The Unhinged Meltdown That Wasn’t

Why Donald Trump made the mistake of tweeting out that (new) instantly iconic photo of Nancy Pelosi.
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The image was instantly iconic: President Donald Trump sits at a long table in the White House, flanked by more than a dozen powerful men in suits. Directly across from him, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the only woman at the table and his greatest political opponent, is on her feet and holding the floor. Her face is calm, her body language assertive but measured. Trump’s brow is furrowed, his mouth agape. She points a finger at the president as she speaks—the first face-off between Pelosi and Trump since the House launched an impeachment inquiry under her leadership.

Both Trump and Pelosi emerged from that meeting on Wednesday, each accusing the other of having had a “meltdown.” Trump offered the photo as proof of his case. “Nervous Nancy’s unhinged meltdown,” he tweeted, seemingly certain that this image of a woman speaking up in a meeting depicted some kind of psychotic break.

Perhaps it’s so foreign to Trump, who formerly owned two beauty pageants and notoriously bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” to be legitimately challenged by a member of the opposite sex that any woman’s assertion of power, to him, looks like a descent into madness. What everyone else saw was an image of a woman literally standing up to a president that more than half of the country wants impeached and removed from office. The photo was so flattering to Pelosi, and so widely celebrated on Twitter, that she made it her cover photo across social media platforms.

“Ok, maybe I am a feminist,” conservative commentator Bill Kristol tweeted alongside the photo.

“We are all feminists today,” added George Conway, husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne.

The fact that Pelosi continues to show Trump respect and conduct herself with measure and restraint around him is becoming almost hard to fathom, considering how justified she would be in having a rage fit at that meeting. Trump’s hasty foreign policy decision this week greenlighted Turkey’s deadly attacks on the Syrian Kurds, who have long fought alongside the U.S. against ISIS, drawing strong rebukes from both parties. He openly asked foreign countries to investigate his Democratic political opponents and blatantly used his office for financial gain. And, on a more personal level, he’s been referring to Pelosi as “Nervous Nancy” for months, which is certainly not a professional, mature, or respectful way for the president to address the Speaker of the House.

But Pelosi knows better than to “melt down” in public. She rose to prominence in a world where women, especially female politicians, do not get to show anger—and are even accused of it when they are perfectly composed. Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson called Senator Kirsten Gillibrand “positively unglued” in 2017 when she spoke out against military sexual assault. Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller characterized Senator Kamala Harris as “hysterical” after she questioned Attorney General Jeff Sessions in her signature tough, prosecutorial way about the Russia investigation. (The word “hysteria,” tellingly, comes from the Greek word “hystera,” meaning uterus, and was once thought to arise from a literal defect in women’s wombs.)

When Senator Elizabeth Warren delivered a passionate speech about the future of the Democratic Party after Trump’s election in 2016, Morning Joe host Mika Brzezinski described it as a meltdown. “There’s an anger there that was shrill, a step above what it needed to be, unmeasured and almost unhinged,” she said on her show.

Trump’s misreading of the Pelosi photo reflects an old cultural anxiety around women’s ambition. Harvard researchers found in 2010 that voters felt contempt, anger, and disgust toward “power-seeking” women, while they see power-seeking men as tough and competent. Women who even calmly exert power are seen as threatening and unlikeable, an affront to traditional gender roles.

It’s why pundits constantly told Hillary Clinton in 2016 that she needed to smile more—out of just a vague feeling that her desire to be president conveyed anger and aggressiveness in and of itself. She has spoken about the challenge of having to appear calm and nonreactive as Trump menacingly hovered behind her on the stage at the second presidential debate. “Think of all the times where you are either mentally or physically gripping yourself, [willing yourself] not to respond, not to lash out, not to display the anger that you feel, because you know it will redound to your detriment,” she told New York magazine. “So you swallow it.”

Throughout history, when women have shown anger, “they’ve been ignored or marginalized, laughed or blanched at, their vehement objections treated as irrational theater, inconsequential to the important matter of governing the nation,” Rebecca Traister wrote in her 2018 book, Good and Mad.

Of course, men in power are free to behave in unhinged ways. Twenty million people watched Brett Kavanaugh actually melt down before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year when confronted with a decades-old sexual assault allegation against him. He alternated between tears and indignant rage, contorting his face into a snarl and raising his voice in anger. "You sowed the wind for decades to come," he warned Democratic senators in what amounted to a threat. "The whole country will reap the whirlwind.” Trump praised his performance, and the Senate promptly confirmed him to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court.

Former House speaker John Boehner was known for the constant stream of tears down his face. He cried during a Taco Bell event and in an interview with the Golf Channel.

The president himself has meltdowns on a near daily basis, all of which are documented on his Twitter feed. He lashes out against anyone who criticizes him, spontaneously fires members of his staff and cabinet, expresses romantic love for murderous dictators who flatter him. His flamboyant histrionics and reactive politics have shocked the entire world.

There was little doubt on Wednesday which of the two politicians had a meltdown in that meeting. The fact that Trump miscalculated so badly in thinking that the rest of the world would share his perception of an unhinged woman in the photo suggests that the tides are slowly changing in favor of equality. That image of Pelosi rising like air above a sea of powerful men, one of whom she’s about to impeach, will forever be a visual manifestation of her legacy.

Laura Bassett is a freelance journalist writing about politics, gender, and culture.


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