I’ll start with a disclaimer: I’m not a big believer in the “War on Women.” In a world wildly overrun with various strains of social justice warrior nonsense, paired with absurd claims of “oppression” lurking in nearly every upper-middle-class corner, I find most attempts to Balkanize offenses by gender not only tiresome but a waste of time.
Also, when it comes to chivalry — let’s define it as Webster’s does, which is “behaving in an honorable or polite way, especially toward women” — I’ll be the first to admit that it’s on the verge of death. The feminist sisterhood, bless their hearts, struck the initial blows. Today, institutions ranging from grammar schools to the U.S. military seem hellbent on telling the world, and themselves, that men and women are nearly the same, with the latter being just a bit more oppressed.
While feminists took the first stab of the knife, and many others twisted it along the way, it may be Donald Trump who finally knocks down proverbial Mr. Chivalry, stomps on him a few times and then finishes him off with a blowtorch.
On Tuesday, Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was charged with simple battery against 28-year-old reporter Michelle Fields. She is not a bodybuilder; she does not have a history in extreme fighting or professional wrestling, at least not to my knowledge.
On March 8, Fields, attempting to question Trump on his way out of a news conference at the Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Fla., encountered Lewandowski when he grabbed her arm and pulled her backward. What happened next was fascinating and — as is the case with almost all things Trump — baffling and absurd.
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Fields, who claims she was bruised from Lewandowski’s grip, posted photos on social media and asked for an apology.
Lewandowski responded as any sane person would, apologized, and then we all went back to talking about quantitative easing and how to tackle the burgeoning Islamic State network wreaking havoc in Europe and beyond.
I’m sorry, America: Of course that didn’t happen. On Team Trump, you have to lie even when it makes absolutely no sense to lie. This is exactly what Lewandowski did, on Twitter, for the entire world to see: “You are totally delusional,” he told Fields. “I never touched you. As a matter of fact, I have never even met you.”
Trump, for his part, took a reasoned, statesmanlike stance on the issue — ugh, fine, you know that’s not true. Instead, he went on national television and suggested that Fields was a crazed attention-and-pity grabber who was making the whole thing up.
Fields pressed charges and the Jupiter Police Department charged Lewandowski. At the same time, crystal-clear video footage of the infamous arm yank, from Trump’s own golf club, no less, was released for the world to see. Here again, a normal campaign might apologize and move on, but why do that when you can continue to prove to the nation that no one cares when you lie?
Trump — who is, I remind you, the GOP presidential front-runner — first insisted that there was “nothing there” on the tape. Then he told a gaggle of reporters that if Fields had really been hurt, she should have screamed — which is kind of weird to say if there was nothing on the tape, is it not? — and that Fields’ line of finger-shaped bruises were probably there beforehand.
Next, Trump’s new best friend, Sean Hannity, got in on the act: “I looked at this tape at least 100 times today. … I don’t see any jerking, I don’t see any pulling.” Oh, and here’s GOP Rep. Peter King: “You know, before I saw the video yesterday, I thought he had hit her with a baseball bat or something.” Nope, just your standard old-fashioned, ill-mannered woman-pull! Make America Great Again!
Then Trump, who is apparently marketing himself as “America’s Next Strongman” — get ready, for I am not making this up — implied that he was actually quite threatened by Michelle Fields. “Why is this reporter touching me?” he asked ominously on Twitter, paired with a photo of him next to Fields. “What is in her hand?” It was, if you’re worried, not a miniature dirty bomb, but a pen. “It shows she’s a very aggressive person,” Trump told Fox News, mulling publicly about pressing charges, mere days after telling the world that the entire Fields incident was a figment of everyone’s imagination.
It’s all so tiresome, isn’t it? In the end, we can bicker and argue about whether the manhandling of a young woman is worthy of a battery charge, and that’s exactly what the Trump campaign wants us to do. The fact that we’re debating it at all — and that the GOP front-runner is blatantly championing it — shows, among many other things, how far we’ve gone. Sad.
Heather Wilhelm is a writer based in Austin, Texas.
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