The Woman Who Put Donald Trump in His Place

It happens more often than you think. In the end, it’s a woman who puts the class bully in his place. While her male classmates try to pass by unnoticed, whistling while they look in the other direction, she lets fly with what everyone is thinking, right in his face. And she makes him back down. That is exactly what has happened to the self-proclaimed alpha male of the U.S. political landscape, Donald Trump. Since he announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president — in reality, since long before that — he has been letting fly insults, put-downs and nonsense right and left. But of course, it is necessary to remember that the multimillionaire is an equal-opportunity insulter, going after whoever is in front of him with the same self-confidence, whether it is the president of the United States, the female anchor for the conservative Fox network, or a Mexican immigrant. For him, what matters is if the person is dark-skinned, a woman, or doesn’t speak English. If by chance the three characteristics are combined, then that’s just frosting on the cake.

With hopes high because of some polls that showed support for his populist views, and with an increasing impact on the discourse of his rivals in the party, Trump appeared this week in a televised debate with other candidates for the nomination. But he crossed swords with a woman who — surprise! — he had insulted and had been disparaging. “Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?” he had said about her before the debate. Rather than engage in the mudslinging that Trump likes so much, Carly Fiorina reacted with class, calm and good manners. She put the millionaire in his place and emerged from the debate as one of the promising figures in the Republican race, after going into it as practically a straw candidate. Her attitude said to Trump: Tell me what you brag about, and I’ll tell you what you lack. And she has a point. Unlike Trump, who demands that everybody work hard, but who inherited a prosperous family business, Carly Fiorina knows what it’s like to start as a secretary and become the CEO of several large multinational corporations. Neither she nor her ancestors changed their family name, the way that the Drumpf family changed theirs to Trump. What is more, the candidate dropped her English family name of ancient lineage to take her husband’s Italian family name, as is customary in the United States — something inconceivable for her rival, whose U.S. origins have the same authenticity as his toupee.

It is definitely not a good week for Trump, who has been replaced on his “reality show” by an immigrant, Arnold Schwarzenegger, an Austrian about whom saying he has a strong German accent would be an understatement. After achieving success in his work, he had the audacity to marry a woman from one of the most pedigreed U.S. families — the Kennedys — and on top of that, he was democratically elected as the governor of California. He is the embodiment of the American dream for any immigrant. His most famous phrase? It’s a mixture of English and Spanish, and applicable to Trump: “Hasta la vista, baby!”