Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump once told an interviewer that he advises his friends to “be rougher” with their wives, and that he sometimes goes “through the roof” when he comes home and dinner isn’t ready.
“Psychologists will tell you that some women want to be treated with respect,” Trump told Nancy Collins in a previously unreleased 1994 transcript from ABC’s Primetime Live. “I tell friends who treat their wives magnificently, get treated like crap in return, ‘Be rougher and you’ll see a different relationship.'”
The Problem with Trump Isn’t His Debating Skills
what was really outside any norm of decency was what he thought even after you had dutifully distilled away the incoherence and the manic improvisations. Talking, again, about President Obama’s birth certificate, he displayed not only the usual pathological inability to admit to an error—any error, ever—but an underlying racism so pervasive that it can’t help express itself even when trying to pass as something else.
.. Yet Trump continued last night his self-congratulations for compelling the President to do this, along with the grotesquely racist notion that it was “good for him” (i.e., for the President). It slowly dawned on the listener that this was all of a piece with the rest of Trump’s racial attitudes: he believes that, as a rich white man, he had a right to stop and frisk the President of the United States and demand that the uppity black man show him his papers. Stop-and-frisk isn’t just a form of policing for Trump; it’s a whole way of life.
.. It was of a line with his equally bizarre notion that owning a country club that doesn’t actively discriminate against black people is not a minimal requirement of law but a positive achievement of the owner.
.. His cruelty to Alicia Machado was unleavened by any apparent respect for her as a human being in any role other than as an envelope of flesh—an attitude he only doubled down on the following morning by complaining that she presented what he saw as an obvious problem as a reigning Miss Universe: she had gained “a massive amount of weight” (by Trump standards, that is). Again, this wasn’t a problem of how he chose to present his beliefs; the problem is with the beliefs. This wasn’t a question of preparation. It was that the things he actually believes are themselves repellent even when coherently presented. This was not a bad performance. This is a bad man.
To find Hillary Clinton likable, we must learn to view women as complex beings
Whether you realize it or not, you’ve spent your entire life being trained toempathize with white men. From Odysseus to Walter White, Hamlet to Bruce Wayne, James Bond to the vast majority of biopic protagonists, our art consistently makes the argument that imperfect, even outright villainous, men have an innate core of humanity. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Good art should teach us to empathize with complex people. The problem comes not from the existence of these stories about white men, but from thelack of stories about everyone else.
.. Clinton—like most women—tends to be far more popular when she’s in office than when she’s running for one.
.. But that’s not the case for male politicians. In fact, it’s often their flaws thatmake them likable. After all, on paper the idea of an old disheveled man yelling sounds downright unpleasant. But in practice Bernie Sanders is an utterly charming and refreshing political figure.
.. So why is Clinton critiqued for raising her voice like Sanders, speaking hard truths like Biden, and making an awkward Pokémon Go reference we almost certainly would have dubbed a “dad joke” had Kaine said it? Why do we find their flaws likable and Clinton’s flaws off-putting? Why isn’t she seen as America’s awkward aunt or nerdy stepmom?
.. I would argue it’s because we don’t yet have cultural touchstones for flawed but sympathetic women.
..We haven’t been taught to empathize with flawed women the way we have with flawed men.
.. she’s frequently asked why her complex female character isn’t more likable. And as Davis points out toVariety, that’s just not something we question about male antiheroes like Tony Soprano and Hannibal Lecter.
.. We sympathize with the self-centeredness of Louis C.K. on Louie but we can’t stand it in Hannah Horvath on Girls.
.. Joe Biden enjoys a far rosier public image than Clinton even though he shares many of her political flaws.
.. Clinton is warm and personable in intimate settings but more distant and awkward in large ones.
.. I was a senior in college. I wasn’t sure how well I’d do. And while we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real ‘pile on.’ One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. It was intense. It got very personal. But I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room. I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off.’
.. her public persona is a kind of self-preservation tactic born out of years of brutal misogyny
.. it transforms a dehumanizing flaw into a relatable one.
.. the group most likely to enthusiastically support Hillary Clinton are older women in the workforce.
Steve Bannon’s Bad Day: Allegations of Voter Fraud and Domestic Violence
Donald Trump’s new campaign CEO, who is registered to vote at an empty house in Florida, may be as scandal-plagued as his predecessors.
.. But voting experts point out that there are virtually no documented cases of in-person voter fraud, where someone shows up and votes in someone else’s name. More common are cases where someone is registered at an address where they don’t live—just like Bannon. It’s not altogether uncommon for people to have failed to update old registrations, but it’s particularly embarrassing for Bannon, since he is running a presidential campaign, no less one that is warning about widespread fraud.
.. Not only is the whiff of voter fraud an embarrassing disclosure for a campaign that has railed against it, but the domestic-violence charges make Bannon the latest figure on the Trump campaign embroiled in misogyny and violence.
.. his ex-wife Ivana even alleged marital rape, though she has since withdrawn the claim.
.. Manafort, in turn, was hired as a counterweight to and later a replacement for Corey Lewandowski
.. But Lewandowski was pushed aside and later fired, beset by the campaign’s struggles at winning delegates but also by Lewandowski’s repeated physical altercations on the trail. In the most high-profile case, Lewandowski grabbed then-Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields at a rally in Florida, then denied he had done so. Although a prosecutor declined to bring charges, video evidence showed Lewandowski had lied about the encounter.