Last night Donald Trump, America’s favorite orange-faced semi-Fascist, risked alienating his many white supremacist fanboys by turning to Yiddish in an attempt to insult Hillary Clinton.
Referring to Clinton’s previous run for the presidency, Trump told a crowd in Michigan that
she was favored to win — and she got schlonged, she lost, I mean she lost.
In the same, er, speech, Trump also brought up Hilary’s now-famous bathroom break during the last Democratic debate — she was late returning to the podium, apparently because the women’s bathroom was so far away — by affecting great disgust at the very notion of women having a tinkle in the toilet.
I know where she went, it’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it. No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting, let’s not talk, we want to be very, very straight up.
This is not the first time that Trump has expressed his revulsion at a woman’s biological functions. Back in August, you may recall, Trump attacked Fox News host Megyn Kelly after she asked him about some of the misogynistic things he’s said in the past about women.
“You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes,” Trump declared in a CNN interview afterwards. “Blood coming out of her wherever.”
By “her wherever,” Trump was apparently referring to Kelly’s you-know-what.
As last night’s “schlong” comment reminded us, Trump also likes to talk about penises, though he somehow always manages to do so in a way that is much more demeaning to women than it is to men,
A case in point is the lovely remark he made to attorney Gloria Allred, who had criticized him for staying mum after Miss Universe Canada officials tossed (and later reinstated) a trans woman from the contest. (At the time, Trump owned a huge stake in the Miss Universe contest.) Allred observed that no one had demanded to know what was in his pants.
Trump told her anyway:
I think Gloria would be very, very impressed with [my penis]. I really do. I think she’d have a whole brand new image of Donald Trump… There’ll be no apology whatsoever.
Let’s take a brief stroll down memory lane, shall we, and look at some other appalling things The Donald has said about women.
Let’s start this list by returning to Hillary Clinton, because of course Trump’s “schlong” comment isn’t the only appalling thing he’s ever said about her. Here’s one infamous Tweet he posted and later deleted, either because he thought better of it or because his lawyers did.
As it turns out, Trump has many charming thoughts about powerful women. Here he is offering his highly sophisticated take on Arianna Huffington:
.@ariannahuff is unattractive both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man- he made a good decision.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2012
How much money is the extremely unattractive (both inside and out) Arianna Huffington paying her poor ex-hubby for the use of his name?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 7, 2015
Trump routinely responds to criticism from women journalists with schoolyard insults — sometimes delivered right to their door. New York Times columnist Gail Collins says he once responded to a less than flattering column she made about him by sending her
a copy of the column with my picture circled and “The Face of a Dog!” written over it.
He followed this up, years later, with this lovely Tweet:
Frumpy and very dumb Gail Collins, an editorial writer at The New York Times, is so lucky to even have a job. Check her out – incompetent!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2014
But he doesn’t only have it in for female journalists and politicians; he reacts to criticism from pretty much any famous woman by attacking their looks, among other things.
While @BetteMidler is an extremely unattractive woman, I refuse to say that because I always insist on being politically correct.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 28, 2012
.@BetteMidler talks about my hair but I'm not allowed to talk about her ugly face or body — so I won't. Is this a double standard?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 28, 2012
And then of course there is Rosie O’Donnell, one of Trump’s favorite targets over the years.
Sorry, @Rosie is a mentally sick woman, a bully, a dummy and, above all, a loser. Other than that she is just wonderful!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 9, 2014
Trump has been lobbing crude insults like this at O’Donnell for years. In an Entertainment Tonight interview from nearly a decade ago, he declared that
Rosie O’Donnell is disgusting, both inside and out. If you take a look at her, she’s a slob. How does she even get on television? If I were running The View, I’d fire Rosie. I’d look her right in that fat, ugly face of hers and say, ‘Rosie, you’re fired.'”
“We’re all a little chubby but Rosie’s just worse than most of us. But it’s not the chubbiness — Rosie is a very unattractive person, both inside and out. …
Rosie’s a person who’s very lucky to have her girlfriend. And she better be careful or I’ll send one of my friends over to pick up her girlfriend, why would she stay with Rosie if she had another choice?
