The lunging incident grew from a single moment. It happened when a woman reporter tried to ask Trump a question.
The previous day Trump had promised every American citizen a $5,000 stimulus check after the midterm elections. The next day on the tarmac of DFW Airport in Dallas, the woman reporter asked Trump why the American people need a £5,000 incentive to turn out to vote if Trump’s economic policies were so successful.
Trump denied that it was an incentive to vote, even though that’s exactly how he’d framed it the previous day. Then Trump told the woman it was a “reward” for people having to put up with “a horrible situation caused by Biden.”
The lunge happened after the woman attempted a follow-up question.
“Hey, not you!”
The reporter was ABC’s Rachel Scott. Ms Scott is an intelligent, highly competent reporter.
She’s also Black.
This isn’t the first time Ms Scott has attracted the unjust ire of Trump. During the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Conference in late July of 2024, Scott asked Trump why Black voters should trust him given his past rhetoric. Trump called the question “horrible,” “hostile,” and “disgraceful.” He later labeled her “the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place.”
Trump has a long, ugly history of abusing women reporters, especially when they’re women of colour.
For example, Yamiche Alcindor, Abby Phillip, Akayla Gardner and Weijia Jiang are highly intelligent and competent women reporters of colour. They have all felt the vicious lash of Trump’s racist tongue, a tongue he uses only on women, especially women of colour.
But women of colour don’t have to be reporters to attract Trump’s invective. Kamala Harris, Maxine Waters, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Michelle Obama, “The Squad” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, are particularly favourite targets for derision by racist Trump.
Trump isn’t merely racist, either, he’s above all a misogynist. Women of any race routinely receive excoriation for their looks, their weight, their intelligence and their right to speak their minds. Trump abuses women in ways that he rarely uses against men, particularly white men.
Trump clearly hates and fears and feels inadequate around smart women. Where does this come from?
In 2015, psychologists Tali Mendelberg and Christopher Karpowitz at Princeton University, studied how men respond to intelligent women in group settings. The study revealed that men with fragile masculinity showed measurable anxiety and hostility toward women who outperformed them.
Trump has the most fragile masculinity of anyone I can think of. He also obviously has an advanced case of SPA.
SPA, or Small Penis Anxiety, is a persistent worry or distress about penis size. When Trump brings up his obsession with the size of his hands, a psychological misdirection known as “displacement” or “deflection,” he’s really talking about his tiny penis.
The revelation from Stormy Daniels that Trump’s penis is minuscule is dismissed by Trump who says that he never had any relationship with her. But that’s an obvious lie.
Trump’s history of adjudicated rape, alleged child rape, sexual assault, unwanted touching, inappropriate comments, physical and verbal abuse toward dozens of women would put a less powerful man in prison, if not on the National Sex Offender registry. Trump has always gotten away with these crimes against women, in part because the Republican Party has evolved into a safe place for rapists and woman haters.
Violence and hatred of women is deep in the MAGA DNA.
It’s the real reason Roe v Wade was repealed. Not out of concern that a bit of microscopic protoplasm might be a fully-formed human soul, but because some men are outraged that a woman can get pregnant by any means but theirs.
It’s why women whose lives are in peril, who were raped by their fathers, who will die if they give birth, are denied life-saving or sanity-saving abortions in some American States.
Neither is it any accident that the so-called online “Manosphere” is Trump-aligned either. Violence against women is becoming a cultural norm among insecure little men who take their frustrations out on all women because their egos can’t handle a little rejection.
Men like Trump are terrified of what they can’t control, and Trump is clearly terrified of smart women. Trump’s lunge at a brilliant and skilled black reporter has given another increment of permission to the worst and ugliest and most violent impulses of weak men.
In a split second, Trump showed us exactly what he is and what he’s capable of.
