Nasty Women by Samhita Mukhopadhyay

Author:Samhita Mukhopadhyay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

THE PATHOLOGY OF DONALD TRUMP

Sady Doyle

THERE HAS PROBABLY never been a more frightening president than Donald Trump. Above and beyond his terrible politics, there’s a visceral sense of something off about the guy, some uncanny-valley quality to how he moves. You fear Trump with your gut, on instinct, before you can put the threat into words.

It hit me in the second presidential debate, when Trump, evidently peeved by the fact that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, was allowed any speaking time whatsoever, left his corner of the stage and began stomping toward Clinton while her back was turned, face visibly contorted with anger. Oh my God, I thought, bracing myself against my chair. He’s going to do it. He’s actually going to hit her.

He didn’t. But the fact that I thought he would—that I had fully expected a U.S. presidential debate to devolve into a fistfight, for even one split second—crystallized my reaction to Trump, and shed some light on the air of threat that surrounds him. It lies in the sense that anything is possible; there are no norms tempering his cruelty. There is nothing to stop him from going too far.

No presidential candidate would ever think of posting a picture of his opponent’s wife on Twitter and encouraging his supporters to mock her looks—but Trump did just that to Heidi Cruz. No decent human would ever boast about sexually assaulting women—but Trump was caught on tape giggling about it with Billy Bush. And no one who genuinely repented committing or joking about sexual assault would then dismiss women who’d come forward to accuse him of sexual assault by claiming they were too ugly for him—but Trump did exactly that to a People reporter who accused him of backing her against the wall and kissing her by force during an assignment. (“She said I made inappropriate advances to her … You take a look, take a look at her, look at her words. I don’t think so.”)1 And who would self-derail in the middle of a serious political campaign to re-litigate decades-old celebrity feuds with Rosie O’Donnell or Alicia Machado? Who would repeat bizarre conspiracy theories about his opponents—Ted Cruz’s father killed JFK, Barack Obama “is the founder of ISIS”2—on a national stage, in full seriousness? Who is that dishonest, that thin-skinned, that ruthlessly, personally cruel; who could be so clearly and entirely driven by a desire to humiliate and dominate anyone who so much as questioned him? Leaving politics out of the equation as far as possible, focusing solely on how this one man treats the other human beings in his life: What kind of guy does this shit?

As it turned out, many women knew exactly what kind of guy would do this shit. They’d met that guy, at least once, sometimes many times over; they’d seen what he was capable of, and how he got away with it. That giddy, sickening, snapped-elevator-cable feeling that Trump gave off—the sense that there were no rules anymore, that anything could happen

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