Trump’s a little obsessed with that “ugly both inside and out” line, huh? Presumably he uses it so that he can’t be accused of attacking only a woman’s looks.
Of course, not everything Trump has said about women has been insulting. Sometimes it’s just creepy as hell.
During one appearance on The View, he had this highly icky thing to say about his daughter Ivanka.
She does have a very nice figure. I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.
Did I mention that she’s HIS DAUGHTER?
And then there were these perhaps inadvertantly revealing remarks he made about Paris Hilton on the Howard Stern Show back in 2003.
I’ve known Paris Hilton from the time she’s 12. Her parents are friends of mine, and, you know, the first time I saw her, she walked into the room and I said, ‘Who the hell is that?’ … Well, at 12, I wasn’t interested. I’ve never been into that. They’re sort of always stuck around that 25 category.
Dude, if the first thought you have every time a female human being walks into the room is “is she old enough to have sex with,” you need help.
Let’s make sure this guy doesn’t become our president, huh?
‘Because you know what makes someone stand a chance and be electable? People voting for them.’
The first US election I was old enough to pay attention to was (as it turns out) the 1980 election (I hadn’t realised until just now that it was that particularly pivotal election) in which John Anderson was an independent candidate. I remember being baffled at continually reading polls in which Anderson would have received some high percent of the vote if people voted for who they thought would be the best president, but single digits if people voted for who they thought they had to vote for. How could that even make sense–wasn’t the whole point to vote for the person we thought would be the best president?
EJ,
You left out the fact that Bill Clinton gave Trump a phone call a couple days before Trump announced his campaign. Bill denies all claims that they discussed the election, while Trump’s people say Bill told Trump “he should take a more prominent role in the Republican party.”
@Orion:
Ha! I didn’t know that bit. That’s fantastic. I wonder which one of them is lying?
Bernie Sanders defends a woman’s right to pee:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-donald-trump-bathroom_567a04e6e4b0b958f658b36d
Primary debates are what they are, but it’s really been stunning to see the contrast between the GOP debates and the Democratic ones. I didn’t pay much attention to the debates 8 years ago, but now that I can see he two parties side by side the difference is more striking than I could ever imagine.
@Lady Mondegreen
I’m talking about the GOP establishment, though, not other politicians. They’re the ones whose brand is at stake. There’s a big difference between being despised by his colleagues (and most of the human race) and being a Republican Party insider. Others in Congress might revile Cruz, but the RNC wants a candidate who respects and abides by their own (unwritten) rules of campaigning and fundraising. At the very least, Cruz has some allegiance to conservatism, the Republican Party, and the Senate. Trump has no such loyalty to the party or its image. Only his ego matters. Given a choice between Trump and Cruz, the RNC would hold their noses and back Cruz as their standard-bearer.
Which is not to say Cruz is their top choice, but he may well be the last man standing. Rubio, so far, has been running a lazy campaign, avoiding ground operations in the early states (Iowa and New Hampshire) and focusing more on national media and digital outreach. Likely he’s trying to avoid the trap of having to campaign hard right to win the first few primaries and then veer back to center, but that strategy may come back to haunt him if he drops too far out of sight.
If your point is that Sanders is electable if people will just vote for him, that’s … something of a tautology, and not what the word “electable” means. If you define “electable” in that fashion, then Trump is equally electable, and so am I, even though I am completely unknown and aren’t running (but I could certainly win, by that standard, as a write-in candidate, if people would just vote for me!).
Does Sanders have broad enough appeal to woo nonpartisan voters to his side? Probably not. That’s what makes him not electable. He is very popular in the lefty base, which is great! But the lefty base can’t elect a President on their own with no help from any other political demographic.
Now, members of the lefty base know this, and they often vote begrudgingly for the Democratic candidate even though they don’t like that candidate. Candidates like Bill Clinton took advantage of that and delivered almost nothing that the lefty base really wanted in exchange. Hillary Clinton works similarly in that regard, and Sanders is super-valuable in reminder her that doing this runs a real risk of her losing that very important base vote. But he won’t win, and can’t win, because non-partisans won’t vote for him.
