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Former President Donald Trump has a long history of making sexist comments about women’s looks, and there’s a reason for that. Sexism is not a side effect but a cornerstone of his values, outlined and reiterated in his books, interviews, tweets (RIP), and otherwise conveyed remarks over the years: Women have value only insofar as their sex appeal, as judged by him and his narrow definition of what constitutes a good-looking woman. Asked whether he’d stay with former First Lady Melania Trump after a disfiguring car crash, Trump famously answered “How do the breasts look?” If women are to express ambition beyond satisfying their husband, a notion he discourages (“when I come home and dinner’s not ready, I go through the roof,” he said in a 1994 ABC interview), any accomplishments are undoubtedly due to their looks in Trump’s world. In 2014, he told reporter Maria Ngo interviewing him that she wouldn’t have her job if she weren’t beautiful: “It’s very sad, isn’t it?”
It is sad, but not for the reasons Trump thinks. It’s sad because his mind has been so permanently limited to view fifty percent of the population as moving pieces of art used to feed one’s ego and furnish one’s life with comforts. In the spring of 2021, new tapes reviewed by the Washington Post revealed Trump making a crack at another former First Lady: Michelle Obama, whom he sarcastically called “beautiful” in a play for laughs from his Mar-a-Lago audience of Republican donors. After so many years in which we condoned Trump rating women’s attractiveness on national TV in the pageant scene, the former president seems pathologically incapable of observing anything but the looks of women, even and especially when their looks have had nothing to do with their contributions to society.
From French president Emmanuel Macron’s wife Brigitte to Hillary Clinton to Kim Kardashian, no women are exempt from Trump’s unfiltered thoughts on their appearance. Whether it’s good or bad is irrelevant — contrary to Trump’s beliefs, the women he speaks of are not automatons whose synapses fire up when they receive a compliment from men, but in fact people like you and me, people who could happily go our whole lives without knowing what Trump thinks of our faces, bodies, and so forth. For a long list of women that now includes Michelle Obama, that wasn’t an option — as proven by Trump’s gross comments on their looks below.
A version of this story was originally published in 2021.
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