Alicia Machado, who won the Miss Universe pageant in 1996, was photographed in May of this year in Los Angeles. Credit Emily Berl for The New York Times.
The undeniably beautiful Ms. Machado, who is beautiful at any size, (preferably a well-nourished one) speaks out about her treatment at Trump’s hands, and the trauma she’s lived with for 20 years. As I understand it, Ms. Clinton had quite a moment in the debate regarding Trump’s abusive tactics with Ms. Machado. The whole article is a good read. I’d dearly like to think that Trump was at the very least moderately shamed, but no. All he cared about was how he was caught out. Nasty creep, that one.
For 20 years, Alicia Machado has lived with the agony of what Donald J. Trump did to her after she won the Miss Universe title: shame her, over and over, for gaining weight.
Private scolding was apparently insufficient. Mr. Trump, at the time an executive producer of the pageant, insisted on accompanying Ms. Machado, then a teenager, to a gym, where dozens of reporters and cameramen watched as she exercised.
Mr. Trump, in his trademark suit and tie, posed for photographs beside her as she burned calories in front of the news media. “This is somebody who likes to eat,” Mr. Trump said from inside the gym.
[…]
“I was sick — anorexia and bulimia for five years,” she said in an interview with The New York Times in May. “I was 18. My personality wasn’t created yet. I was just a girl.”
Mr. Trump has acknowledged pressuring her to lose weight, saying it was her job as Miss Universe to remain in peak physical shape. On Tuesday morning, he made no apologies for that.
“She gained a massive amount of weight and it was a real problem,” Mr. Trump told Fox News.
The full story is here.
He’s such a pustule.
My dog.
I don’t suppose anyone ever told him, as he was heaping on all this abuse of Ms. Machado, “hey, Donnie, you could stand to lose a few pounds yerself y’know.”
No, of course not, what was I thinking….
Yep. The “massive amount of weight” was 12 lbs.
That was extremely shitty behaviour on his part. He is completely self-centered and lacks even a tiniest amount of empathy.
sez caine: “The ‘massive amount of weight’ was 12 lbs.”
Only 12 pounds? That’s unpossible. The Donald said she ballooned up from 117-118 to 160-170 pounds, a weight-gain of 40-50 pounds, and the Donald’s track record with respect to unimpeachable veracity is such that only a LOSER or a Democrat could possibly doubt the Donald’s word.
At which point Trump’s behaviour would of course have been totally justified, right?
Can we stop discussing how much weight gain/loss is acceptable in women and acknowledge that this is nobody’s business outside of extreme cases where it’s between her and her doctor?
Someone should tell him that those two things are not the same. I don’t weigh all that much, but I’m no physical shape to speak of.
Let’s even leave the weight issue off the table, and the anti-woman misogyny issue off the table. Let’s assume counterfactually that this was simply a straight employer/employee dispute, and also assume counterfactually that he had a legit complaint against an employee who wasn’t doing a good job for the job for which xe was hired.
It’s worth pointing out that even giving him this much benefit of the doubt, this is still incredibly shitty management. If there’s ever a relationship that should call for tact and kindness, rather than public humiliation, that relationship would seem to be the one between a powerful boss and a teenaged employee. But as we all know all too well, Trump’s motto seems to be, “What’s the point of having power if you can’t use it to humiliate your underlings?”
I’d much rather look at her than Trump. Actually, I’d much rather talk to her than Trump. Actually, if she were the republican nominee, I’d probably prefer that because, if she’s capable of getting dressed without assistance, she’d probably be better than Trump.