How the Lamest Insult Ever Made Trump Lose His Mind

It’s easy to assume that, during the Trump administration, the White House went to insane lengths to suppress the president’s haters. But this week, we got some conclusive evidence, or rather, conclusive-ass evidence: It’s now a matter of congressional record that in 2019, the Trump White House tried to pressure Twitter to delete a tweet in which Chrissy Teigen called the president, and I quote, “a pussy ass bitch.”

Rep. Gerry Connolly unearthed the episode in a congressional hearing on Wednesday, which began with a 2019 tweet from Trump complaining that others were taking credit for a crime bill he’d passed: “Guys like boring musician @johnlegend, and his filthy mouthed wife, are talking now about how great it is—but I didn’t see them around when we needed help getting it passed.”

Teigen, the “filthy-mouthed wife” and media personality who is indeed married to John Legend, posted her own now-historic tweet soon after: “Lol what a pussy ass bitch. tagged everyone but me. an honor, mister president.”

In the hearing, Anika Collier Navaroli, who worked in content moderation at Twitter, responded to Connolly’s question by confirming, “I do remember hearing that we had received a request from the White House to make sure that we evaluated this tweet, and that they wanted it to come down because it was a derogatory statement directed towards the president.” She went on to read the tweet in full when prompted by another congressman. Twitter ultimately declined to take down the tweet. (Naturally, Teigen has been taking a little victory lap this week.)

It’s unclear whether Trump ever petitioned Twitter to take down other disparaging tweets. So as far as we know now, “pussy ass bitch” may be the only tweet that enraged Trump enough to get Twitter involved.

That’s pretty incredible, as Trump was called a lot worse during his time in office. Kim Jong-un once called him a “dotard,” a 14th-century insult few people have heard of. Lebron James memorably called him “u bum.” John Oliver compared Trump’s genitals to a Cheeto “with the dust rubbed off,” and the magazine Spy called him a “short-fingered vulgarian”—an insult that’s been kicking around for three decades. Twitter users were always churning out new jabs, too—one popular one was that Trump “looks like the villain in a movie where the hero is a dog.” This isn’t even getting into all the serious criminal allegations that have been leveled at him: There are four criminal probes going on right now alone, and he’s been accused of sexual misconduct by more than 25 women. And still, the thing he was most embarrassed by was pussy-ass bitch? It’s not even a good burn!

His reaction might have something to do with who said it. As Nicole Holliday, an assistant professor of linguistics at Pomona College, told me, “Chrissy Teigen is an internet celebrity. Being dragged by her is worse than anything else.” One reason for that is her visibility and how much traction her tweets get, said Sylvia Sierra, a linguist and assistant professor of communication and rhetoric at Syracuse University. “I think it’s hilarious,” Sierra said, marveling that it was this tweet that sent him over the edge. “That’s my professional opinion.”

Each part of Teigen’s key phrase, pussy, -ass (because there should technically be a hyphen in there), and bitch, has its own rich history, but as a whole, it refers to a cowardly, weak, or effeminate man, and it somewhat repetitively means that twice. “The insult itself, I think, is actually kind of uniquely bad to him, because it’s double-gendered,” said Holliday, pointing out that Trump’s persona is all about masculinity, and he tends to get upset when anyone insinuates he’s weak—which, for him, is directly (and misogynistically) tied to femininity. Teigen “was able to, in one tweet, use both a noun and an adjective that conveyed this weak femininity that she was trying to project on him,” Holliday said.

After being called a “filthy-mouthed wife,” it was only fitting that Teigen would respond in kind. “This is the whole Michelle Obama ‘When they go low, we go high’ thing,” Holliday said. “He made it so tempting to go low.” There’s also a delightful schoolyard quality to the phrase, which explains why Trump went to Mommy Twitter to tattle on Teigen.

Meanwhile, pussy is a word that was already closely tied to Trump before Teigen lobbed it at him. The Access Hollywood tape famously showed him saying “Grab ‘em by the pussy,” and that led directly to subsequent Women’s Marches and their infamous pink pussy hats. At one point in its history, back in the 1500s, pussy was actually a nice word for a young woman—although it also meant vagina—but it started to be used as an insult implying cowardice, femininity, and homosexuality around the end of the 19th century. This is common with slang words. “From about 1600 onwards, what gets used for insults and swearing is parts of the body and what we do with them,” said Jonathan Green, the creator of Green’s Dictionary of Slang.

There’s more history and scholarship about the -ass suffix than you’d think, too. Green’s Dictionary of Slang has citations for it going back to the 1950s, and it’s generally accepted to be a shortening of -assed, as in half-assed. The lexicographer Ben Zimmer has attributed its growing popularity in recent decades to African-American colloquial use, citing in part research by Arthur K. Spears, a professor at the City College of New York. As for where it comes from, Green told me that “early on in the use of ass or assed, it stopped only being used for parts of the body. By what’s called metonymy, it becomes representative of the whole person.” He used the example “saving your ass,” which means saving yourself. So it follows that “if you’re pussy-assed, you’re just entirely gutless, cowardly, effeminate,” Green said. In other words, all of you—your entire being—is made of being a pussy.

Sierra also pointed out that the connotation of pussy is evolving, citing the American Dialect Society’s selection of -ussy as its word of the year, but it’s safe to say Teigen was putting her whole Chrissussy into a pretty traditionally derogatory sense of the word.

Then we arrive at bitch, a “huge word,” according to Green. “It’s one of slang’s heavy hitters,” he said, and we all know what it means. James Harbeck is one of the founders of Strong Language, a blog about swearing. “Bitch today usually means someone who, again, is dominated by someone else,” he told me via email. “In this case I believe it comes by way of its use for prostitutes (a pimp might refer to the prostitutes he controls as ‘my bitches’), tracing back to the application of the term to an unpleasant, too-aggressive woman.” Taken all together, the phrase pussy-ass bitch “shows very clearly the misogynistic basis of a lot of English swearwords,” Harbeck said.

Harbeck also pointed out that the word pussy is associated with cat, ass with donkey, and bitch with dog, meaning, using ghoti logic, that Teigen kind of called Trump a “cat donkey dog.” I don’t think this really means anything, but I love it.

Beyond that, we’ll probably never know why pussy-ass bitch was the straw that broke the Cheeto’s back. “Some of this is just Trump being unpredictable, right?” Holliday concluded. “Who knows what’s gonna set him off?”

At any rate, Trump’s whims and lack of impulse control have made pussy-ass bitch a pivotal part of American history. I, for one, couldn’t be more proud.