'Quiet, Piggy'

Susan Estrich on Dec 11, 2025

He did it again. Consider the pattern. On Dec. 8, President Donald Trump went after Rachel Scott, who happens to be a woman of color, for asking him whether the administration would release the controversial video of the strike on the Venezuelan boat.

Scott: "Are you committed to releasing the full video?"

Trump: (reportedly growing irritated) "Didn't I just tell you that? (he didn't) You are the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place ... Let me just tell you, you are an obnoxious -- a terrible reporter. And it's always the same thing with you."

On Dec. 6, he went after CNN's Kaitlan Collins as "always Stupid and Nasty."

On Nov. 27, he asked CBS reporter Nancy Cordes, "Are you stupid?"

On Nov.26, he called The New York Times' Katie Rogers "ugly."

On Nov. 18, he told ABC's Mary Bruce, "I think you are a terrible reporter. It's the way you ask these questions. You're a terrible person and a terrible reporter."

On Nov. 14, taking questions from reporters aboard Air Force One, he snapped at Bloomberg's Catherine Lucy, who was asking about Epstein, "Quiet. Quiet, Piggy."

"Quiet, Piggy," says the President of the United States to a professional woman doing her job. That's just the last month I'm counting, and I may have missed some of them.

It's clearly a pattern of derogatory comments made to professional women in a tough, competitive, and demanding profession, where only the cream of the crop wield the microphones, except for the press secretary, that is. But isn't that the flip side of the same coin? If he really respected women ...

But he doesn't really respect women. He makes no pretense of it. He appreciates their beauty. He surrounds himself with it. Not so much their brains.

He is the only president I know of who has made looks the key criterion for being a U.S. Attorney. Once, it was prosecutorial experience. Lindsay Halligan? Alina Haba? These were ridiculous choices of unqualified, beautiful women.

It's one thing to lard up the cabinet with clowns who look good on television, and another thing to take out your misogyny on the women who cover you. It sends a message of disrespect that invites followers to do the same -- to respond to tough questions by calling ugly and sexist names, to respond to powerful women by putting down their appearance and their intelligence.

If you heard one kid do that to another in the back seat of the car, you'd pull over the car to teach a lesson.

How do you stop the pattern of insults when they are coming from the President of the United States? Is there no one in his orbit who has the stature or the guts to tell him that liberal columnists are not the only ones noticing a pattern here; that women of all sizes get insulted when you point a finger at one of us and call her "piggy," that this is not how we expect leaders and role models to behave.

Clearly, this president thinks his MAGA followers applaud his crude dismissal of his critics, particularly his female ones, as unattractive and stupid. But is that really what the MAGA women want? At some point, Marjorie Taylor Greene, he's going to be looking at you, too, and then who's left? If that's how he sees women, he's going to notice one of these days that you're one too.

========

To find out more about Susan Estrich and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.