Ugh, the president is tweeting again.
It’s a common refrain throughout much of the world. It would be easy to say it is beneath the dignity of the office of the presidency to be tweeting false, vindictive, and/or asinine statements but the reality is that it’s beneath the basic dignity of any rational human that is above the age of majority.
For a man who infamously stated that he could grab women by the genitals, has over a dozen sexual assault allegations against him, stated that he would date his daughter Ivanka were she not his daughter, insinuated that a female journalist was asking tough questions because she was menstruating, and who has a history of denigrating a woman’s looks if he does not like her, there is very little the president of the United States can say on Twitter or elsewhere that would take most people aback.
In fact, earlier in the week when the president decided he was going to interrupt an official diplomatic call with the Irish prime minister to creepily comment on a female reporter’s appearance, most of us thought that Donald Trump had reached his sexist quota for the week.
Yet he apparently had more than enough sexism to spare. On Thursday morning Trump took the media, his fellow Republicans, and much of the world aback with these two tweets attacking MSNBC host, Mika Brzezinski:
MSNBC responded to the president’s tweet by stating: “It’s a sad day for America when the president spends his time bullying, lying and spewing petty personal attacks instead of doing his job.” A spokesperson for the network further tweeted that he never thought he would see the day wherein responding to the president of the United States would be beneath his dignity.
We don’t need to bring in feminist theorists to analyze just how sexist Trump’s tweet is, and how it fits his pattern and precedent of attacking a woman for her looks. Nor do we need to really delve into the very obvious fact that he tends to criticize men on attributes other than their physical appearance.
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Additionally, as Callum Borchers noted over at the Washington Post, whenever Trump targets the Morning Joe hosts, he has a penchant for targeting the bulk of his vitriol towards Brzezinski: “When Trump hits Brzezinski and Scarborough on Twitter, he hits Brzezinski harder, more personally and in a way that seems designed to portray her as someone who is insecure (“facelift”) and unintelligent (“low IQ”) — and who would not be on TV if not for her romantic relationship with Scarborough, to whom she was recently engaged.”
The fact that a sitting president would so viciously attack a journalist on her appearance is bad enough, but the stupidity and ultimate volatility of the tweet is compounded by the fact that the GOP health-care plan is currently sitting in the Senate and is at serious risk of ever making its way into law. Some of the key votes needed to pass it are Republican women. Considering female lawmakers of all partisan stripes still face an incredible amount of misogyny in their day-to-day lives, often specifically being called out on their looks, this isn’t exactly the most astute way to get a key part of one’s presidential platform passed.
Trump’s Twitter feed is a veritable case study in just how unfit he is to hold the highest office in the most powerful country in the world. One by one his tweets demonstrate that he is a man unwilling to heed the advice of any of his advisers or well-wishers, how he is the biggest obstacle to his own agenda and how he is alienating huge swaths of Americans, including those from his own party.
But none of this is new or revelatory information. This has been the case since he announced he was running to be the GOP presidential candidate. Republican leadership decided it was more important to have someone from their team in the White House than it was to uphold the dignity of the office, and voters ultimately decided it was better to go with a reality TV star with zero government or policy experience than it was to vote for a hyper-qualified woman with a record of public service because she had poor email server management.
That was America’s choice, as was their right to do so. It’s just a shame that the rest of the world has to watch this unfold – all in real time, and in 140 characters or less.
Supriya Dwivedi is host of The Morning Show on Toronto’s Talk Radio AM640 and a columnist for Global News.
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