“Does Sanders have broad enough appeal to woo nonpartisan voters to his side? Probably not. That’s what makes him not electable”
What I have seen so far is that he do have enough broad appeal to win against about any republican candidate, but medias hate him so they hide that.
Of course, as a non-american, it’s hard to be sure muy informations are unbiased either.
I’ve thought this for a while myself. Honestly, as much noise as the hardcore Republican base makes – which is a LOT, bloody hell – unless they’re willing to drop their base like the flaming toxic waste barrel it is and head back towards the centre, their only options now are to ramp up the gerrymandering and
massively unconstitutional poll taxes“Voter IDs” even further or be relegated to the same pages of history as the Confederates and Nazis.@M:
Many of the more reasonable Republicans (inasmuch as there is such a thing nowadays) have said the same thing, and have come up despairingly against the fact that they can’t drop their base because they are their base more and more every year, as one by one everyone still connected to reality leaves and all that remains is the shrivelled twin husks of the neoconfederates and the fundamentalists.
Unless something bizarre happens – the GOP getting taken over by Hispanics, say, and becoming a Spanish-speaking party – I can’t see a dawn for them. Parties rise and parties fall, and this one has fallen.
@ EJ et al
The dilemma of whether to pander to your core base and narrow your appeal or attempt to increase your appeal but risk alienating your natural supporters is as old as politics. We’re having a (much nicer) version of that over here with Jeremy Corbyn of course.
If the GOP goes hard right and gets a drubbing in the polls then it may be that they’ll look for someone with wider appeal next time. It’s a cycle we’ve seen many times before.
The worst case scenario is that they campaign on a hard right ticket and do well. As someone once said “A week is a long time in politics” and “Events dear boy, events”. I can imagine a few scenarios that Trump could benefit from; especially if hyped in the right way.
POM,
The number of people who are actually swing voters is quite small though. People like to say they’re independent, but ultimately will vote for the same party every time. Claiming to be an independent just makes people feel special. Citations will have to wait until I can home because I don’t have time to research now, but there have been studies.
What’s more important for Democrats is turnout. So many people stay home on election day because they don’t feel that either party represents them (and they’re right) and don’t see a difference between the two parties. This is especially true among demographics that vote Democratic when they do get out. Young people, poor people, and people of color.
Democrats have made a huge mistake – insert Gob Bluth gif here – chasing after the center these past few decades. What they need to do is get populist and go after infrequent and first time voters. As the demographics of the country shift and the GOP gets more blatantly racist and anti-choice, there’s a huge opportunity here. Bernie potentially has a huge appeal as a populist and independent. But he’ll only have a shot if the party base stops being so scared of candidates that aren’t hand picked for the mostly mythical swing voter. I don’t think primary voters are ready yet, but they should be.
He did NOT talk about Bette like that. Dude, it’s not going to end well. I don’t think he realises how many people in their 30s grew up with Beaches. That sh&t is SACRED, YO.
Demographics are against the GOP. Racism, anti-immigration, anti-women, and anti-gay policies don’t play well in an increasingly diverse nation. They have nothing to offer millennials. Their base is mostly older, white, Southern, and Bible Belt voters, aka Fox News watchers. Until recently they’ve succeeded by convincing the working class that a) Scary People are out to get them and b) voting for tax loopholes for rich white dudes is also in their best interests, but people are finally starting to wise up after a few decades with barely any gain in wealth for the 99%, and obscene windfalls for the 1%. Trickle-down economics was a terrible scam.
Voters may not be enamored of Republican presidents lately, but for some reason they still like to pack the House and Senate with Republican majorities (or Democratic, when the president is Republican). Maybe it’s a subconscious balance of power thing. Usually the party that’s in the Oval Office loses ground in the midterm elections, as punishment for not fixing all the problems of the world in two years despite a hostile Congress.
It’s turnout. Democratic voters simply do not turn out to vote during mid term elections. It’s a huge problem for the party that they don’t seem to be addressing that much because again, they’re directing all their energies towards chasing the center. I also think they need to put more resources into local elections in Republican leaning districts. The GOP has done this. They’ve built a dedicated base from the ground up. Democrats are focusing too much on the presidency alone.
It is so damn frustrating for me!
