Trump’s 'Piggy' Insult is Distracting Us From the Real Issue

Last week, aboard Air Force One, the president of the United States looked a Bloomberg reporter in the eye, pushed his finger into her face and said, “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.”

She had asked him a question about the Epstein files—“What did Jeffrey Epstein mean in his emails when he said you ‘knew about the girls?’”—which he responded to with a long response including, “I know nothing about that, they would have announced that a long time ago.” And when the reporter asked a quick follow-up question (standard practice for reporters doing their job), that’s when he said it.

“Piggy,” by anyone’s standards, is a pretty childish insult. One can only imagine that among the cadre of reporters, someone at the back, or heck right up at the front, must surely—surely!—have nudged their neighbor and said, wait, did he? Did you? Was that? Did I just hear…? Did he just—OK fine, I’ll say it—call her, “piggy”?

What is striking about the videos of Trump admonishing the reporter Catherine Lucey to her face, is that no-one on that plane—not a single person—appears surprised. 

No-one is surprised because none of this is new: Trump lectures women reporters and tells them to “be quiet” and describes them as “fake news” or “the worst” or “second rate” or says they “know nothing about nothing” often. By now, a tongue-lashing from Trump is simply part of the job of a White House correspondent.

Still, while the rest of us register the insult and discuss and unpack it and watch the moment from multiple angles, we overlook the far, far more important point: That Trump didn’t answer the question that was posed to him. 

So let’s reiterate Lucey’s partial follow-up question here: “If there’s nothing incriminating in the files, sir, why not…” 

Why not, indeed?

Reiterating the question is as good a reminder as any to focus on the real issue at hand, not the distraction.