Donald Trump’s campaign is marked by his mouth, but only when his seemingly endless stream of insults is directed at a woman do the news media at large interpret it as gender related, sexist or misogynistic.
The latest example is a remark the Republican presidential candidate made Monday at a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Referring to a recent Democratic debate wherein the event returned from a commercial break while front-runner Hillary Clinton was still using the restroom, Trump said it was “disgusting.”
“I know where she went — it’s disgusting,” he said to laughter from the audience. “I don’t want to talk about it. No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting.”
A Washington Post article on the comment followed up saying, “Trump has repeatedly faced criticism for the language that he uses to describe women.”
Jonathan Cohn of the Huffington Post wrote that Trump “doesn’t realize that using the bathroom can be more complicated for women than for men …” He suggested Trump must see women as a “less-physically capable gender.”
Trump’s campaign first ran into the sexism charge during the first GOP debate on Fox News in August, when moderator Megyn Kelly confronted him with disparaging things he had said in the past about women.
“One of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don’t use a politician’s filter,” she said. “However, that is not without its downsides, in particular when it comes to women.”
Following the confrontation, Trump said in interviews and on social media that Kelly was unfair to him and characterized her in the debate as “blood coming out of her eyes, coming out of her — wherever.”
New York Times columnist Frank Bruni tied the Kelly and Clinton episodes together, writing in his column on Wednesday that “the fluids of women in particular rattle Trump.” He said “Clinton’s bathroom break — or, more precisely, Trump’s revulsion toward it — lies at the intersection of his misogyny and his fastidiousness.”
After a Rolling Stone profile in September quoted Trump mocking his GOP rival Carly Fiorina’s appearance, there was another rush of criticism about the way Trump has insulted a woman.
Iowa’s Des Moines Register dubbed Trump “the jerk at the bar, family reunion, or sporting event who disrespects women.”
But Trump has insulted men in personal ways, as well, but without the ensuing accusations that he’s doing so out of bigotry.
“He treats women running for president the same way he’d treat a man running for president and the media and Carly and Hillary scream bloody murder,” said conservative commentator Ann Coulter, a Trump supporter, in an email to the Washington Examiner media desk.
Coulter said Trump’s critics play the role of feminists but then act like “delicate hothouse flowers who will cry when you say something untoward.”
Trump has mercilessly taunted his rival Jeb Bush as being “low energy.” In media interviews he’s examined the perspiration of Marco Rubio.
During a TV interview in November, Trump said of Rubio, “He’s the youngest but I have never seen any human being sweat like that.”
In one of the GOP debates in September, Rand Paul questioned Trump’s judgment, noting that he’s quick to “attack people on their appearance — short, tall, fat, ugly.”
Trump fired back, “I never attacked him on looks and, believe me, there is plenty of subject matter there.”
Still, one reporter said that Trump’s attacks on some women fit into a narrative that he is insensitive toward minorities.
Dave Weigel, a Washington Post politics reporter, referred to a recent controversy over whether Trump had mocked the physical disability of a New York Times journalist. (Trump maintains he was not.)
“When it came to the Times reporter, the voters I talked to thought insulting one person like that was disrespectful to all disabilities,” Weigel said. “Certainly, the insults of female reporters are seen as part of a continuum of insults to women, over a long time.”
A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign did not return a request for comment.
