After a female reporter tried to question President Donald Trump about the Epstein files last week, an irritated Trump abruptly shut her down by saying “Quiet, piggy.”
Those two little words — a low among lows for sexist comments from a sitting president — speak volumes about how Trump views women. They should also be a warning sign about the rampant normalization of misogyny in U.S. political culture, and how it could affect our democracy more broadly.
A gendered slur such as “piggy” is meant to disparage, belittle and most of all put a woman in her place.
Hostile sexism is now the biggest — or among the top three — predictors of support for political violence and willingness to engage in it in survey research across multiple countries, including in the U.S. Together with the cultural normalization of misogyny driven by popular misogynist influencers who peddle “dating” advice and courses teaching how to control and manipulate women, we should be very concerned about how overt misogyny from political leaders may affect democracy, political violence and social cohesion.
Some of this misogyny is cloaked as a call for a return to male leadership or more “masculine” approaches over supposedly lesser feminine ones. Take Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s call for more “masculine energy” in the corporate world or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement of a return to the “highest male standards” for combat roles.
But there’s a bigger, bolder kind of misogyny taking center stage in shockingly casual ways. A gendered slur such as “piggy” is meant to disparage, belittle and most of all put a woman in her place. Its intent is not only to insult, but to also erode the confidence and authority of a woman.
Both tactics — the call for “male” standards or masculine energy in the workplace and public life, and the disparagement of women in professional roles — aim to eliminate or reduce the space for women to be in public or professional roles at all, especially in leadership ones.
It’s no coincidence that Trump so easily reached for an animal slur to degrade and dehumanize a woman who was just doing her job. Animal slurs are one of the most common derogatory epithets lobbed at women. Slurs such as “piggy” convey that a woman is insufficiently disciplined or slender, or that her behavior is unnatural, so aggressive that it can only be described as unhuman. It’s similar to the popular slur “bitch” — a word that refers to a dog — which is often directed at powerful or ambitious women whose behavior is cast as uppity or difficult, or who are seen as insufficiently feminine, deferential, gentle, helpful or pleasing.
Pairing “piggy” with an actual directive to be quiet makes it even clearer that the goal is to silence women for speaking up. “Quiet, piggy” punishes a woman for daring to question Trump’s authority, for pressing his dismissal of a question about Epstein with a follow-up query. It is an easy, casual attack on a woman’s autonomy, intelligence and dignity — directly intended, with both instruction and insult, to discredit and stifle.
Those two little words — a low among lows for sexist comments from a sitting president — speak volumes about how Trump views women.
This is why Trump wielded the slur in a moment of annoyance — because he intended the phrase “Quiet, piggy” to discipline a woman who didn’t conform to his expectations of submissive, demure behavior. He didn’t even have to think to do it — the phrase just popped out of his mouth spontaneously.
The desire to control and contain, to keep women in their place, explains why so many sexist and misogynist metaphors, including those favored by Trump and his supporters in attacks on female political opponents, involve motion.
Send Her Back, Lock Her Up, Ditch the Witch, Joe and the Ho Got to Go. Women who are publicly visible are particular targets — because the goal is to not just belittle, but to do so in a way that makes them less powerful, with metaphors that remove them from view. Plenty of people will argue that critiques of “Quiet, piggy” represent political correctness gone amok, the latest sign of a cosmopolitan liberal mainstream who just can’t take a joke. But even those who don’t think this kind of misogyny should be worrisome on its own should be aware that it is a glaring warning sign for the health and stability of our democracy. In the end, Trump’s casual slur at a reporter who annoyed him is best understood as punishment directed at a woman for not behaving as Trump thinks she should. Women who violate the unspoken rules about where they belong are met with swift reminders to stay in their place — such as the postelection celebratory misogynist chants and memes “get back in the kitchen” or “make me a sandwich.” “Quiet, piggy” is just the latest terrible example. And if we stay quiet, the one thing we know is it won’t be the last.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University, where she directs the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL). Her most recent book is "Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism." 
