President Donald Trump recently inexplicably warned graduating cadets in a commencement address at the United States Military Academy at West Point about “trophy wives” — a term that is “toxic” and misogynistic, one gender studies expert said.
While delivering his speech on Saturday, Trump spent some time sharing a story about late real estate developer William Levitt, who is widely considered to be the pioneer of the suburbs. The president described the developer, whose legacy includes his policy to only sell properties to white buyers, as a “great, great real estate man” who at some point lost his “momentum.”
As Trump began to reference Levitt’s eventual career downfall, he mentioned the developer’s marital history, noting that Levitt sold his company and then “had nothing to do” before he got divorced and then “found a new wife.”
“Could you say a trophy wife? I guess we could say a trophy wife,” Trump said about Levitt’s second marriage. “It didn’t work out too well. But it doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you. A lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t work out. But it made him happy for a little while at least. But he found a new wife.”
Levitt was married three times — just like Trump. And the president’s scandal-ridden history as a husband does not fit traditional or conventional views of a devoted family man.
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Trump then went on and talked about Levitt later feeling “bored” with life, before the developer eventually “lost a lot of momentum” in his career and “lost everything.”
He ended the tangent about Levitt by speaking directly to the cadets — seemingly as a way to impart wisdom — saying: “You got to have momentum, but you have to know [when] that momentum is gone. You have to know when to say it’s time to get out.”
The term “trophy wives,” which Trump used in his speech, is widely credited to Julie Connelly, an editor of Fortune Magazine. She used the term in an article in 1989 to describe a “trophy wife” as a woman who works hard or “has her own business.” The phrase has held different meanings, uses and interpretations over the years, and today, most people use it as a way to label an attractive woman who’s married to a man who’s very successful in his career.
Kari J. Winter, a professor of American studies at the University at Buffalo, said the term “succinctly captures a toxic set of misogynistic ideas.”
“It implies that financially successful men deserve to acquire beautiful, sexy wives in the same way that they can purchase expensive cars, watches and other commodities,” she said. “It demeans women by reducing their value to patriarchal beauty standards, as if success for a woman means becoming a desirable object for a wealthy man. Gross.”
Winter, whose expertise includes gender, feminism, race and class, told HuffPost that she believes Trump’s “word salad about trophy wives offers his personal experience as evidence for his assertion that ‘a lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t work out.’”
“Maybe the message West Point graduates should take away is this: Reject Trump’s misogynistic pursuit of serial trophy wives,” she continued.
“Pursue genuine, egalitarian relationships based on mutual respect and love if you want your personal life to work out well.”
Trump’s speech at West Point may be viewed as a window into his state of mind, Winter said.
“Listeners need to be wary of imposing a coherent meaning on a nonsensical ramble,” Winter told HuffPost. “It might be more illuminating to view the speech as a window into Trump’s state of mind. Is he telling himself, ‘You have to sometimes know when you’ve lost momentum?’”
Aside from Trump’s mention of the misogynistic idea of a “trophy wife,” Winter thinks that Trump’s speech and his rant about Levitt are overall “embarrassing for the United States.”
She pointed out that the purpose of commencement speeches is to acknowledge and honor the accomplishments of the graduates, and to offer words of wisdom and encouragement — not asides about trophy wives or losing momentum.
She said that Trump’s apparent implication that having a “trophy wife” helped lead to Levitt losing his momentum was one of the “many incoherent passages in his speech.” And the president’s choice, overall, to highlight Levitt, who died in 1994, was “strange.”
It “calls attention to Trump’s advanced age and the way he is stuck in the past,” she said.
“As a teacher, I interact with hundreds of young people every year, and none of them dream of living in all-white, covenant-restricted, car-dependent suburbia any more than they want to live in apartheid South Africa,” Winter said.
After all, “affordable housing is one of the most urgent issues in the United States and around the world,” she continued, before later adding, “Why is it that Trump keeps returning to the worst design ideas of the 20th century?”
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