in a piece for Slate titled How Donald Trump Measures a Woman’s Worth.
It should be obvious by now, giving his multiple marriages, given so many of the comments he has made over the year.
Let me put this into context, by quoting a tweet from my friend from Haverford Mark Kleiman, a noted professor of public policy, and warning, graphic language ahead:
Golberg’s piece is thorough, and well written. I am not going to go through it completely, but let me set up the part to which Mark Kleiman referred.
Goldberg notes that Trump had previously played around with the idea of going after Clinton on Bill’s infidelity. What is important can be seen in these words:
Before entering politics, Trump criticized Bill Clinton not for mistreating women, but for failing to find hotter mistresses. He once called Jones a “loser” and said of the Lewinsky scandal that “people would have been more forgiving” if Clinton had slept with “a really beautiful woman of sophistication.” Trump’s message in bringing up Bill’s adultery now is the same as the right-wing slogan he retweeted last year: “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?”
The words to which Kleiman referred come in the next two paragraphs:
His belief that Bill Clinton’s affairs reflect badly on Hillary demonstrates something key to his psyche: For Trump, the only salient distinction when judging a women’s worth is whether she is fuckable or unfuckable.
The fuckable/unfuckable schema is so deeply rooted in Trump that he can’t fully grasp that not everyone shares it. Consider how, the morning after Monday’s debate, he defended himself from Clinton’s accusation that he’d bullied former Miss Universe Alicia Machado for her weight. Speaking to Fox and Friends by phone, he said, “[S]he gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem.” On Wednesday night, speaking to Bill O’Reilly, he continued to paint himself as the victim of Machado’s sudden-onset unfuckability, suggesting that he deserves thanks for trying to save her job. “I did that with a number of young ladies,” he said. “Look what I get out of it. I get nothing.”
If you keep reading, you will encounter more. Trump is not the first to want a trophy wife, but Goldberg notes the lack of any pretense one often sees about valuing them for other than their appearance.
Goldberg then writes
Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. But Trump doesn’t realize his shallowness is a vice, because he’s not aware that other systems of value exist.
Because of his attitude, Goldberg believes Trump thinks that attacking Hillary on Bill’s infidelity is a clear way of delegitimizing her — after all, if she can’t satisfy her husband . . .
And Goldberg comes back to her blunt language in her conclusion:
Because of Trump’s decisions, the news cycle is currently full of talk of Miss Universe’s weight and Hillary Clinton’s marriage. With any luck, we’ll look back on this as the moment when Trump started to implode again, after an anomalous period of stability. If he’s ultimately beaten by a woman, it will be in part due to his inability to see past the fuckable/unfuckable binary and recognize women as fully human. It’s hard to imagine justice quite so poetic.