On a semi tangential note, my office is across the street pretty much from the Mall of America. There’s a BLM protest planned there today and the overflow parking lot is piling up with cop cars. It’s a little concerning. I hope the cops don’t trigger happy today 🙁
What WWTH said. I hope the protest goes well.
Turnout is always higher amongst the fanatics than amongst the moderates. If the GOP is shrinking down to its core of (as Buttercup Q. Skullpants says) hateful ageing Southern white Fox watchers, then they’re going to be able to count on a higher percentage turnout, albeit of a lower total. It’s the fringe benefit of being the extremist, I suppose.
Pacifists do not wish death upon our enemies; therefore I wish a long and happy life on those extremists. I hope they live to see their world taken away from them, and everything they ever clung to turn to ashes in their mouth as we build a better world.
“Unless something bizarre happens – the GOP getting taken over by Hispanics, say, and becoming a Spanish-speaking party – I can’t see a dawn for them. Parties rise and parties fall, and this one has fallen.”
That’s a good idea, actually. If all Hispanic and Muslim citizens of the US were to show up at the Republican caucuses, they might actually be able to pull it off.
Amen, EJ.
For the past twenty years or so, the GOP’s GOTV strategy has been to get an inflammatory issue or two on local ballots (embryo rights, gay marriage, etc.) as a loss leader. It
enragesenergizes their base and gets them out to the polls, where they then also vote for Republican candidates. Voila…Republican majority. Outrage doesn’t motivate Democrats as much. Speaking personally, most of the time I find myself voting against bad ideas and candidates, and it’s getting really old. For a change, I’d like to vote for a good idea (or candidate).I canvassed door-to-door for Obama in 2008, and was struck by the apathy among Democratic voters around here. Nobody seemed all that passionate about the election (except for the prospect of turfing Bush out). Voters are often suspicious of anyone “from away”, especially DC politicians who don’t understand us and might try to interfere. One year, an out of state PAC ran a sneering ad on local TV accusing Kerry of being a “Franco-American”, and it bombed. Apparently it hadn’t occurred to the ad writers that we have a sizeable French Canadian population who don’t take kindly to strangers coming in and maligning their ethnic group.
These quotes made my head spin
@WWTH
Of course you’re right, that people tend to vote for the same party even if they identify as independent, but it’s a mistake to think that those people are actually loyal to the party that usually gets their vote and will never switch. A significant proportion of “independents” are actually libertarians, or Green Party, or socialists, or communists, or Tea Party, or any number of other non-Democratic, non-Republican identities.
Libertarians, for instance, tend to vote consistently Republican, because Republicans are more closely aligned with their ideas, but they will switch to Democratic if they ever feel that the local Democrat is better embodying their views.
What’s at work today is that the Republicans have been far, far better at manipulating the Overton window than Democrats over the past 40 – 50 years, and they are reaping the rewards thereof. Window-movers are, almost by definition, not electable. They are outside the window of acceptable discourse, and as a consequence they don’t win elections. A politician can win first, and then start moving the window, and we see this happen frequently, but the reverse doesn’t generally work. To move the window, one has to be outside of it, and being outside the window means that one is outside the realm of acceptable discourse.
It’s arguable (and I believe this to be true) that the Democratic National Committee consistently aims directly at the center of the window, which makes sense in terms of winning the election at hand. However, because the Republican party has been more willing to take risks with individual politicians, they have been able to move the window quite a distance without any significant counter-pull. So we find the Democrats, aiming at the center of the window every election, aiming farther and farther to the right as the window moves rightward. We’re now at a point where the center of the window is actively alienating to the leftist base of the Democratic party, because it’s so far to the right.
Sanders is one of the first major players to be willing to risk being a window-mover. But to move the window, he has to be outside of it, and being outside of it makes him really, really hard to elect. That’s just how this works.
Does anyone on here understand satire? Or the importance of context?
After sanders allowed people to take his podium and take over his rally i lost all respect for him as a leader. Those people where little girls what would he do if it was north Korea?
I’ve appeared to lost some context when reading the second part.
A Trump supporter with a Hitler reference in his username? I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
@SFHC
Oh, yeah, that’s right. The 88 = HH = Heil Hitler schtick.