Trump Loses It on Air Force One: “Quiet, piggy!” He Snaps at Female Reporter
Donald Trump’s testy relationship with the press took another ugly turn this week, and this time a lot of people think he went way too far.
It happened on Air Force One on November 14, right in the middle of a flurry of questions about the newly released Jeffrey Epstein emails (the ones that mention Trump, Bill Clinton, and a bunch of other high-profile names). Trump was insisting he barely knew Epstein and that everyone should focus on Clinton instead.
Bloomberg White House reporter Catherine Lucey tried to ask a follow-up: something along the lines of “If there’s nothing incriminating, why not just…” and before she could finish the sentence, Trump wheeled around, pointed at her, and barked:
“Quiet! Quiet, piggy!”
Yeah… he actually said “piggy.” The whole thing was caught on video, and once it hit social media it spread like wildfire.
People online did not hold back. One widely shared post pointed out the irony: “The guy who’s been photographed next to a bucket of KFC more times than we can count just called a woman ‘piggy’.” Someone else posted a side-by-side of Trump and Miss Piggy that got tens of thousands of likes in hours.
On Reddit, the comments ranged from stunned to savage. One user wrote, “Imagine Obama or literally any other president in history saying that to a reporter.” Another added, “From now on female reporters should just greet him with ‘Morning, Mr. President… oink oink’ and see how he likes it.”
Even some journalists started calling out their own colleagues for not pushing back in the moment. One Redditor put it bluntly: “The press corps just sat there and took it. Spineless.”
The White House response (according to NBC’s Vaughn Hillyard) was classic Trump-world: they claimed the reporter had been “unprofessional” toward other journalists on the plane first, and basically said she had it coming. Exactly what Catherine Lucey supposedly did to her colleagues was never explained.
This isn’t even the only run-in Trump had with reporters this week. A couple days earlier he told another journalist who interrupted him, “You are the worst—I don’t know why they even have you.” And he’s still fuming at ABC News over their Khashoggi coverage, threatening (again) that their broadcast license should be yanked.
It’s the same pattern we’ve seen for years, but a lot of people feel like calling a female reporter “piggy” on camera crossed a new line—even for him.
Facebook Comments