Quiet, Piggy

On November 14, President Trump was taking questions from the press aboard Air Force one when Bloomberg correspondent Catherine Lucey asked him why he was resisting the release of the Epstein material “if there’s nothing incriminating in the files.” In a remark that struck a nerve with a lot of people, the president answered by pointing a finger at her and saying, “Quiet, Piggy.”

Part of what was striking about the line was that it seemed more likely to come out of the mouth of a kindergartner than a president. It was also shocking because no member of the press responded to the glaring violation of basic courtesy and the singling out of a female reporter for an epithet meant to demean her.

The comment itself was not the worst—by far—of those Trump has offered during his decade as a national political figure. But it points to something I think doesn’t get addressed often enough about not just Trump, but Trumpism.

A constant hostility toward women sits at the heart of Trump’s politics. Today, I’ll write about how it relates to historical authoritarianism, how it’s shifting U.S. culture around women, and what we can do about it.

The “Quiet Piggy” comment is part of a trend. Just last week, ABC News’s Mary Bruce asked a hard question at the White House during Trump’s meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to which the president responded by calling her a “terrible reporter.” Trump doesn’t think he should be accountable to anyone, yet he’s especially nasty to women. Women of color, in particular, have gotten the brunt of this kind of behavior from him in the past.

The hatreds the administration is most vocal about stoking right now are those targeting immigrants and trans people, because these are the two groups that they’ve decided, perhaps mistakenly, the larger U.S. public is willing to let be brutalized.

But it’s important not to sleep on other key hatreds Trump has embraced: vitriol against women and Black folks. Don’t forget his history with the Central Park Five, when he took out a full-page ad in the New York Times. He would never express regret for what he did, even after the men were exonerated.

But it’s women I want to focus on in this post. There is, of course, the open question of just how deep his relationship was with convicted offender Jeffrey Epstein, who ran a sexual abuse network that trapped countless girls and young women. But aside from that, Trump was accused in a deposition of marital rape by his wife, Ivanka, before she reached a settlement with him.

The president is on video from 2016 saying “Grab ‘em by the pussy” about women, which he dismissed at the time as locker-room talk. Several women came forward to say he had done just that—along with committing many other forms of sexual assault and unwanted physical contact. A jury found Trump liable for his defamation and sexual abuse of writer E. Jean Carroll, and added to the original damages after his subsequent additional defamation.

The bad old days

For people who weren’t around in the last decades of the last century, it may be hard to imagine how normalized this so-called locker-room talk was in everyday life, even around women. In my case, bosses who weren’t my peers—in terms of age, income, or power—would regularly ask me sexual questions, as if it were all lighthearted banter that I had asked to engage in. They would often do it in front of other people at first, then privately.

One boss was obsessed with whether and how I had lost my virginity. Another one said about my pants that he would like me to come over to his house and take my shoes off and walk all over his back while I was wearing them.

A coworker at another job, someone I barely knew, left an extraordinarily explicit letter for me on my desk, which I turned in to my female boss, who happened to be on the committee handling harassment issues. It was a law firm, and they took the matter very seriously. Yet was left to me—in my early twenties and in a support-staff role at the firm—to make the choice on whether or not the guy should be fired. Did I mention he had a wife who was at home with their infant child?

Most women I know over fifty have several of these workplace stories, and worse ones. Did I move beyond the reach of those guys, or did some workplaces really change? Perhaps a little bit of both, but some evidence indicates that there was a societal shift.

The country saw a dramatic decline, for instance, of sexual harassment of women in the federal workplace between 1987 and 2016. But there are indications harassment is on the rise again after a brief respite during the pandemic.

My sense is that now Trump is actively shifting the window of how women are seen and treated at every level of American society, rolling back the timeline a half century in terms of public discourse, even where institutions are more resistant to the administration’s efforts to undo the progress women have made in my lifetime.

Authoritarianism and women

This treatment of women isn’t happening simply because Trump is a retrograde monster. It’s also because he’s an aspiring dictator who’s seized an unprecedented amount of power for a U.S. president, while still facing rising popular resistance. He appears driven to humiliate nearly everyone as a political and personal dominance display.

Nevertheless, however organic and long-standing his mistreatment of women, it would be a mistake to see him as the solo driver of this phenomenon. This kind of denigration of women and wish to control them is root and branch part of the twentieth century authoritarian playbook.

And I’ll remind you that it’s not necessary to directly emulate fascist movements in order repeat history, although some of that does appear to be going on. Remember that if a political party’s (or its leader’s) goals are the same, behavior and actions tend to mimic the past, intentionally or unintentionally.

Thus women are stripped of agency as political actors in daily life and instead treated as baby machines in the tradwife movement. In Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany, this invented social phenomenon involved a focus on women as responsible for children and the home, freeing men for their assigned political and military roles. Though women did support (or sometimes resist) the Nazi cause in various ways, the German government’s focus on family life was made clear through extensive, prolonged propaganda.

All this is just the flip side of the coin of the demonization of trans folks and attempts to ethnically cleanse the country of immigrants that is now underway in the U.S. Spurring white people to have babies via natalist fixations often gets coverage in the press without the context of how these movements take root and are furthered in authoritarian states.

It’s worth remembering that eugenics is both the elimination of populations deemed undesirable from the gene pool and the expanded reproduction of ethnicities and races deemed superior. And most of the twentieth-century natalist arguments in fascist countries had roots in the writings of U.S. eugenicists of the era.

While there’s a difference between state-sponsored programs and those touted by cultural figures like Elon Musk, I would argue that no natalist argument should be considered by a journalist without mention of the origins of these movements and a look at the agenda of who is promoting them today.

