Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of
Donald Trump's meteoric rise is the degree to which he's been able to not only succeed in belittling his opponents through juvenile taunts, but to drag many of them into the same conduct.
Marco Rubio lost moral high ground when he resorted to commenting on Trump's
hand size as a not-too-concealed reference to
penis size. Leading Trump to be the first presidential candidate in history to brag about his dick in a nationally televised debate.
But, interestingly, despite the overflowing goblet of
nicknames and neener-neeners Trump has tossed out at his male competitors -- "Lyin' Ted," "Little Marco," "Low-Energy Jeb" -- his sharpest attacks are generally reserved for women, for whom he reserves a special set of sexualized slurs.
The first example (in this season) is
Megyn Kelly, a
Fox News commentator who called out Trump's tendency to refer to disliked women like
Rosie O'Donnell as pigs and cows. In an interview the next day Trump waved off Kelly's biting criticism with the assertion that she "had blood coming our of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever." This drew a collective gasp from polite society (which took the wherever to mean exactly what you think they took it to mean), which Trump waved off insisting that he meant "ears" (but, apparently, lacked the capacity to name the body part on the sides of your head when under the gun).
Okay, let's suppose we go with that innocent misunderstanding excuse. When some weeks thereafter Trump spontaneously opined of
Carly Fiorina, "Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?" he had to trot out that line again, insisting that he wasn't commenting on Fiorina's attractiveness at all, and creepily starting the next debate by exaggeratedly lauding her beauty. And then a few weeks after that Trump observed that
Hillary Clinton "got schlonged" by
Barack Obama in '08, and the response was even more pointed, as one would have to be a complete idiot not to read a vulgar connotation into that. Trump, naturally, claimed not to read a vulgar connotation into that. So let's stretch out our willingness to go with that innocent misunderstanding excuse a second time.
This week Trump responded to an anti-Trump ad in morality-centered
Utah--featuring a recent image of Trump's occasionally-nude-in-magazines hot third wife--by tweeting against Utah primary winner
Ted Cruz, "Be careful, Lyin' Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!" Now, that sparked chortles all over the
Internet about a certain locker-room double meaning of spilling the beans. But it's a bit late in the game for Trump to insist that he had no idea he'd be leading his followers to think he was speaking of ejaculating on Heidi Cruz's face.
Ted Cruz responded by calling out Trump as a
coward; Trump's retort was to tweet a pic of Heidi Cruz's face at an awkward moment next to a pic of Trump's own sexpot. Advantage Trump (though Megyn Kelly's one-word-response takedown is priceless). Naturally, this isn't the first time Trump has gone after a competitor's wife, having retweeted in the first half of the campaign that "#JebBush has to like the Mexican Illegals because of his wife."
I've noted on numerous occasions that the presidential elections are probably fixed, and it's hard to see the fixers fixing this one for Trump (who would for example be the most pro-abortion, pro-big-government, anti-religious candidate to claim the "Republican" mantle in memory). But if they do make Trump president, international relations will get very interesting very quick when he starts tweeting things like "That Chinese Premier is dragging his feet in these negotiations. Have you seen his wife? She's a dog. Woof."
Then again, who knows, maybe we deserve to live in a world defined by this level of discourse.