How to deal with a president who refuses to be held to account

Trump stormed out of a press briefing at the White House’s Rose Garden this week because he found the woman’s question too ‘nasty’. Not for the first time, says Holly Baxter

CBS News correspondent Weijia Jiang (left, seated) as her question leads to Trump leaving his press briefing early (Reuters/Rex)

How male politicians speak to the women who question their decisions has long been a source of consternation – and prime fodder for opinion columns. Who could forget David Cameron’s “calm down, dear” moment in parliament, aimed as it was towards Labour MP Angela Eagle, who had been asking him about NHS reforms? Or Gordon Brown’s “bigoted woman” hot mic incident after encountering an angry Labour voter in Rochdale? Back in 2018, when I worked in London on the UK Voices desk before transferring to New York, I wrote a column about why it was important to talk about whether or not Jeremy Corbyn called Theresa May a “stupid woman” in the Commons (something he has since denied. The background noise in the room means we’ll never know for sure.)

Men on both sides of the aisle, then, have fallen into the sexist trap of using “woman” as a qualifier for adjectives like stupid, ignorant, whiny and other “feminine” stereotypes – but nobody does it with the frequency and flagrancy of Donald Trump. The Republican president spent a large proportion of his 2016 election bid referring to Hillary Clinton as a “nasty woman”, and he’s only become emboldened since. Female reporters in particular are subject to his misogynistic ire: 10 days ago, he singled out two CBS News journalists – Paula Reid and Weijia Jiang – for criticism during an interview with the New York Post, in which he called them unnecessarily “angry” during press briefings and added that he wished they could be more like 1950s TV housewife Donna Reed.

That was bad enough, you might think, but this week Trump came for Weijia Jiang again during questions in the White House’s Rose Garden. When Jiang asked a question about coronavirus testing in the United States and whether Americans could be confident the current tests the president has been boasting about were reliable and available, he responded that she should “ask China” her “nasty question”. Jiang, who is an Asian American reporter born in China but raised in the US since the age of two, was visibly taken aback. The next (also female) journalist called upon then asked a question that didn’t sit well with the president either, and so, in a move that made international headlines, Trump simply walked out of the press conference altogether, leaving a socially distanced room full of journalists in confusion and disarray.

When I discussed this incident with Hannah Selinger, one of my regular opinion writers for Voices in New York, she said she considered it a classic display of fragile masculinity. Trump is obsessed with his own “manliness” or lack thereof, she pointed out: he has repeatedly said that he is too manly to wear a mask, claimed that he could beat up political rivals in fights, and retweeted pictures of his face Photoshopped onto the bodies of athletes and TV stars. Such is his personal insecurity that he famously kept a fake Time magazine cover featuring himself as cover star on his office wall until recently. He is the most powerful politician in the world, but his ego can’t handle a tiny bit of needling by reporters whose jobs are to hold him to account – especially if they’re women.

Hannah’s psychological analysis of Trump’s behaviour turned into a stellar column. She made the point that if the president can’t handle this sort of everyday challenge, the entire country should be worried. And she’s right: Trump has crumbled in the face of his own rural supporters calling for a premature end to lockdowns, and has begun to support the protesters. Undoubtedly, there will be dire consequences for those same people – but The Donald is not psychologically strong enough to be the president they need rather than the president they like.

Another person I discussed that ill-fated Rose Garden press conference with was Jean Lee, an Asian American reporter who has written eloquently in the past for me about why her blue-collar Korean immigrant mother is a Bernie Sanders enthusiast. Jean spoke with authority about the long and shameful tradition of silencing Asian American voices – especially those of Asian American women – and how that impacts her own career. She reminded me that among all the furore surrounding Trump’s exit from the presser, everyone had forgotten the importance of Weijia Jiang’s question. I realised she was right, and asked her if she’d be happy to investigate the answer and write about it herself; she agreed, and the resultant column is here.

Trump makes things difficult for journalists when he refuses to engage with us on a meaningful level and storms out of briefings, but he doesn’t make it impossible. As Hannah and Jean’s pieces prove – as well as the work of our US news team and our Washington DC bureau – there is always a way to ensure we do our due diligence. Under this presidency, we just have to be a little more creative than usual.

Yours,

Holly Baxter

Voices editor (US)