Donald Trump’s Double Standard on Weight
From the “400-pound” hacker to Alicia Machado, the candidate’s denigration of fat people has a long tradition—but may be a liability.
Spencer Kornhaber: I was struck by how much the topic of weight was part of the debate: There was the 400-pound hacker, Rosie O’Donnell, and Alicia Machado. Why do you think this keeps coming up this election?
Amy Farrell: Trump is definitely a bully, and we know that fat-shaming is the most typical reason a child will be bullied. So he’s picking up on a typical playground tactic. And it’s really connected to our ideas about sex and gender, race, and sexuality. His specialty is to insult, and fat shaming is a rhetorical move that’s far reaching, prevalent, and an easily understood way to degrade people.
.. But there’s much more of an allowance for a man to be fat than there is for a woman.
.. I think that there’s some level of the image of the “fat cat” that Trump is relying on. The fat cat wasn’t necessarily likable, but he was seen as powerful and able. So he gets a bye in that way.
.. [The implication is] that women need to live up to a certain kind of standard, and if one doesn’t they are deserving of insults, threats of violence, of sexual assault, whether symbolic or real. That has been a tactic used for the last 150 years. Cartoons against the suffragists showed them as turning into animals; white suffragists turning into black people, using the presumption that blackness was bad; and them turning into fat people. So he’s just drawing on a long tradition of mocking women if they don’t satisfy a particular kind of standard that is pleasing to him as a powerful white man.
.. Right, and also what was her great crime? It was disagreeing with him. And she’s an outspoken woman who also makes people laugh, which makes her particularly hated. The mockery of him he can’t stand, and so the only response back is to say she’s really like an animal, out of control, ugly, etc.
.. I was reading an interview with anApprentice producer who said that Trump always wanted to keep a fat man on the cast so people could laugh at him.
.. The fat man can be the everyman who everyone can identify with and isn’t threatening. Often he’s a humorous character: easy to mock but maybe quite likable, too.
But that also slides into a man who’s perceived as not being sufficiently masculine. Not being sufficiently strong. Not sufficiently male, really. So I think when he mocks other men for being fat, it’s like the alpha male kicking the other men who aren’t as great of a man as he is.