporters in the White House press room that “everyone in this room should appreciate the frankness and the openness that you get from President Trump on a near-daily basis.”

In his wildest forays into doublespeak, dystopian novelist George Orwell would have been hard-pressed to forecast Leavitt, the 28-year-old cross-wearing press secretary who publicly celebrated Trump’s body shaming of the reporter by urging that Americans embrace the humiliation. Like her boss, Leavitt is wickedly wrong. Honesty doesn’t require intimidation, which is what Trump was trying to do by singling out a female reporter.

Within days, Trump belittled another female reporter as he welcomed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman into the Oval Office and dismissed U.S. intelligence findings that the prince was culpable in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Trump berated a female journalist in the room for allegedly making the prince uncomfortable by asking a question about Khashoggi’s murder.

On Friday, the president took to social media to call a female New York Times reporter “ugly, both inside and out.”

Let’s also not erase Trump’s history here. This wasn’t the first time Trump demeaned a woman or compared her to a pig. After Alicia Machado, the 1996 Miss Universe, gained weight, Trump, who then owned the pageant, called her “Miss Piggy.”

Then, of course, there’s the “Access Hollywood” recording in which Trump boasted about fame allowing him to sexually assault women with impunity.

Reporters can be irritating with their provocations and repetition. But it’s not a game. It’s the constitutionally protected job of journalists to prompt or force the powerful to explain their actions. The process can be uncomfortable for everyone, but it shouldn’t be nasty.

Sen. Erin Maye Quade, DFL-Apple Valley, was so exasperated by Trump’s piggy comment that she took to social media. No fan of Trump, she later said in an interview that his language matters. “The things that the president says matter, no matter who the president is,” Maye Quade said.

The senator went on social media again when Trump went after Democratic lawmakers in D.C., calling them traitors guilty of “seditious behavior” that is “punishable by death.” (The senators had recorded a video urging U.S. troops to defy “illegal orders.”)

Maye Quade said Trump’s strategic aim is to dehumanize his opponents and thus make it acceptable for bad things to happen to them.

In a similar vein, remember how First Lady Melania Trump summarily dismissed the “Access Hollywood” tape as “boy talk”?

Trump’s been defiant about his language and regard of women. But perhaps there is dimly lit hope; the administration showed an ability to self-correct on another topic.

The Washington Post recently reported that the U.S. Coast Guard, operating under the Department of Homeland Security, was planning to downgrade the display of swastikas and nooses from white supremacist hate symbols to “potentially divisive.”

After intense publicity, including a searing denunciation from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Coast Guard retreated, saying the ban would remain on swastikas and nooses.

No amount of outcry seems able to prompt such a course correction in Trump’s treatment of female reporters, but they will persist. They will survive the nasty, needless and dehumanizing taunts.

Given that Trump provides limited evidence of ability to change, the question is: How should we as a nation continue to react to a president who makes a blood sport of consistently dehumanizing Americans, especially members of the fourth estate? Is it worth our sustained outrage?