Trump Told a Woman, ‘Quiet, Piggy,’ When She Asked Him About Epstein
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“Keep your voice down.”
“That’s enough of you.”
“Be nice; don’t be threatening.”
“There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
“Quiet, piggy.”
This is a sampling of what the president of the United States has said to and about female journalists during his time in office—and most recently to Catherine Lucey, a White House correspondent for Bloomberg. On Friday on Air Force One, Lucey asked Donald Trump about the Epstein files. He answered her first question, but when she followed up, the president bent his head down and pointed his finger, the way you might chastise a screaming child or shoo a stray cat. “Quiet. Quiet, piggy,” he said.
Lucey had clearly touched a nerve. Two days later, Trump announced that he would endorse the House’s vote on the release of the Epstein files, likely because he knew that the House had the numbers to do so and would go forth with or without his support. But this category of remark is part of a long-running pattern for the president: Trump’s time in American politics has been marked by repeated attempts to insult and demean female journalists.
At the start of his first presidential campaign, Megyn Kelly, at the time a Fox News journalist, asked Trump at a primary debate about reports that he had referred to women as “fat pigs,” “dogs,” and “slobs.” Trump didn’t deny the accusation, and instead made a joke about how he said those sorts of things only about Rosie O’Donnell. Later, talking about the debate on CNN, Trump said of Kelly: “There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” And the president has repeatedly insulted Yamiche Alcindor, now a White House correspondent for NBC. At a press briefing about COVID-19 in 2020, Trump replied to her question about his prior statements on governors’ ventilator requests by saying, “That’s why you used to work for the Times and now you work for somebody else … Be nice; don’t be threatening.”
The president’s vitriol against those exercising their First Amendment rights is not limited to women. Today, during a White House visit with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the president said of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi that “a lot of people didn’t like that gentleman” and that “things happen,” suggesting the journalist may have deserved his killing. (In 2018, Saudi officials lured Khashoggi to Turkey and murdered him, dismembering his body with a bone saw.) At a 2024 campaign rally, he fantasized about shooting journalists. His comments to female reporters, however, have another through line: Why can’t you just be silent like a woman should?
Trump has an even longer history of denigrating women more broadly. This is reportedly not the first time that he has used the word piggy to describe a woman. Alicia Machado, the winner of the 1996 Miss Universe pageant, has alleged that Trump once called her “Miss Piggy” and made other demeaning comments about her weight. And the president’s longtime feud with O’Donnell has included much public sexism, including Trump calling her a “big, fat pig” in 2006. (Most recently, the president has floated the prospect of revoking O’Donnell’s American citizenship, a move that legal experts say would be blatantly unconstitutional.) And this is just how Trump talks to women, leaving aside the many credible accusations of sexual abuse and misconduct against him, which he has continued to deny.
When asked for comment about Trump’s remarks on Air Force One, a White House official told The Guardian, “This reporter behaved in an inappropriate and unprofessional way towards her colleagues on the plane … If you’re going to give it, you have to be able to take.” The White House did not provide any evidence of inappropriate behavior. “Giving it” is doing one’s job, apparently, and “taking it” is being called a pig by the president for asking him a question.
If the president needs a political motive to treat women respectfully in public, he has one. This month’s elections saw high turnout among women supporting Democratic candidates, and evidence suggests that young, highly educated women are becoming more and more disgusted by the MAGA movement. But Americans should also hope that their leaders are guided by basic decency at the very least. “The United States is now a nation run by public servants who behave no better than internet trolls, deflecting criticism with crassness and obscenity,” my colleague Tom Nichols wrote earlier this month. Trump’s sexist comments are an attack on women’s dignity—and by making them, he strips the presidency of its dignity too.
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Today’s News
- The House passed a bill directing the Justice Department to release all of its Jeffrey Epstein–investigation files, achieving near-unanimous support despite months of Republican efforts to avoid a vote. Last night Trump said that House Republicans should vote for the release, insisting, “We have nothing to hide.”
- Federal judges blocked Texas’s new congressional map, calling it a race-based gerrymander. The ruling forces the state to use its map drawn in 2021, a major setback for Trump’s redistricting push.
- The Trump administration announced a plan to dismantle the Education Department, shifting its programs to other federal agencies.
Evening Read
The Social Cost of Being a Morning Person
By Liz Krieger
As my wake-up time has inched earlier, I’ve written more, exercised more consistently, and been able to approach challenges with clarity, well before afternoon fatigue sets in.
But every transformation comes with a price. And mine has been paid in evening hours—those crucial moments when families traditionally reconnect after a day apart, when teenagers may be more likely to open up, when friends gather and marriages deepen in the comfortable darkness after responsibilities have been met. I have become a person who gives the best of herself to the morning and offers only the dregs to the night.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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