Fuck Trump

So Donald Trump is threatening to sue Rosie O'Donnell for reasons about which he's being pointlessly coy. (She talks smack about him—duh.) Now, quite honestly, I have no great love for either of these people, both of whom can be amusingly clever but also ridiculously annoying—and neither of whom are any stranger to being rude and offensive. But check this out—in his tirade on Access Hollywood about how he's going to sue O'Donnell, Trump throws in this unbelievable comment:

Rosie is somebody out of control, who really just doesn't have it, and she ought to be careful, because I'll send one of my friends to pick up her girlfriend, and I think it would be very easy.

And if you watch the video at the link, you can hear whatever dumb woman who's interviewing him off-camera start laughing. "Oh no!" she giggles, like it's a big fucking joke to threaten to kidnap someone. In the story at the link, this comment is reported as "He also sent a stern warning over O'Donnell's outburst and suggested she watch her partner." Uh, no. He also made an overt threat against O'Donnell that she'd better stop criticizing him or else he'd hurt the person closest to her, which is a criminal act, not "a stern warning."

The fact that it was framed as "a stern warning" and elicited an amused "Oh no!" from the woman interviewing Trump is fucked up on so many levels, with issues of sex, sexuality, class, and power all at work, I barely know where to begin. If O'Donnell threatened to have Trump's wife kidnapped, it would absolutely not be called "a stern warning," but a threat, which it precisely what it is. But coming from a powerful and extremely wealthy man, directed at a woman—and a woman whose partner is also a woman, no less—it's just "a stern warning," which sounds for all the world like an admonishment issued by Daddy. Of course O'Donnell is herself wealthy and powerful, but not in the same league as Trump—the audience for her all-female chatfest is mostly housewives, after all. He does the business of men. She's middle class all the way. He's champagne and caviar. And when you piss off champagne and caviar, you'd better "be careful" or your girlfriend is toast.

Trump, man among men and issuer of stern warnings, likes a little toast with his fish eggs.

Heaven knows, if anyone bothers to call Trump on this thuggish bullshit, he'll just explain it away as "a joke" (though it clearly wasn't intended as such), and woe to O'Donnell if she doesn't have a good yuk over the uproarious threats against her partner. Trump can then add "humorless" to his list of complaints against O'Donnell (which also include "fat" and "unattractive"). NBC should immediately sever ties with Trump for making such unconscionable threats, but they won't. Much of their prime-time programming depends on sexist and homophobic swill, and making fun of "ugly" people, so Trump's stern warning against two lesbians will no doubt make them proud as a peacock.