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Let’s stop being so hard on Donald Trump. He has done us an enormous public service. After this down-and-dirty battle of the sexes, we will never look at gender in politics the same way.
For centuries, women were seen as unfit to hold public office. Ambition, power and business were the province of men. Unlike gossipy feminine chatter in the parlor, manly discourse was considered impersonal, unemotional, forthright, reasonable.
Every day, Trump debunks that old “science” when he shows that the gossipy, backbiting, scolding, mercurial, overly emotional, shrewish, menopausal one in this race is not the woman.
Trump is surrounded by a bitchy sewing circle of overweight men who are overwrought at the prospect of a distaff Clinton presidency.
Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie, Roger Ailes and Rudy Giuliani are the Really Desperate Housewives of Trumpworld. They are so shrill that Trump sometimes needs to remind them that he’s the Queen Bee.
Gingrich defended Trump after Alicia Machado described her humiliation after the mogul dubbed her “Miss Piggy.”
“You’re not supposed to gain 60 pounds during the year that you’re Miss Universe,” the pudgy Gingrich said in a hissy fit last week.
Giuliani declared Hillary Clinton was “too stupid to be president” if she did not immediately know that Monica Lewinsky was telling the truth. And he was in true Mean Girl form when he catcalled the press to “go online and put down ‘Hillary Clinton illness’” if you wanted to see alarming videos.
Pretty boy Sean Hannity is as obsessive about Trump as a teenage girl with a Tiger Beat pop icon. On Fox News the other night, the anchor and Gingrich did their best to scratch Clinton’s eyes out on Benghazi, Bosnia and Ferguson.
Often this year, Christie has replaced Melania Trump as the mute helpmate at Donald’s side. A witness at the infamous bridge trial painted Christie as a vengeful and manipulative she-devil, testifying that when the New Jersey governor was told of the 2013 lane-closing scheme, he cackled.
Ailes was supposed to help prep Trump for the first debate, but he was too busy pouting on his fainting couch about losing his job.
Although women are often portrayed as the vainer sex, Trump has swept away that cliche. He has forced the Republican Party to contort its historical wary posture toward Russia, simply because he got a compliment from the buff, bare-chested Vladimir Putin.
Women are known as having more tender feelings, but no one on the planet is more thin-skinned than Trump. His team is tiptoeing around him, trying to figure out how to persuade him that he lost the debate and how to make him work harder for the next one.
Trump’s team wants to prepare him for the second debate with an actual rehearsal — as opposed to coming up with zingers over cheeseburgers and Cokes. They want to toss him questions that will get under his skin, so that next time he doesn’t let his emotions get the better of him and go all PMS.
After working with psychologists to figure out how to goad Trump into an outburst in the first debate, the commanding Clinton saved the Machado provocation until the end.
Trump unraveled and kept unraveling all week. It culminated with a bout of hysteria and a series of middle-of-the-night tweets, including a supremely catty one at 5:30 a.m. urging people to check out Machado’s sex tape — offering no evidence that one exists — and her past.
We should have known then that Trump was really a 13-year-old girl.•
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Dowd is a New York Times columnist. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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