I overheard two grown men laughing the other day about President Donald Trump’s outburst at the expense of a female reporter he called “piggy.”
They thought it was hilarious.
“He tells it like it is,” one said, as if cruelty were a form of truth-telling.
Well, let me tell you like it is.
Mocking a woman for doing her job isn’t honesty. It isn’t candor. It isn’t toughness. It’s smallness.
It’s the behavior of a man who cannot face a question without trying to diminish the person asking it. And when grown adults laugh at that, it says less about her and far more about what we as a country are becoming.
Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey was doing what she’s supposed to
The reporter, Catherine Lucey of Bloomberg, who used to cover the Iowa Statehouse for the Associated Press, was doing exactly what a free press is supposed to do: asking about the Epstein files, which the American public absolutely deserves answers about.
Before she could finish, he cut her off with “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.” It wasn’t a slip of the tongue. It was deliberate – a way to avoid the question by attacking the questioner.
The day before Thanksgiving, Trump called New York Times reporter Katie Rogers “ugly” in a Truth Social rant about an article she coauthored with a male reporter about signs Trump is aging in office.
Some people excuse this kind of behavior by saying, “That’s just Trump being Trump.” As if that phrase is a moral permission slip.
People who defend this pattern often fall back on the same line.
As Rep. María Elvira Salazar, R-Florida, put it Nov. 18, “President Trump is a very picturesque, and difficult, and different type of politician. But I always say that I look at his policies and not at his personality.”
It sounds reasonable until you realize that personality is exactly what shapes behavior – and behavior is what shapes a nation. Policies don’t mock women. Policies don’t sneer at reporters. People do.
Trump played the oldest trick in the autocrat’s handbook
Others say the news media “deserves it.” After decades in newspapers, I can promise you reporters can be persistent, irritating and unyielding – and thank God for that.
Democracy depends on people willing to ask uncomfortable questions. But calling a woman “piggy” isn’t holding the press accountable. It’s the oldest trick in the autocrat’s handbook: Humiliate the critic so you don’t have to answer the criticism.
What troubles me most isn’t just the insult itself. It’s the applause for it – the way some cheer cruelty if it comes wrapped in their team’s colors. The way grown men laugh at a woman being demeaned.
The way people confuse bullying with strength.
Leadership requires restraint. It requires self-discipline, respect and the ability to face scrutiny without collapsing into name-calling.
Every president gets frustrated. Every president has moments of irritation with the news media. But no president in my lifetime – not Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Obama, Biden – ever behaved like this publicly toward a member of the press.
They understood that the dignity of the office was not theirs to soil.
When the president of the United States talks like this, it gives the country permission to talk like this. It corrodes our civic life. It teaches our kids that mockery is a substitute for argument. It encourages the belief that the way to win is to shame someone into silence.
So let me tell you like it is one more time: A president who speaks this way diminishes himself – and the nation – with every insult he throws.
If this is what passes for “telling it like it is,” the bar for leadership has sunk far lower than any of us should accept.
And we don’t have to accept it. Not in our politics, not in our communities and certainly not in ourselves.
Ray Watford is a retired production director who worked for newspapers in Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. This column originally published in The Columbus Dispatch.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Worst part of Trump’s ‘piggy’ comment wasn’t the insult | Opinion
Reporting by Ray Watford, Opinion contributor / The Columbus Dispatch
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