President Donald Trump took another shot at a female journalist right to her face in the Oval Office, and it set off a wave of backlash. This time, the target was ABC News’ Rachel Scott, who pressed him about his earlier promise to release video of the Sept. 2 strike on a boat in the Caribbean Sea. Trump has since backed off on that promise, and when Scott asked him about it, he lashed out.
“Let me just tell you, you are an obnoxious — a terrible, actually a terrible reporter,” Trump said. “And it’s always the same thing with you. I told you, whatever Pete Hegseth wants to do is okay with me.” He then handed the question off to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The moment set off MS NOW host Nicolle Wallace, who used her Monday episode of “Deadline White House” to urge reporters to stop accepting what she called Trump’s “verbal violence” toward women in the press. Wallace ran through a list of recent insults Trump has hurled at female journalists, all captured on camera or in public settings.
“December 6th he called Kaitlin Collins ‘stupid and nasty.’ On November 27th he said ‘are you stupid’ to CBS journalist Nancy Cordes. On November 26th, he called the New York Times’ Katie Rogers ‘ugly.’ On November 18th, he called ABC’s Mary Bruce ‘terrible and insubordinate.’ November 14th, he told a Bloomberg reporter ‘quiet, piggy,’” she said.
Wallace didn’t hold back. “This is sick s——. This is sick,” she said, adding that every reporter in the room is simply trying to do their job for viewers and readers. She urged the press to think about their own families when deciding how to respond the next time Trump unloads on a woman doing her job.
“They should go home tonight and think about whether their sisters or their daughters, or their moms, or their sons or their husbands, or their fathers think that there’s something else they should do the next time he calls a female journalist obnoxious, terrible, stupid, nasty, stupid, ugly, terrible, insubordinate, or piggy.”
Wallace suggested that if Trump relies so heavily on the spotlight, reporters should consider pushing back together. “Maybe if Donald Trump can’t live without being on TV, and maybe if they said, ‘you know what, we’re going to have some solidarity,’ like they did with him wanting to change the names of oceans,” she said.
For Wallace, the stakes are bigger than one Oval Office exchange. She warned that the country is at a crossroads. “We’re either going to normalize this and then you’re going to hear all sorts of prominent people calling women all sorts of names — I’m sure by the time I get off TV I’ll have a few of those myself — but we’re either going to normalize this and usher in an era of unprecedented misogyny, or that press corps is going to act as one and say, ‘no more.’”
Trump’s treatment of reporters has been a running story for years, but the Oval Office moment with Rachel Scott has renewed calls for the press to stand together. Whether they actually do that next time he lashes out remains to be seen, but Wallace made it clear she thinks the moment for collective pushback is long overdue.