Trump Fired Off A Sexist Trope At A Faith Luncheon. It Shows He's An ‘Unhappy Man,' Expert Says.

Yahoo

26-07-2025

President Donald Trump fired off a sexist trope about women when he rambled on and on about his so-called Big Beautiful Bill during a faith luncheon at the White House earlier in July.
During Trump's speech at the White House Faith Office luncheon with business leaders, he went on a tangent about the giant bill he'd signed into law, which favors the wealthy and is expected to cause millions of people to lose their health insurance.
The president complained about the Republicans who'd initially pushed back on the legislation and claimed the bill would 'perhaps' prevent an economic depression that, he bizarrely reasoned, wouldn't be good for 'unattractive' men married to women.
'You people, so rich, so beautiful, so nice to look at, will be totally busted,' he said. 'And let's see how long your wife stays with you ... she'll stay with you for about three weeks and she'll say, 'Darling, I can't take it anymore. I can't take it anymore, darling, I'm leaving you.''
'I said to one guy — he's a very, very unattractive man — but he's smart and he's rich, and I said, 'You better hope we get this thing passed because your wife will be gone within about two minutes,'' Trump continued. 'He said, 'You're right.'' The crowd erupted in laughter.
Trump has made a few public quips about women marrying for money in recent months. Back in May — again making an assumption about his audience — the president inexplicably warned graduating cadets about 'trophy wives' in a commencement address at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He said that trophy wives often don't 'work out' as he told the story of the late real estate developer William Levitt and his eventual professional downfall.
Geralyn Fortney, a licensed professional counselor and regional clinic director with Thriveworks who specializes in women's issues, previously told HuffPost that narratives about women marrying men for financial benefits is a 'long-standing sexist trope.'
'It dismisses the fact that everyone, even women who marry men of privilege, is capable of marrying for love,' she said. 'This is a long-standing sexist trope that discredits women as incapable of love without strings attached, and also makes us believe that women are unable to have success on their own!'
As it relates to Trump's speech on Monday, Kari J. Winter, a professor of American studies at the University at Buffalo, said that the president — in addition to 'incessantly sexualizing women' — seems to 'have a core belief that women marry only for money.'
'Like a crude, cliched commercial that uses women's bodies to sell cars or booze or whatever, Trump conjures absurd, non-sequitur images of patriarchal marriage to sell his disastrous economic policies,' she told HuffPost in an email. 'He is literally telling men that they need his economics to keep their marriages afloat.'
Trump's worldview is 'transactional and misogynistic' — and he's unhappy, Winter says.
Winter, whose expertise includes gender, feminism, race and class, doesn't think Trump is consciously pushing a trope — she believes his 'worldview is fundamentally transactional and misogynistic.'
'In these remarks, he is addressing men despite the presence of women in the audience, and he assumes that they share his belief that wealth is the only way to attract and keep women,' she said. 'In his repetitive use of the 'trophy wife' trope, we can see that underneath his arrogance and delusions of grandeur is an unhappy man who does not believe that he is worthy of love.'
'Maybe he doesn't even believe that love is a thing,' she continued.
Winter admitted that she laughed out loud when she first heard Trump's remarks at the faith luncheon — but not because his speech was funny. She laughed because his comments were 'spectacularly awkward, inarticulate and idiotic.'
'We expect incoherent word salads from Trump, but the rambling offensiveness of his remarks continues to exceed expectations,' she said.
When asked to share her thoughts about the audible laughs Trump received from business leaders in attendance at the luncheon, Winter said: 'Some wealthy people will pander to anything as long as they get tax breaks at the expense of the poor and middle class.'
'The enormous economic violence encoded in Trump's big, b*shit bill shows how morally bankrupt his rich supporters are,' she wrote before later adding, 'History bears witness to the fact that many people cloak themselves in the garbs of religion in order to provide cover and permission for their most hateful, violent impulses.'
'They should be ashamed of themselves, but they appear incapable of shame so we as a society need to find a way to hold them accountable,' Winter added.
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