One day after courting votes from "suburban housewives," President Donald Trump went on Fox airwaves and launched a flurry of misogynistic attacks against a number of women in Congress, including Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
The president on Thursday called the powerful members of Congress "mad," "stone cold crazy" and "not even a smart person," respectively.
Trump hurled the insults throughout a wide-ranging early-morning interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, first targeting Harris, who days earlier became the first woman of color named to a major-party presidential ticket.
The president called Harris "sort of a madwoman" as he reminded viewers of her blistering interrogation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his Senate confirmation hearings.
"She was so angry," Trump said. "Such hatred with Justice Kavanaugh — I've never seen anything like it. She was the angriest of the group, and they were all angry."
"These are seriously ill people," he added.
Referring to Black women as "angry" or "mad" is a racial trope. Earlier in the week, Trump suggested in another interview that presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden had insulted men by vowing to pick a woman for a running mate.
"Some people would say that men are insulted by that," the president said, "and some people would say it's fine."
Adding that he was not yet sure which camp he best fit into, Trump said: "I don't know."
One of the president's adult sons also joined in the misogynistic pile-on against Harris. Eric Trump on Wednesday "liked" a tweet from right-wing Twitter personality Lori Hendry calling Harris a "whorendous" pick for a running mate.
One day later, the president turned his focus from Harris to a favorite target: Ocasio-Cortez.
"AOC was a poor student. I mean, I won't say where she went to school," Trump said. "It doesn't matter."
"This is not even a smart person other than she's got a good line of stuff," the president continued before adding: "I mean, she goes out and she yaps."
Next in line was Pelosi, whom Trump preemptively saddled with the blame if Republicans recapture the House in November — a daunting prospect which political experts almost universally believe is untenable.
"I believe we're going to take back the House, because Nancy Pelosi is stone cold crazy," the president claimed.
That was far from the first time Trump had called Pelosi crazy.
Just ahead of the Bartiromo interview, Trump went after another influential woman in politics, tweeting that Mika Brzezinski, the co-host of "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, was the "ditzy airhead wife" of Joe Scarborough. (Trump also called Brezinski's co-host and husband a "complete Psycho" in the same tweet.)
The day before, Trump tweeted that "suburban housewives" would flock to him at the polls after he appealed an Obama-era affordable housing program under which "low income housing would invade their neighborhood."
Brzezinski used her own program to fire back Thursday, saying powerful women make Trump "scared like a little baby."
"What's your thing with women? You have a lot of problem with women. Like, you're scared of them or something," Brzezinski said. "I think the Kamala [Harris] thing has you freaked out, but I've noticed it's all over the place. You get really like stressed out by women."
"You have to say things that are sort of triggering about women that are like back from the 1950s," the MSNBC host continued. "You're calling us 'housewives' when you talk about voters."
"Every time Kaitlyn Collins from CNN or Paula Reid from CBS . . . ask you a question, you scurry off the stage," she concluded. "You get scared like a little baby."
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