Are Donald Trump’s attacks on Hillary Clinton sexist? To be fair, Trump is a guy who makes insulting personal remarks about everyone he disagrees with, regardless of gender. Let’s not jump to conclusions. This deserves a serious breakdown.
YELLING
Trump frequently complains that Clinton yells too much. “That’s why I turned her off last night … I just couldn’t stand it. I got such a headache,” he told a rally earlier this year. “But I won’t say it, because I’m not allowed to say it, right?” He added that he had “great respect for women, believe me.”
Rule No. 1: When grading a candidate’s level of sexism, add one point for every time he says that what he just said is not politically correct. Add two if he interjects that he has great respect for women.
Voice is a sensitive issue. We heard for decades and decades that a woman could never be a TV news anchor because viewers would not — in the words of one NBC executive — “accept the news from a woman’s voice.” And Trump yells all the time. If this were coming from someone like, say, Mitt Romney, we could have a discussion about whether the comment was sexist, or just irritating. But Trump is basically saying that only guys get to holler.
HEALTH
“She looks sick,” said Rudy Giuliani on Fox News. Giuliani, Trump’s top surrogate, spent the summer arguing that there was something very, very wrong with Clinton’s health. He urged people to just go online “and put down ‘Hillary Clinton illness.’ ” No better proof that something is true than the fact that you can find it on the internet. It’s like making the case for a space invasion by telling people to Google “aliens among us.”
Clinton does have allergies that sometimes send her off into fits of coughing. There’s also a video of her tripping and being helped up by a flight attendant — an incident that seems to be what Giuliani is referring to when he says she had to be “lifted onto airplanes.”
Trump has been on this one as well. “Mainstream media never covered Hillary’s massive ‘hacking’ or coughing attack, yet it is #1 trending. What’s up?” demanded the man whose own released medical information consisted of a four-paragraph letter that started off with “To Whom My Concern.”
This is nuts, but not necessarily sexist. Trying to start rumors about an opponent’s health was a staple of presidential politics long before we had a woman in the race. Ronald Reagan called Michael Dukakis an “invalid.” A top Democrat discussing Reagan in 1984 said, “Well, he didn’t quite drool.” Obama supporters tried to raise concerns about a reoccurrence of melanoma in John McCain, but McCain answered the question by releasing a huge medical report from his doctors.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/opinion/sexism-lets-deconstruct-donald.html?_r=0
