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Megan Garber, June 29, 2015<\/p>\n
American pop culture has worked to normalize women\u2019s bleeding. The American president has missed that memo.<\/p>\n
In battle, blood is weakness. Blood is loss. Blood is a visual symbol that, while one may have fought valiantly, one was also\u2014at least for a moment\u2014bested by another. On the battlefield, the one who bleeds is the Loser (Sad!); the one who does not is the Winner.<\/p>\n
Donald Trump, it\u2019s often said, sees the world\u2014and human life in general\u2014as a roiling battlefield, and the people within it, consequently, as a collection of Victors and Vanquished who can be easily sorted as such. So it was both shocking and deeply unsurprising\u2014a situation that is becoming less and less paradoxical as this unorthodox presidency goes on\u2014to read the tweets that President Trump sent out on Thursday morning: about Joe Scarborough, a little, but mostly about his Morning Joe<\/em> co-host, Mika Brzezinski. They were tweets mocking weakness. They were tweets mocking vanity. They were tweets about blood.<\/p>\n The tweets, on the one hand, were simply another volley in the administration\u2019s ever-ramping battle against the American press\u2014tweets in line with the accusation<\/a> the deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made, earlier this week, about the media somehow being, as an institution, \u201cfake news.\u201d They featured typical Trumpian insults that were in line, despite their pettiness, with what increasingly seems to be the grander rhetorical project of this presidency, which is to delegitimize the mediating role of the media, and, consequently, to destabilize the notion of communal truth.<\/p>\n So, fine. Shocking, unsurprising, etc. But then there was the blood thing. The thing that aimed to delegitimize Brzezinski not merely according to her job performance\u2014not even, as is Trump\u2019s wont, according to her appearance\u2014but according to her ability to bleed. To bleed, his implication went, in the name of vanity. Scarborough, here, was merely \u201cPsycho\u201d; Brzezinski, however, was \u201clow I.Q.\u201d [sic] and also \u201cCrazy\u201d and, also, \u201cbleeding\u201d\u2014\u201cbadly,\u201d no less\u2014from her \u201cface-lift.\u201d<\/p>\n The accusation, first of all, seems to be another case of \u201cfake news\u201d: This, as CNN\u2019s Brian Stelter noted, was Brzezinski on the evening in question:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n
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