Trump isn’t just America’s president. He’s the defining phenomenon of our age. But the question is rather like the chicken and the egg. Which came first? Had society already reached such depths that it would elevate a man like this to planetary overlord, or was it his elevation that triggered the arrogance, the aggression, the vulgarity, and everything else we’ve come to call Trumpism—traits that now define our societies?
These past days we’ve watched and heard Trump attack women journalists on two separate occasions (he’d do the same to men, but it happened to be women). In one case, ABC News journalist Mary Bruce dared, in the presence of the Saudi leader meeting with the American president, to raise the issue of the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 by Saudi intelligence operatives, as well as the Trump family’s financial dealings with Saudi Arabia. At the same time, the journalist asked about the Jeffrey Epstein lists.
Trump attacked her—live on air—calling her appalling both as a person and as a journalist. “It’s not the question that I mind. It’s your attitude. I think you are a terrible reporter. It’s the way you ask these questions… You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter.” Meanwhile he also attacked the network Bruce works for, calling it fake news and saying “I think the license should be taken away from ABC because your news is so fake and it’s so wrong.”
With absolute cynicism he also characterised Khashoggi as controversial. “You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen,” he said about a journalist who walked into an embassy and never walked out, having been butchered, dissolved, and disappeared. And as a parting shot: “You need to go back and learn how to be a reporter. No more questions from you.”
Two days earlier he attacked another journalist, calling her a pig. Responding to a question about Epstein from Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey, he raised his finger and said: “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.”
These behaviours are transmitted across the world, normalised, and adopted by more and more people. The contempt towards women expressed by the head of the teachers’ union organisation is neither random nor an isolated incident.
P.S. In Trump’s honour, a tree-planting ceremony is being organised at Vergina Lyceum in Larnaca. The tree-planting is organised by the Jewish Community of Cyprus.