And it’s not just twentieth-century fascist movements that the U.S. is echoing. Decades of family-planning policies from China to Russia reveal how the particularly warped desire of a nation’s leaders override the consideration of women as people, and show that these ideas have never really gone away.

Playing out today

The words “quiet, Piggy” spoken by a president to a working reporter likewise taps into a resentment about women’s real job being to stay at home and raise children. As with everything, Trump is continuing preexisting undercurrents in the Republican Party and making them worse.

As Notre Dame professor Christina Wolbrecht noted in an interview with the 19th News after Rush Limbaugh’s death: “The Republicans supported the Equal Rights Amendment since the 1940s. That all changed in the 1970s. That changes because there’s a backlash to feminism.”

So many gains from women have happened in my lifetime. When my mother got divorced in the 1970s, it was just before women could get credit cards and loans, and just after ‘no-fault divorce’ became widespread. Title IX and the expansion of sports that followed shifted a lot as well, and in my opinion played a key role in girls being understood as competent and skilled human beings by men and boys alike.

These advances arrived institutionally in the 1970s but were met with a counterforce by the evangelical movement in the U.S. in that decade and going forward.

We’re currently seeing attempts to roll back all those gains across the country. The Trump administration was planning to gut Title IX, but that plan met with massive opposition that seems to have stemmed the attack for now.

The nationwide right to abortion has already been gutted. That fight was a fifty-year project in the U.S. by the religious right to capture power after Black Americans gained electoral protections, segregation began to crumble, and racial animus lost some of its power to garner votes.

More recently, some in government have appeared to question a woman’s right to vote. Others in the manosphere are bemoaning women’s ability to divorce their husbands. While this kind of talk long predates Trump, it’s now being amplified by loud voices on big platforms.

And the president has been doing what he can to strip women of agency. Between February and July, hundreds of thousands of Black women were removed from the workforce at disproportionate rates. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth regularly denigrates women’s combat readiness and has removed or blocked women from key leadership positions in the military.

The Trump administration furthered its denigrating messaging on women by reportedly intervening in Andrew Tate’s prosecution in Romania, where Tate and his brother were under house arrest as they were investigated for sex trafficking and other crimes. And we recently learned that the White House likely tried to interfere with attempts by law enforcement in the U.S. to seize the brothers’ electronic devices when they entered the country.

There’s a feedback loop between the President of the United States and the worst voices on the internet. All these arguments about childrearing, women, and relationships aren’t really about families or children at all. They’re about controlling women. And choosing not to bear children—or being unable to—makes women less vulnerable to those who would like to have power over them.

Indulgence of this world view shows up in a variety of places in opinion pieces and whole corners of YouTube. The New York Times opinion page recently asked whether women have ruined the workplace (after public outcry, the original headline was changed to blame feminists).

Similarly, the anger over women refusing to date reactionary white men is wild to observe. The underlying idea seems to be that women have to give these unhappy men attention and power, or else they’ll do harm to get it.

While I would say it’s a good idea to give every kind of person paths to engage both politically and culturally, there’s no reason to pretend what Andrew Tate—and even those making softer arguments about accommodating grim misogyny—are doing anything but trying to extort status and power through violence or the threat of it. They’re fueling men to rage.

Trans women under threat

And make no mistake, the attack on trans folks is part of this assault on women. It’s trans women on whom the paranoia about trans-ness focuses most. It’s trans women who are portrayed as a danger to other women and children.

But the trans-vestigators who believe they can reliably parse others’ identities by relentless visual examination and public accusations are just the next step in Rush Limbaugh’s decades of “feminazi” comments on the radio, denigrating the appearance of those on the left as undesirable and not real women.

The current rigidity around gender in the Trump administration can be seen with Karoline Leavitt, in her dresses and wearing a cross, or in her middle-aged corollaries sporting the plastic-surgery-concubine look that appears to be nearly mandatory for billionaire wives and heads of agencies. These are the people who would deny any medical care for trans people while gender-confirming surgery becomes more and more de rigueur for high-power Trump allies.

Meanwhile, the treatment of the most vulnerable women worsens. NBC News just published a project on the horrific abuse of pregnant women in U.S. jails. Unauthorized surgeries, including forced hysterectomies, of immigrant women in detention have been reported by whistleblowers for years.

What can you do about it?

It’s easy to just think of all of these kinds of mistreatment as separate, individual actions by nasty human beings. But I wanted to address the larger topic today to underline that this is what authoritarian countries do. The treatment of women is a sign of the government’s larger intentions, and the Trump administration is making its intentions clear.

If you want to push back on a small everyday level, support women when they’re targeted this way. If someone, anyone, were to say anything in the universe of “Quiet, piggy” in your presence, call them on it. If women are regularly talked over in meetings at your workplace, call attention to it, or champion their good ideas directly. If women are regularly discredited behind their backs, refuse to engage in it.

If you’re a woman, don’t sit silent if you see this kind of behavior, just because you might be exempt from it—this time. And if you’re a man, ask yourself if you’re always responding to women by calling their opinions or their statements into doubt.

Support reporting at the intersection of gender and politics, like the 19th News, which I’ve quoted in this piece. Or subscribe to solo independent women journalists who are doing an incredible job breaking news about this administration, like Marisa Kabas, whose Handbasket astounds me every week with the shoe-leather reporting she does on vital issues.

Closer to home, giving to food banks, abortion funds, and diaper banks can help women keep their sanity, as well as control of their own lives. If you’re a woman, or even if you’re not, consider running for local office, prioritizing policies that will help women. See what kind of mutual aid you can contribute to on the ground that treats women as the ultimate authority in their own lives, irrespective of what anyone else might say or do.

And Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate! The holiday has a dodgy history, but we can reclaim it for a more human kind of community and fellowship.

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