In his interview with the Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly on Tuesday night, Donald Trump tried to pull off a win-win straight out of “The Art of the Deal”: At once trying to prove that he was a friend of women and that no woman gets the best of him. It’s not clear how well he succeeded, but he was able to put an end to his feud with a star newswoman and make nice with a network he will need in the general election.
The dealmaker was careful to give Kelly something: She got to prove her chops as uber-anchor, hosting her first prime-time special like Barbara Walters lassoing a big player as lead-off batter and peppering him with touchy-feely questions, garnering sky-high ratings.
Kelly stopped short of asking what kind of tree Trump would choose to be, but she did go beyond his building a wall. Regrets? He has a few but he wouldn’t name them. When asked if he’d been hurt emotionally, he told Kelly he’d have to get back to her. That’s not likely, though. He said looking backward was “not healthy.”
As for his battle with Kelly, he said he’d gone easy on her with the retweeting (which he called “a modern day way of fighting back”), but she took exception to “bimbo.” Grinning like a rogue, he said, “Ooh, OK. Excuse me,” but urged her to acknowledge that it wasn’t all that bad as insults go.
Take that, little lady. He’s a man’s man who dodged opening up, admitting error, giving up fighting or being presidential — all in 20 minutes. The interview capped a couple of weeks of Trump laying out a campaign that will expand on his winning strategy of targeting the white male vote. Even with polls showing that 70 percent of women disapprove of him, he claims that in the later primaries he won women who don’t like political correctness or the war against men.
He’s doubled down on his effort to show he’s not the one who treats women badly. Bill Clinton is “the “worst abuser of women in history” and that gives Trump the right to throw the woman card right back at the former president’s enabling wife.
The strategy comes at the potential cost of driving women, including avowed non-feminists, into the arms of Hillary Clinton, who is having a hard time attracting them on her own. But ever the gambler, Trump is going to play out his hand. He may have no choice. He’s won by being the uber-male, knowing little but certain of everything. In these dangerous times, being manly has worked for him. He isn’t just going to kill Islamic State terrorists; he’s going to kill their families.
Ever the big dog
The Kelly interview came on the heels of a brutal front-page expos? in the New York Times headlined “Crossing the Line” that detailed stories of Trump’s mistreatment of women. The ink was barely dry before he treated it like fish wrap. He had help.
The woman whose anecdote was the centerpiece of the article was quick to confirm the details of a day at Mar-a-Lago but denied the conclusion. To dredge up an old saw, she “liked it.” Forget that most women wouldn’t like to be taken to a private room, shown spare bikinis, and asked to undress and put one on. She was all over the Internet and TV saying it was all fine with her.
Alpha males, and the women who love them, cheer when Trump eludes another dagger from the “failing New York Times.” They believe masculinity (and Christmas) have been stolen by political correctness and the so-called feminization of America.
Trump is ever the big dog to be admired and envied. His campaign is pitched to tough guys who don’t think it’s a problem that he got out of serving in the military but can, nonetheless, insult Arizona Sen. John McCain for being captured and imprisoned by the North Vietnamese. He felled his girlie men competitors, who sweat under pressure, are little and suffer from low energy.
Trump may once again outwit those who think his appeal has a ceiling. He may be counting on voters to forget his treatment of women, not all that bad anyway, as he waves the New York Times and Bill’s past in voters’ faces. There are always those who want to go back to an earlier era when men were in the corner office and the little woman knew her place. He can’t play the woman card but he can trump it.
Margaret Carlson is a columnist for Bloomberg View.
