“I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything ... Grab them by the p***y. You can do anything." It’s been 20 years since Donald Trump was recorded talking openly about the way he treats women in 2005, on the set of Days of Our Lives. Fast forward to this week – in 2025 – and what has changed? Nothing. If anything, his war on women just keeps getting worse.
“Quiet piggy” is the latest insight into the mind of the US president and what he really thinks of women (as if we were in any doubt). His attack on a female reporter onboard Air Force One, when she asked him a question about the Epstein files – accompanied by a patronising finger waggle – joins a litany of sexist threats, insults and diminishing comments which go back as far as his hairline.
The real problem now, though, isn’t what he says, but that it’s so achingly dull, predictable and routine. It’s not funny or clever – if you’re going to roast us, at least be biting and smart. This sexist shtick is getting tiring – isn’t it time for old men like Trump to give it up altogether?
“That is one dumb woman,” he said of ABC’s "The View" co-host Sunny Hostin in 2024. The same year, he raged about Whoopi Goldberg, saying: “She was so filthy, dirty, disgusting. She was so dirty. Every word was filthy, dirty. What a loser she is.” About Nancy Pelosi, also in 2024: "She's a bad, sick woman. She's as crazy as a bed bug." At the same rally, Trump talked about being advised not to clap back at Michelle Obama: “She hit me the other day,” Trump said. “I was gonna say to my people, ‘Am I allowed to hit her now?’ They said, ‘Take it easy, sir, sir.’”
The list goes on and on: when quizzed last year about businesswoman Jessica Leeds, who alleged he assaulted her during a flight to New York in the late 1970s, Trump gave this answer: “Frankly,” he said, “I know you’re going to say it’s a terrible thing to say – but it couldn’t have happened, it didn’t happen, and she would not have been the chosen one. She would not have been the chosen one.” And, on Stormy Daniels in 2023 after their alleged affair: "I never liked horseface. That wouldn't be the one.”
Trump has used words like “nasty woman” to describe his opponent Hillary Clinton and the New York Times suggested last year that he called Kamala Harris a “bitch” in two separate private conversations (though his campaign denied it). He also said of Carly Fiorina – his only female rival for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016: "Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?" Just this week, he lashed out at his former ally, Marjorie Taylor Greene, after she criticised the handling of the Epstein fiasco, saying: “I don't know what happened to Marjorie. She's a nice woman, but I don't know what happened. She's lost her way, I think.”
And when he’s not being insulting, he’s lascivious: Trump referred to his own daughter Ivanka Trump’s looks in 2004, saying: “She does have a very nice figure ... if [she] weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her”. The president has been accused by at least 26 women of rape and sexual assault since the 1970s – allegations all of which he denies – and was found liable by a jury for sexually abusing the writer E Jean Carroll in a department store in the 1990s, though he dismissed her last year with the comments: “I never met her. I have never touched her. I would have no interest in meeting her in any shape or form.”
Trump doesn’t hide who he is – in my opinion an overt misogynist, a woman-hater – and he doesn’t say sorry for it, either. He does it in plain sight. His track record speaks for itself – his Supreme Court selections are mainly anti-abortion, and therefore unarguably anti-women, he’s taken credit for overturning Roe v Wade and he’s also mates with people like white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who took to X on election night to declare an unfettered war on abortion, saying: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” “Quiet piggy” is only the icing on a very thick, very layered, very out of date sexist cake.
Yawn. Haven’t women suffered enough without having to listen to such sexist nonsense? Yet Trump has so far always been frustratingly impervious at the ballot box to all this. His opponents during his first presidential campaign made efforts to discredit him over his relations with women and the language he used, but they made little progress, with some of his older female supporters arguing that this was just how men at a certain time, or a certain age, behave.
Women are tired of this nonsense, now. Maga, reportedly, is getting tired too – of Trump and his silly, schoolboy insults and “weak and rudderless” leadership. It makes me want to put my finger to my lips and sshhh the US president (if not every single man in politics). But listen. After all the slurs, all the insults, all the ways he has got away with the things he has said – and, allegedly, done – to women, wouldn’t it be a great twist in the tale if it is, finally, the women who bring him down?
