Today's Bad News for Donald Trump
White House Chief O' Staff Mick Mulvaney admitted there was a quid pro quo involved in the release of military aid allocated for Ukraine. A few hours later, he was out insisting he hadn't said what he said…but he said it. Wouldn't you have liked to have heard the phone call or meeting where he was told to do that?
Today's Outrage by Donald Trump
In his never-ending quest to project his own misdeeds and failings on everyone else, Trump began slamming Nancy Pelosi. As Anna North observed…
The president's attempt to shame Pelosi likely worked among his base. But for most other Americans, it backfired. That should come as no surprise, given Trump's track record with powerful women.
As I've written before, Trump's strategy in confrontations with men is often to question their masculinity — he called Marco Rubio "Little Marco" and made fun of Jeb Bush's supposedly "low energy." It's a style he's likely developed in a long career in male-dominated spaces, from the military academy where he went to school to the heavily male real estate development business to the Hollywood sets where he bragged about being able to grab women "by the pussy."
But that strategy doesn't work on women, so Trump usually tries to invade their personal space, insult their appearance, or, as in the case of "Nervous Nancy," insinuate that they are mentally ill or unstable. Any woman who's gotten to where Pelosi is now, though, has had to put up with being called "crazy" a time or two. Except with people already primed to applaud Trump's misogyny, the strategy is doomed to fail.
I think when some non-partisan, observant author writes the history of American politics in this century, it's going to amaze many how much of it has to do with men who can't rationally deal with women in positions of power. And usually they don't call them "crazy" so much as they impugn their appearances and femininity.