“She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live. Actually, she looked very much like a great first lady, Melania. She didn’t look like Kamala,” Trump told tech mogul Elon Musk during a meandering livestream Monday, mispronouncing the vice president’s name. “But of course, she’s a beautiful woman, so we’ll leave it at that, right?”
He was referring to an illustration of Harris on the cover of this week’s Time Magazine, which he called a publicity “free ride.” But the comments — from which Musk quickly navigated away — fit neatly into a familiar playbook for the former president: A tendency to fixate on womens’ appearance.
“It’s demeaning. It would be equally demeaning if she wanted to discuss his physical appearance,” said Julie Roginsky, a Democratic strategist who has advocated for policies to quell workplace harassment in the aftermath of #MeToo. “That’s not what rational people are looking for in their president. They’re looking for somebody who can lead the country and address the concerns that people in this country have.”
For decades, Trump has built elements of his public persona around his proximity to — and crass rhetoric about — beautiful women. “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass,” he said in a 1991 interview with Esquire magazine. He used to own the Miss Universe beauty pageant, and in 2005 boasted to Howard Stern that he went backstage while the contestants were undressed. In 2013, he told a contestant on “The Celebrity Apprentice”: “It must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.”
