For At Least The Third Time, Donald Trump Calls A Woman Critical Of Him “Neurotic”
Something that has become apparent during this neverending election season is that GOP nominee Donald Trump tends to recycle his Twitter insults. Considering he insults multiple people on the daily, I guess this is understandable. “Loser,” “hater,” “third-rate,” “failing,” “joke,” “low-ratings,” and “disaster” are some of his favorite terms to use when attacking other people or media outlets.
However, when it comes to women, he tends to go a different direction. One insult that has been used more and more, and only when it comes to females, is “neurotic.” Over the past few months, he used it to describe both former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski. He put another woman on this list Saturday — New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
.@NYTimesDowd isn’t alone. Trump has a history of calling women “neurotic”: pic.twitter.com/YZG9aWRDI8
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 17, 2016
Apparently, Trump was none too happy with Dowd’s CNN appearance earlier in the day. Speaking to host Michael Smerconish, Dowd noted that Trump said he likes inciting violence at his rallies because it makes them more exciting. This was after she told Smerconish that she didn’t think she had much sway over the GOP nominee because she had mentioned she didn’t like the tone of his events.
Considering that Trump tends to take a potshot at CNN at least once a day on Twitter — despite saying numerous times he refuses to watch the network — it was a given he was going to after Dowd. In this instance, he devoted two mean tweets to her.
Wacky @NYTimesDowd, who hardly knows me, makes up things that I never said for her boring interviews and column. A neurotic dope!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 17, 2016
Crazy Maureen Dowd, the wacky columnist for the failing @nytimes, pretends she knows me well–wrong!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 17, 2016
First things first — there really is no slight too small for Trump, is there. Outside of regular NYT readers and Beltway insiders, who is Dowd known to? How is going after her appealing to independent voters he’s hoping to court? It doesn’t, of course. But Trump’s whole mindset when it comes to politics is dominance. He must win at all times, no matter the situation.
But, setting aside his lack of originality and wit when it comes to throwing out insults, calling Dowd “neurotic” and “crazy” just exposes Trump’s old-school misogyny. As he did with Mika, he’s creating a portrait of Dowd as a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown, unable to deal with the hard-fact-paced world with the real captains of industry. When confronted by a strong man or a difficult situation, she’ll wilt and become a nervous wreck. (You can say many things about Dowd, but neurotic or nervous is not one of them.)
Earlier this week, that is exactly how he described Pastor Faith Green Timmons, the Flint clergywoman who shut him down in her church, causing him to meekly reverse course from making an anti-Hillary political speech. Of course, Trump only talked smack about her the next day from the comfort of Fox News. Same goes for Mika. And Dowd. And DWS. And all the other sexist attacks he’s made about other women. It is always in one of his safe spaces as opposed to in the presence of the woman herself.
Which makes Trump not only a misogynistic asshole, but a coward and a wimp.
And this is the kind of man who would be President? What kind of people are we? Who would want him for a husband father brother friend….
“Neurotic” was the standard mid-Twentieth Century thought-stopping cliché of the antifeminist reaction. Florence Nightingale was “neurotic”. Marie Curie was “neurotic. It goes without saying that Simone de Beauvoire was “neurotic”, and, of course, Betty Friedan was “neurotic”. If you were a woman who thought male dominance or the double standard even might be unfair, or if you didn’t drool brainlessly over babies, you were “neurotic”. I haven’t even started on the “masculine protest”, “penis envy” “latent lesbian tendencies”, or “clitoroidality” they rolled out when they were playing hardball. And, of course, American women, even good housewives, were all agreed to be “castrating”. These are the “good old days” that Donald Quack is signalling he means to bring back. I, at least, will not live long enough to see them return, but if the “postfeminist generation” doesn’t wake up, it could swiftly find itself living under a prefeminist society.