As anyone within earshot or eyesight of major media outlets is aware, the man considered the leader of the free world behaved like a threatened wild boar again this week — snorting, grunting, and all but stomping his feet in an abominable attack on two respected female reporters: Mary Bruce, of ABC News, and Catherine Lucey, Bloomberg’s White House Correspondent. In so doing, Trump spewed more sewage from an orifice decent human beings use for speaking, eating or other pleasures than any wild animal would from various other orifices. Perhaps he was channeling the primal behavior of another feral creature — a raccoon, an animal notorious for marking its territory with its own muck.
Trump’s invective toward Lucey is so insulting that it would be offensive to cite it in any family newspaper. Even the megalomaniac mynah bird my Uncle Dominic taught to swear in Italian would have the good breeding not to repeat Trump’s insults.
Lucey kept her composure while Trump treated her as if she were a boisterous barnyard animal rather than a professional doing a vital public service. The leadership of Bloomberg News was also calm, issuing a guarded statement. Meanwhile, almost every other major media outlet has decried Trump’s comment as despicable.
Which is the reaction all who have children to raise, students to teach, and elderly loved ones to soothe should have when faced with such affronts, regardless of where they live and work. With households to maintain, children to feed, and parents to care for, it’s no wonder so many stay silent.
Yet, if we want to live in a civilized America, we can’t afford to be so calm as the leaders of outlets that justified their silence to protect their “access.” To be sure, the risk is real: If a credentialed reporter challenges Trump, he threatens the outlet, which he has done countless times, and the reporter could lose their job. Add to that the fact that Trump has secured multi-million-dollar settlements from major organizations, including CBS and ABC, in effect muzzling other outlets’ attempts to probe further and poke the bear by objecting to how Lucey was treated.
To that point, a White House minion said of Lucey, “If you’re going to give it, you have to be able to take.” In fact, Catherine Lucey is no stranger to tough guys, loudmouths, or their female enablers. She is a respected journalist with over two decades of experience covering politics for prestigious outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press. A Penn graduate, she started her career at the Philadelphia Daily News on the police beat, rising to cover city politics. This, in a gritty town where the cliché to “vote early and often” is still recalled as an inside joke uttered by party bosses in the dozens of pizza parlors, cheesesteak counters, and dollar-a-beer taprooms that dot Philly’s working-class neighborhoods.
The countless women in Trump’s inner circle who enable the despicable behavior toward female journalists need to be called out as well. They are the type former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright must have had in mind when she declared there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women. But, oh, the tantalizing temptations of a White House job! A lucrative lobbying salary awaits, or a right-wing newscast spot with one’s own hairstylist and makeup artist or becoming the third trophy wife of a jowly congressman.
However, most Americans do not need the validation of the harrowing hellscape that is the current White House. They do not make their living near Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell — Greed (#4), Wrath (#5), Fraud (#8), and Treachery (#9) among them. To be sanguine in the face of such behavior is to be complicit. Complicit in enabling the downfall of common decency, the devolution of our democracy, and the annihilation of ethical behavior decent adults hope to impart on young people.
When the highest office normalizes the degradation of women, it acts as a permission structure for harassment in boardrooms, in classrooms, and at the family dinner table. It teaches young men that dominance is established through bullying, and women that intelligence is secondary to compliance.
After all, with proper training, even Uncle Dominic’s expletive-emitting mynah bird would behave better than our president. Unless, of course, there’s a wild boar within earshot, snorting, grunting and stomping. Or a rabid raccoon marking territory with its own you-know-what. At least, those are animals humans could train, lest they inflict further harm on humanity. As for training Trump to be decent? Sure — when pigs fly.
