Trump’s Attacks on Stormy Daniels Echo an Uncomfortable Era
On Tuesday, Donald Trump did the thing Donald Trump is consummately good at doing: He tweeted something that was at once profoundly petty and sweepingly cruel. The something, this time around, was about Stormy Daniels: The president mocked the fact that a judge had dismissed the defamation case the adult-film star had filed against him. “‘Federal Judge throws out Stormy Danials [sic] lawsuit versus Trump,’” Trump summarized. “‘Trump is entitled to full legal fees.’” He added, in his own voice: “@FoxNews Great, now I can go after Horseface and her 3rd rate lawyer in the Great State of Texas. She will confirm the letter she signed! She knows nothing about me, a total con!”
This was par for the course, of course, for Trump, a leader who has taken the affordances of the bully pulpit extremely literally, and who has demonstrated a particular glee when it comes to insulting women and their appearances: To him, from his presidential platform as well as from other ones, women are either beautiful and thus desirable and thus grabbable, or they are ugly/fat/disgusting/dogs/animals that have an off-putting tendency to bleed out of their wherevers. What made this particular tweet catch on, though, was the bit of innovation it contained: Daniels as “Horseface.” Capital H, to mark it as a name, and the beast and the body part fused insouciantly.
[Read: Donald Trump’s penchant for blood feuds]
What happened next, in response to the presidential-sealed nickname, was as revealing as the tweet itself was unsurprising: “Horseface” became part of the day’s zeitgeist. Soon after the presidential on Twitter. tweeted (since deleted) featuring pictures of a plasticine horse head captioned “The Stormy Daniels Halloween costume starter pack.” ran under the earnest headline “‘Horseface’ and the Year of the Woman.” CNN, on Wednesday morning, ran whose chyron read “Trump slams Stormy Daniels on Twitter as ‘Horseface’”; the anchor Alisyn Camerota asked John Kennedy, the Republican senator from Louisiana, about the tweet (he replied, while noting that he didn’t approve of the mockery, “We’ve all done something like that before”).
