BACKLASH: We shouldn't normalize this, they said!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2025

It's been normalized for the past many years: We interrupt our Backlash retrospective to report what Jim VandeHei said.

He spoke at 6:20 Eastern on today's Morning Joe. This is what he said:

"In what world is that OK?"

In what world is that [conduct] OK? VandeHei sensibly asked. He directed his question at President Trump's latest unusual conduct. 

The president had done something unusual. In this case, even the somewhat permissive New York Times has reported the conduct in question:

Trump Berates One Reporter and Tells Another, ‘Quiet Piggy’

President Trump assailed an American journalist in the Oval Office on Tuesday for asking Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, about the violent death of a Washington Post columnist at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018. U.S. intelligence has said the attack was carried out on the prince’s orders.

“You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that,” Mr. Trump told the journalist, Mary Bruce of ABC News, later referring to her query as “a horrible, insubordinate, and just a terrible question.”

“A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about,” Mr. Trump said, referring to the murdered journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. “Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.” The prince has denied involvement in the killing.

It was the second time in a week that Mr. Trump had leveled a fierce insult at a woman who was covering him.

For better or worse—we'd say for worse—there he had gone again! The president had assailed Mary Bruce (ABC News) for asking a fairly obvious question about Mohammed bin Salman. 

That said, it was the "fierce insult" directed at a second female reporter which generated VandeHei's question on today's Morning Joe.

Last Friday, the president had said "Quiet, Piggy" to Catherine Lucey (Bloomberg News) during a scrum on Air Force One. As the Times report continued, it described that bit of unusual conduct on the commander's part. For Mediaite's report of that incident, you can just click here.

For reasons which so make obvious sense, the Times report had stressed the fact that this insult had been directed at a female reporter. Mediaite filed several reports describing pushback within the mainstream press against this cutting remark. Headline included, one such report started like this:

‘I Just Don’t Understand How Somebody Acts Like This’: Anderson Cooper at a Loss After Trump’s ‘Piggy’ Insult

CNN’s Anderson Cooper expressed bafflement at how President Donald Trump can keep lobbing juvenile insults at others, only for “everyone” to essentially shrug in response.

On Friday night, Trump took questions from reporters aboard Air Force One, where Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey asked the president about the Epstein files. When Lucey tried to ask a follow-up, Trump grew irritated and said, “Quiet, quiet, piggy!”

"I know diversity and actually treating people with decency and human kindness is not, you know, what’s popular today in some quarters," Cooper was quoted saying. "But I just don’t understand how somebody acts like this time after time, and everyone just pretends like, 'Oh, that’s just what this guy does.' ”

In response, Navarro was quoted saying this: "We’ve grown numb to it. And I think we have to fight that urge to normalize it and get numb to it."

Lucey has long been a highly regarded Washington reporter. She has worked an array of high-end news orgs, including the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press.

Fellow reporters were pushing back against the latest bit of unusual behavior by President Trump. But in fact, this type of conduct has been widely "normalized" in recent years, in part with respect to President Trump, but also on a nightly basis by the Fox News Channel.

We've noted it here again and again, and then again and again. In a late September profile of the Fox News Channel's Kat Timpf, Amanda Hess of the New York Times finally had the courage to report what she saw and heard when she sat in the studio audience watching a taping of the nightly Fox program, Gutfeld!

In last Friday's report, we posted what Hess said about the Gutfeld! show in question. What did Hess see as she sat in the studio audience? We refresh you with these excerpts:

Mr. Gutfeld’s style mixes anti-liberal insult comedy with relentless punchlines about women’s bodies—their age, their weight, their sexual attractiveness. Each night, Ms. Timpf sits at his right-hand side, playfully challenging him while staking out an alternate style of physical humor—one that centers her own experience inhabiting a woman’s body.

I met Ms. Timpf on a Tuesday morning in August, on her second day back at “Gutfeld!” after a reconstructive surgery in which the tissue expanders inserted behind her chest muscle during the mastectomy she underwent in March were replaced with permanent breast implants.

[...]

The night before, Ms. Timpf had made her return to “Gutfeld!” just as the backlash to the backlash to Sydney Sweeney’s campaign for American Eagle jeans was fomenting on the right. A former heavyweight pro wrestler known as Tyrus offered his take on [Sidney] Sweeney’s female critics: “They look like a bag of oatmeal and they’re ugly and mean,” he said.

[...]

At the top of the show, Mr. Gutfeld delivered a battery of topical jokes in which he matched pieces of the day’s news with verdicts on liberal women’s bodies. Hillary Clinton is ugly. Joy Behar is old. Nancy Pelosi is old. Rosie O’Donnell is fat, Whoopi Goldberg is fat, Lizzo is fat, a professor of political science you’ve never heard of is fat...

Fat fat fat fat fat fat fat, but also ugly and old. Last Friday, we offered links through which you could watch this stream of insults yourself. 

That said, this sort of thing takes place, night after night after night after night, on the primetime "cable news" program. Over here in Blue America, our news orgs have agreed to help normalize this.

In the final passage we've posted, Hess offered an explicit account of what she saw in the Gutfeld! show she attended. In the half dozen profiles of Gutfeld and the Gutfeld! show which have appeared this year, it was the most explicit account of the program's persistent insult culture as directed at "women's bodies." 

That said, even this account understated the extent to which the primetime program feeds on insults of this type. And Hess's account came very late in her lengthy profile of the Gutfeld sidekick, Timpf. 

To her credit, Hess reported this building-block of this braindead show in a way which exceeded the accounts offered by other profiles. But even Hess, we'd have to say, under-reported the extent of the misogyny-adjacent insult culture which is one of the principal building blocks of this highly unusual program.

Quite sensibly, Cooper and Navarro voiced concern about the way the president's insulting treatment of female reporters has perhaps been normalized. But as we've been noting for years, no one within the Blue American cultural sphere has ever chosen to report what Greg Gutfeld actually does, on a nightly basis, on his heavily watched Fox News Channel program.

On Gutfeld!, he insults directed at liberal women go on and on, on a nightly basis, as Timpf just sits there and watches. The program's large "cable news" viewership is told that these liberal women are too old and too ugly, but mainly that they're just too fat fat fat fat fat.

This braindead conduct goes on and on, and then it goes on some more. Over here in Blue America, no one says a word. 

In Hess's profile of Timpf, she described this conduct in a way other profiles haven't done. Indeed, other journalists who have profiled Greg Gutfeld and his braindead show have possibly seemed to go out of their way to misdescribe, or to disappear, this highly unusual conduct. 

Based on appearances, it looks like no one really wants to report or discuss this unusual conduct. Thinking back to Susan Faludi's Backlash, we repeat our question:

Why not?

VandeHei asked an excellent question on today's Morning Joe. "In what world is that [conduct] OK?" the gentleman sensibly asked.

Tomorrow: "Misogynist," one observer said, midway through Hess's profile. But this fraudulent, stupid "cable news" program is also remarkably coarse.