Over at Slate, Michelle Goldberg notes that, as counterintuitive as it may seem, Donald Trump HAS exercised discipline on at least one front since taking office — restraining his personal statements of hatred and disparagement against women. This quiescent phase has of course now come to a revolting and troubling end, as the president unleashed tweets this past week against MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski that revisited familiar Trumpian flash points around the subject of females. Far more than delivering insults to his unfortunate target, Trump has subjected all of us anew to unsettling insights into his psychology and temperamental unfitness for office.
Apparently offended by Brzezinski’s on-air critiques of his presidency, Trump chose not to refute, or engage, or persuade, but to attack this commentator as unintelligent, crazy, and “bleeding badly from a face-lift.” In Trump’s mind, women who challenge him aren’t just a priori dumb and crazy; they’re also physically disgusting, a point he drives home with blood references that are impossible not to associate with menstruation (and that harken back to his previous attack on Megyn Kelley having “blood coming out of her whatever"). Indeed, Goldberg notes that Trump “instinctively projects his own revulsion toward menstruation onto women who threaten him.” (And Donald Trump's references to women's bleeding becomes even more psychologically telling when you consider that Brzezinski and co-host (and fiance) Joe Scarborough have offered evidence that Brzezinski did not indeed have a face lift.)
Josh Marshall takes this analysis a step further, tying Trump’s blood references to Trump’s overall psychology of dominance and submission, wherein blood is a symbol of a humiliation that Trump must always work to inflict on others, and never suffer himself: “Whether it is the ‘disgusting-ness’ of the intimate acts of women’s bodies — menstruation, a woman urinating — or this more general shame and humiliation of being seen bleeding or injured it comes back to the same thing: Trump’s focus on humiliation, the shame of being among the dominated as opposed to those doing the dominating. For Trump, the entire economy of human relations is reduced to this dichotomy. It is a snapshot of the brutal and abusive whirlwind the whole country is caught up in.”
It is, to put it mildly, less than optimal to have as president a bad hombre with such uncontrollable and unexamined impulses that they lead him to attempt to bully and humiliate others; but The Hot Screen thinks Goldberg is on to something when she asserts that it is ultimately in the interests of the country for Trump to keep showing us who he really is: “If there is the barest sliver of consolation, it’s that Trump appears almost as miserable and anxiety-ridden as we are. He’s losing the tiny bit of control he had. It’s better for Trump to show us all who he really is than to let his lackeys pretend he’s remotely worthy of his office. Every time he tweets, he reveals his presidency as a disgusting farce. Let’s hope he keeps doing it.”
Trump’s grotesque remarks demean the presidency and our country’s political dialogue, but they also do us the service of diminishing Trump’s personal standing and power with the public and in Washington. When even Republicans say he needs to stop, this is a glaring clue that the opposition shouldn’t mind too much if they keep on going. It’s always better for a vile person to show their true colors for all the world to see than to hide behind niceties and false conscientiousness. We also need to remember that Trump’s anti-women words are paralleled by real-world actions that do great harm to females; Goldberg notes his expansion of the global gag rule, undermining of federal family planning programs, and erosion of enforcing laws against gender discrimination in education. If his tweets help to remind us that he’s already implemented his own substantive war on women, and rouse more people to resistance, so much the better.
