Since the early days of his political career, Donald Trump has been critical of the media, but in recent days his hostility has reached a new peak – particularly when it comes to questions about his association with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump invoked the phrase “piggy” – a term he has used before – to describe a female reporter on Friday, and has aggressively responded to at least one other female reporter over the past week, including threatening to revoke ABC’s license.
The outbursts come at a tense time for Trump, after the Republican party issued arguably its largest rebuke to the president since he cemented his position as the GOP leader. With as many as 100 House Republicans had been expected to defy Trump in voting to release the Epstein file, Trump was forced into a humiliating U-turn on the subject last weekend.
Trump has frequently had contentious relationships with media organizations. However, questions about Epstein, with whom Trump was close friends for more than a decade, seem to trigger the president more than any other issue he has faced.
“Quiet. Quiet, piggy,” Trump, 79, told a reporter from Bloomberg on Friday, after she began to ask him why he was behaving so erratically “if there’s nothing incriminating in the files”.
In a statement to the Guardian, a White House official said: “This reporter behaved in an inappropriate and unprofessional way towards her colleagues on the plane. If you’re going to give it, you have to be able to take.”
The Guardian asked if the White House was suggesting that the reporter had used the term “piggy” to refer to her colleagues on the plane. The White House did not respond.
In any case, it is clear that Trump finds questions about his actions regarding Epstein particularly upsetting. And while Trump, a self-styled tough guy, has curiously been able to restrain himself when responding to questions from men, it is when faced with questions from women that he has exploded.
In the Oval Office on Monday, after Trump had paraded around a foreign leader who the US intelligence committee believes approved the killing of an American journalist, the president was asked why he decided to “wait for Congress to release the Epstein files” rather than releasing them himself.
Trump reacted furiously, chastising the reporter both for the Epstein question and asking Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, about Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist who was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
“It’s not the question that I mind. It’s your attitude. I think you are a terrible reporter – it’s the way you ask these questions. You start off with a man [Prince Mohammed] who’s highly respected asking him a horrible insubordinate and just a terrible question – and you could even ask that same exact question nicely.
“You’re all psyched, somebody psychs you over at ABC, they’re gonna psych – you’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter. As far as the Epstein files is, I have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein,” Trump said.
The president then spoke for a while about how he believed the media and Democrats had overblown the Epstein saga – despite Republicans and the right wing having spent years demanding the documents be released – before adding: “People are wise to your hoax and ABC is – uh – your company, your crappy company, is one of the perpetrators. And I’ll tell you something, I’ll tell you something, I think the license should be taken away from ABC. Because your news is so fake, and it’s so wrong, and we have a great commissioner, chairman who should look at that.”
Trump has frequently reserved his harshest criticism for women, calling female journalists “nasty” and infamously referencing menstruation to dismiss questions from Megyn Kelly. It’s clear that questions about Epstein, however, have the president particularly uncomfortable – and unfortunately for Trump, they aren’t likely to go away.
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