I suppose I oughta move on from the evil lummox’s latest misogynist excretion – given that “Quiet, Piggy!” has arguably been trumped by his demand for the execution of six dissident Democrats and given his betrayal of Ukraine at the behest of his Russian master.
But I feel compelled to hit the brakes and ponder the reasons why we’re stuck with such a pig.
In truth, it’s no mystery. He’s the end product of a misogynist culture that fetishizes male dominance, that promotes or excuses hostility toward women, that trumpets aggression as intrinsic to masculinity. In turn he gives permission to all the bros who see women as objects to conquer, granting license to all the pigs who flooded social media after the 2024 election with the slogan, “Your body, my choice.”
The vile incident on Air Force One, where Trump stonewalled a Bloomberg reporter’s question and called her “Piggy,” was the umpteenth time in decades he has demeaned women, dumping on their worth and judging them on the basis of their…um…aesthetics. But in two elections he has been generously rewarded, which in turn has given him license to further desecrate the once-hallowed presidency.
Long before he ran for office, he got so angry about a Philadelphia Inquirer story he phoned the female reporter and called her the C-word. He got so angry about a New York Times column he sent notes to the female columnist calling her a “dog” with “the face of a pig.”
During the 90s, in numerous gigs on Howard Stern’s show, he trashed Rosie O’Donnell, ridiculed ex-wife Marla Maples, sneered at Angelina Jolie’s face, and set up a rating system, appointed himself judge and jury (“anyone who’s flat-chested is very hard to be a 10”).
Even in the early stage of his 2016 Republican bid, when any newbie would normally proceed with caution, he was openly piggish – attacking rival candidate Carly Fiorina, mocking former Miss Universe pageant winner Alicia Machado, and since Megyn Kelly’s looks apparently passed muster, he targeted her womanly functions. And if you throw in the Access Hollywood recording, plus the several dozen women who surfaced to allege sexual misconduct, it was clear that the pig had serious issues with America’s majority gender, rendering him unfit for office.
But did that doom him in 2016? Nope. Clearly he had an intuitive understanding of pig culture. Male voters favored him by a wide percentage margin (52-41) and a plurality of white women voted for him, too (47-45). A post-election study found that women generally view sexism as the cultural norm, so therefore Trump was saying nothing they hadn’t heard or experienced before. As one female Trump voter told the New York Times, “What he said about women was disrespectful. But I don’t get offended like some people do. You get through the bad and you focus on the good.”
Thus emboldened – indeed, having been validated – Trump publicly plumbed his depths during his first term, assailing MSNBC co-host Mika Brzezinski for “bleeding badly from a face-lift” and when Stormy Daniels ratcheted up his legal woes, he denounced her as “Horseface.” And a Trump aide, duly inspired in 2018, skewered White House reporter April Ryan as “Miss Piggy.” But, again, male voters and white women didn’t care; even though Trump lost his ‘20 re-election, he still won those cohorts.
Not even a criminal conviction in 2023 (on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up his alleged one-nighter with Stormy), and not even a pair of civil court convictions in 2023 and 2024 (awarding $88 million in damages to sexual assault victim E. Jean Carroll) moved the needle at the 2024 ballot box. He won men by 10 points and white women by four; apparently, since everyone already knows he’s a serial misogynist (and a rapist “in the common modern parlance,” said one of the judges), he should somehow get a pass. A convicted criminal running for president – certainly that was new news – but his trashy behavior was merely “old” news.
So when his next “Quiet, Piggy”-style episode comes and goes, bear in mind this pig didn’t come out of nowhere. He was nurtured in the national pig pen – a place where pervs like Jeffrey Epstein and his pals run amuck; a place where 60 percent of male managers say they’re uncomfortable on the job around women; a place where The New York Times’ in-house right-wing columnist hosts a podcast initially titled “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” And it’s a country where sexually frustrated dudes – known as incels, some of them violent – meet up online to pine for a pig utopia where ruling white men subjugate women.
Step back and behold the barnyard that brought forth Donald Trump. Orwell said it best, in the last line of Animal Farm: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Given the depths of our national degradation, is there still a wee chance that we can dig ourselves free?
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Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com
We got the orange pig because our two parties gave us two lousy choices. Trump ran against a terrible choice in Harris. If he has run unopposed, he would have lost. A great many people understood that we could not allow the open borders to continue. Harris had said that she would do nothing different from Biden. Now we see the true character or lack of character of both parties. They simply want to fight each other. They will not stand up when wrongs are being perpetrated. They care only about their own power and beating the other party. Sad example for our children.