Megyn Kelly Quote

Then I asked him the question that would change my life. Mr. Trump, I said, one of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don’t use a politician’s filter. However, that is not without its downsides. In particular, when it comes to women. You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals.’ Only Rosie O’Donnell, he quipped. The crowd chuckled at his Rosie O’Donnell comment. I passed no judgment on the audience, but I was not going to join them in laughing. For the record, I said, it was well beyond Rosie O’Donnell. Trump knew it too. I’m sure it was, he said. We had fact-checked every word of that question. Rosie had, no question, been vicious toward Trump too, and if it had only been her, I would not have asked that question. But what I’d seen in my research binder was that he’d made a habit of attacking women regularly with these sorts of terms—mocking their looks and sexualizing them. The women he’d belittled in the terms I used in my question included, but were not limited to, Arianna Huffington, Bette Midler, New York Times columnist Gail Collins, and a lawyer requesting a prearranged break to pump breast milk for her baby (disgusting). There were many, many others. Your Twitter account, I continued, has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who is likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the ‘war on women’? First Trump said that we’d gotten too politically correct in this country. And then this: What I say is what I say. And honestly, Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that. He looked angry, I thought. After all my planning for that moment, I was relieved that he hadn’t attacked me personally in his response. Still, I felt his anger, and understood him perfectly. He was making a veiled but very clear threat. I’d known Trump for several years by this point. We’d had a mostly good—but also complicated—relationship. Seared into my mind was a threat he’d made to me by phone just four days earlier to unleash what he called his beautiful Twitter account on me. I expected I would find out what he meant by that soon, and indeed I would.