Trump’s Latest Chauvinist Tantrum

A woman like Rapinoe is unbearable for them because she defies all their expectations of what a woman should be.

While the adults in the United States grieved the United States’ elimination from the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, Donald Trump used it as an opportunity to flaunt his irreparable sexism, reveling in the defeat and lambasting the team’s captain, Megan Rapinoe, for having missed a penalty.

As any vulture would, the obese Trump, whose bunions prevented him from serving in Vietnam and from playing football, has now proclaimed himself a soccer expert who can explain how to take a penalty to the captain of a team that holds multiple world championships.

“Nice shot Megan,” he tweeted, taunting her for having missed one of the game’s penalties. Ever faithful to a habit of constructing grotesque scenarios to project himself as the country’s savior, he took advantage of the missed penalty to attack President Joe Biden.

At this stage in the game, we all know that logic is not Trump’s strong point. Nor does he care that his argument is crazy. He is obsessed with sullying the reputations of those he considers his enemies.

The team’s failure, he continued deludedly, “is fully emblematic of what is happening to the our once great Nation under Crooked Joe Biden.”

Trump’s tantrum has its origin in a slight that Rapinoe, along with the rest of the women’s team, made against him in 2019, when Rapinoe stated before the World Cup that she would not visit the White House to be congratulated by Trump if they were to win the competition that year in France. Rapinoe was not alone. Many key players supported her, and when they won, they fulfilled their promise not to appear at the White House while Trump remained in office.

The snub drove the megalomaniac and his supporters out in droves, immediately branding Rapinoe as a traitor, among other insults. Their reason? Rapinoe is a lesbian woman who fights openly for LGBTQIA+ rights; she also supports the Black Lives Matter movement. She was the first white athlete who, in solidarity with football player Colin Kaepernick, took a knee during the national anthem and who also served as one of the main figures in the successful battle to achieve wage equality with the men’s national team. (A more than justifiable pursuit, if one considers that the record of the women’s team is infinitely better than that of the men’s team in international competitions.)

In short, Rapinoe represents a mix of ideals that contradict Trump’s world view and that of his followers who continue to think, as the old Spanish saying goes, “A woman schooled in Latin will have neither a husband nor come to a good end.”

We must not forget that the Trump base is mostly built of white men without a university education and, as Barack Obama put it well in a moment of great sincerity, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

A strong woman like Rapinoe threatens their masculinity and that is why Trump and his followers are known as sexist pigs. The term is not new, having first appeared after World War II when many women entered paid employment, threatening the self-esteem that men derived from the domestic power they held over women in the economy and in wider society.

And because Trumpist “sexist pigs” believe that women belong in the kitchen or in the bedroom, a woman like Rapinoe is unbearable to them. She defies all their ideas about what a woman should be.