Often, when President Trump feels inadequate about a subject matter, he ends up overcompensating for his deficiency.
During his Monday press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Trump referenced a White House meeting with women business leaders and said, “We know, the full power of women can do better than anyone else. We know that.” He went on to state that he is dedicated to removing the barriers women face.
Can women do better than anyone else? Or would it be more accurate to say that women can do just as well as anyone else? Most people would say the latter. But for a man with an affinity for overstatement and a need to push back against the image of himself as a misogynist, he probably feels he needs to ratchet up the rhetoric a bit.
He’s done the same thing many times in the past. “I love Hispanics,” Trump has said on numerous occasions in a transparent attempt to combat the media-created image of him as a bigot intent on ridding the country of every Spanish-speaking person at gunpoint.
Or consider his statement in the primaries that there would have to be “some sort of punishment” for women who abort their pregnancies under a Trump presidency. Trump seemed to have no clue that pro-lifers completely oppose such a policy. But he was also acutely aware that he was not one of them but needed to say whatever would win their support. So he made a grand gesture but overshot his mark and ended up hurting his own cause. The Trump campaign quickly walked back his “punishment” idea, though it dogged him for the rest of the campaign and is still mentioned occasionally even now.
It’s a minor point, but Trump’s awkward compensatory gestures make the listener — at least this one — think he’s being insincere. Then again, many listeners have probably become inured to Trump’s hyperbole. At this point, if he ever said something more restrained — such as “Women can do just as well as men,”—he’d probably be accused of misogyny.
Daniel Allott is deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner
