The vulgarian strikes anew
Donald Trump plumbs new depths in tastelessness
In 1988, the cofounders of the now-defunct Spy magazine came up with a memorable description for Donald J. Trump. He long hated the moniker they had for him: “short-fingered vulgarian.”
But the label stuck. Veterans of the 2016 campaign will recall how the epithet figured into that race. Marco Rubio even criticized Trump’s small hands, saying: “And you know what they say about guys with small hands.”
Crude? No doubt. But Rubio was just descending to Trump’s level – it was his response to Trump’s “little Rubio” crack. And it is all part of a coarse style of politics that Trump has pioneered and perfected, and that he is repeating.
After a Saturday rally in the Pennsylvania hometown of golf great Arnold Palmer, for instance, Trump once again dominated the headlines and the airwaves by making a crude comment about the deceased champion’s genitals.
“Arnold Palmer was all man, and I say that in all due respect to women,” Trump said at the Latrobe gathering. “This is a guy that was all man…. When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable,’” Trump said with a laugh. “I had to say. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold as a man.”
You gotta hand it to Trump for that seemingly idle spur-of-the-moment crack. Not only did it garner attention – at which Trump is a master – but it confirmed the views of many of Trump’s devotees about their guy. To them, he is a) refreshingly as blunt and coarse as they are, b) virile enough to salute another’s machismo, and c) the kind of man’s man they want in the White House.
Was this an indirect dig at the idea of a woman as president? A sexist statement that suggests Vice President Kamala Harris could not, as chief executive, command the levers of power as well as the macho Trump could? Well, when a narcissist talks, he generally talks about himself one way or another, and with Trump, a passionate golfer, it’s not a stretch to believe that he wanted to bask in the reflected glory of Palmer, to have voters think of him in the same boorish way.
Ironically, Palmer, who died in September 2016, found Trump appalling. Palmer’s daughter, Peg Palmer, in 2018 recalled a moment when her father saw Trump on television during the 2016 presidential campaign, as The Palm Beach Post reported.
"My dad and I were at home in Latrobe. He died in September, so this was before the election,” she said in a conversation with author Thomas Hauser. “The television was on. Trump was talking. And my dad made a sound of disgust — like 'uck' or 'ugg' — like he couldn't believe the arrogance and crudeness of this man who was the nominee of the political party that he believed in. Then he said, 'He's not as smart as we thought he was' and walked out of the room. What would my dad think of Donald Trump today? I think he'd cringe."
Palmer, she said, “had no patience for people who are dishonest and cheat. My dad was disciplined. He wanted to be a good role model. He was appalled by Trump’s lack of civility and what he began to see as Trump’s lack of character.”
Trump’s focus on manhood is hardly new, though. He has long been preoccupied with genital matters.
As Jezebel reported, when Trump’s former aide Stephanie Grisham wrote in her 2021 book, “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” that porn star Stormy Daniels said in an interview that Trump’s penis looked like a “toadstool,” the former president called Grisham “to assure her that his penis was, in fact, not shaped like a toadstool or small.”
Indeed, in 2016, he defended his endowment against Rubio’s comments during a primary presidential debate. “Look at those hands, are they small hands?” Trump said at the time, raising them for the audience to evaluate. “And, he referred to my hands – ‘if they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.”
Of course, it’s an open question whether Trump’s continuing coarseness will deepen his problems with women voters. No doubt, many of his followers – male and female – will warm to his crudeness or dismiss it as Trump being Trump. But, for more thoughtful women, his vulgarity may confirm anew their worst senses about the man.
Many may recall that the thrice-married often philandering felon is on the hook for more than $90 million after juries found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, for instance. Indeed, Trump’s vileness may remind some that at least 26 women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, including assault, since the 1970s. His late ex-wife, Ivana, even accused him in a divorce deposition of raping her in a 1989 fit of rage (though she later amended her comment to suggest she felt “violated,” but not criminally raped).
Trump’s problems with women go beyond a sense of decency and his having the “morals of an alley cat,” as President Joe Biden memorably suggested in their debate.
An October New York Times/Siena College national poll found Harris ahead with 56 percent of the likely vote among women now, with Trump getting just 40 percent. That is similar to the breakdown of the final vote in 2020, when Biden garnered 57 percent of the female vote to Trump’s 42 percent, according to exit polls, though Trump appears to have captured a slender majority of the white-woman vote that year.
Indeed, his overall gender gap has driven Trump recently to reach out to women. He appeared in an all-woman town hall in Georgia aired on Fox last week, where he declared himself to be the "father of IVF," praised Alabama Sen. Katie Britt as a "fantastically attractive person," and parried a sharp question about his abortion stance: “Why is the government involved in women’s basic rights?”
As the BBC reported, Trump replied by walking the tightrope he has maintained for much of the campaign, taking credit for ending nationwide abortion rights, while also saying abortion policy should be left to the states. Democrats have hammered away at the idea that a patchwork of policies could emerge from such an approach, forcing women to travel for abortions.
At times, Trump has sounded at best as condescending to women. Consider his remarks at a September gathering in Pennsylvania: “You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger. ... You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today,” Trump said. “You will be protected, and I will be your protector.”
He added that “Women will be healthy, happy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”
For some women quizzed by the Associated Press about his comments, Trump hit just the wrong notes in that session.
“This notion that women need to be protected, that women are somehow weak or vulnerable — this sort of protectionist, patronizing tone ... I think for a lot of women will just add to that sense of he doesn’t understand their lives, that he doesn’t understand where they are on a whole host of issues,” said Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.
And Jennifer Lawless, chair of the politics department at the University of Virginia, added: “This kind of language is just more evidence that Donald Trump is out of touch with American women… Not only is the sentiment paternalistic, but the fact that he uttered these words while simultaneously berating women for caring about reproductive rights is stunning.”
To be sure, Trump’s latest bawdiness may just be lost over time, replaced in coming days by new and fresh rambling vulgarity. At the same rally where he saluted Palmer, he called Harris a “shit vice president,” as his crowd roared its approval. If he goes still further down the low road he’s been on, who knows what sort of denigration he might come up with?
The bigger question is: when will Americans wake up to just how perverse – in almost all ways – this candidate is? When will they be as revolted as Palmer was?
Forty years ago, this kind of vulgarity would have been the end of a candidate. But since then… we’ve had Monica Lewinsky, Anita Hill, and dozens of women who have tried to call out the base behavior of some men in power, including the Orange Menace. And we’ve seen how many of those women have been heard and believed.