Donald Trump has a remarkably binary view of the world: Walls are good; migrants are bad. Tariffs are good; taxes are bad. People who love Trump are good; those who don’t are bad. And women are hot—or not.
Trump cares about everyone’s looks, of course. But as a former owner of the Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA pageants, he is a self-proclaimed expert on women’s beauty. He spent multiple appearances on The Howard Stern Show rating women on a numeric scale. You can see him, like a teenage boy, sizing up every woman he encounters.
This is boorish, of course, but politically, it has proved useful. When he thinks a woman is unattractive, Trump has an easy way to dismiss her. He rips her apart. Carly Fiorina, he said, had “that face”: “Would anyone vote for that?” He once tweeted: “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” He reportedly wouldn’t make Nikki Haley secretary of state because of “blotch marks on her cheeks”: “She’s not good for me. She’s got that complexion problem.” (He calls himself a “skin man.”) During their primary battle this year, he insinuated that Haley’s husband—a National Guardsman who was deployed to the Horn of Africa—had run out on her. He’s extended this same bullying strategy to his legal issues. His main line of defense in his civil trial for the rape and sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll was that she was not “his type.” (Jurors found him responsible for the latter charge.)
Depressingly, this has been pretty effective. Erotic appeal is a form of power that Trump seems to actually respect. By declaring these women undesirable, Trump has portrayed them not just as bossy, unattractive shrews, but as weak.
When Trump thinks a woman is hot, however, the situation gets a lot more complicated. And Trump thinks Kamala Harris, whom he will face for the first time onstage in tomorrow’s debate, is a certified hottie. He told Elon Musk in an interview that Harris, on the cover of Time, looked like “the most beautiful actress ever to live,” comparing her favorably to his own—presumably hot—wife, Melania. “I think we finally found the one thing Trump is incapable of lying about,” Desi Lydic joked in a Daily Show segment about the interview. “If he thinks someone is hot, he’ll say they’re hot. He’ll lie about winning an election, but he has deep respect for the sanctity of bangability.”
Still, there’s an election to try to win, so Trump is forced to take a different line of attack: suggesting that because a woman is beautiful, she must be dumb, and if she’s successful nonetheless, that’s only because she slept her way to the top. He’s used this strategy before too. He called Megyn Kelly a bimbo and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “not even a smart person.” He said Mika Brzezinski had a “low I.Q.” and implied that she had made it to Morning Joe only because she was dating her co-host. He told a female reporter once, “You wouldn’t have this job if you weren’t beautiful,” and wrote that “early victories by the women on The Apprentice were, to a very large extent, dependent on their sex appeal.” And so now Vice President Harris is “dumb as a rock,” “really DUMB,” “VERY STUPID,” and so on. She only got this far, he has said, thanks to a romantic entanglement she had with the mayor of San Francisco almost 30 years ago, and she “doesn’t have the mental capacity to do a REAL Debate.”
This probably works on some people, but it’s hard to persuade the general public to dismiss observed intelligence in women just because they are conventionally attractive. On a dumber level, sexualizing women backfires because it reinforces the idea that women have a form of power. And it reveals that that power is working—even over Trump. Because when it comes to beautiful women, Trump is a lover, not a fighter.
We make so much of Trump’s sexism that we seem to dismiss Trump’s sexuality—and his open obsession with it. His comments about women are demeaning, but they are also lascivious. He’s a civilly convicted sexual abuser who has described his lack of impulse control around beautiful women on multiple occasions. As he told Billy Bush on the Access Hollywood tape, “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women]. I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet.” Lest we think age is slowing him down, just this year he told a female supporter at Mar-a-Lago, “All these beautiful women, you’re driving me crazy.” He accompanied this with an emphatic gesture. Had his hand been just a few inches closer to the woman, he might have grabbed something.
He honestly can’t seem to help himself: These women are more powerful than he is. “I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye—or perhaps another body part,” he wrote in The Art of the Comeback. A famous germophobe, he’s always been terrified of STDs, but he still can’t help himself: “If you have any guilt about not having gone to Vietnam, we have our own Vietnam—it’s called the dating game,” he told Stern, and vaginas are “potential land mines.”
One really gets the impression that Trump would prefer not to be on the wrong side of any woman he’s deemed hot. Maybe one day, we can have a politics where female candidates aren’t judged by their physical appearance. Harris, unlike Clinton, has so far downplayed her gender, but Trump can’t see past it. Given where we are, it matters that Harris’s attractiveness is a challenge that Trump hasn’t figured out how to solve. It must make him nervous. If he finds Harris alluring, there is no doubt in his mind that America will too. After all, he’s the expert.
