Even considering his past, Donald Trump is having a banner week in terms of flying his misogyny flag. Earlier this week he was so brazen and assured of his charm and power that he harassed a female reporter from Ireland in the Oval Office on camera. Rather than take stock of his actions, which were roundly admonished by the reporter, Caitriona Perry, when she posted the video on Twitter, calling his behavior “bizarre,” he doubled down on his misogyny and went on a Twitter rant Thursday morning taunting Morning Joe’sMika Brzezinski about a bloody face-lift she’d supposedly had. Now model Rain Dove has called for Twitter users to report him for abusive tweets.
Because Trump is thin-skinned and can’t bear any criticism of the job he's doing running the country — which he’s supposed to be concentrating on — he devolved into a tantrum in which he personally attacked Morning Joe hosts Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough.
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It’s impossible to try to understand the true motivation for Trump’s hateful tweets, except that the Morning Joe cohosts, who at one time had a cordial relationship with him, have become increasingly critical of his administration. It’s also difficult to even know if what he said about Brzezinski is true, considering that the man who continually cries “fake news” has a history of playing fast and loose with the truth (his inauguration turnout numbers, for example), but it doesn’t matter if what he said was true or not. Trump enjoys a long history of attacking women for their appearance, and he didn’t bother to quell this tendency even when he was running to become president of the United States. During the primaries, he told a Rolling Stone reporter that no one would want to vote for his Republican opponent Carly Fiorina. "Look at that face!," he said. "Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!"
And who could forget when he famously used the age-old misogynist “she must be having her period” tactic to diminish debate moderator Megyn Kelly when she questioned him about his treatment of women? "She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions," Trump told CNN. "You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever. In my opinion, she was off base."
Since taking office he’s repeatedly attacked Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on Twitter and lashed out at essentially anyone who doesn’t fall into line with his unpredictable yet authoritarian rule. But his personal attack in a public forum on a woman in the media goes too far, and Dove, a queer model and actress, has called for the Twitterverse to shut him down, saying it's the patriotic thing to do as he represents the entire country.
Still, Twitter is not quick to ban those who merely defame or harass, according to its official rules:
"We may suspend an account if it has been reported to us as violating our Rules surrounding abuse. When an account engages in abusive behavior, like sending threats to others or impersonating other accounts, we may suspend it temporarily or, in some cases, permanently."
However, last summer Twitter released a statement saying it was reviewing its policy on “hateful conduct” to include more "types of abusive behavior" and make it easier to report the abuse.
If a concerted effort to remove serial harasser Trump from Twitter were to succeed, he would join the likes of far-right button pushers Milo Yiannopoulos and Chuck C. Johnson, who've already been banished for abusive behavior.
