Trump, you cat donkey dog

You may have heard that Donald Trump is a pussy ass bitch. You may have heard it, to be precise, from Chrissy Teigen; she called him that after he insulted her husband (John Legend) and her, back in 2019:

….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. “Anchor”@LesterHoltNBC doesn’t even bring up the subject of President Trump or the Republicans when talking about….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 9, 2019

lol what a pussy ass bitch. tagged everyone but me. an honor, mister president.

— chrissy teigen (@chrissyteigen) September 9, 2019

It’s back in the news because we just learned that Trump tried to trump it – according to a former Twitter employee testifying before congress, the White House asked Twitter to take it down, and Twitter said no. You can read more about it on Slate, in an article by Heather Schwedel that quotes me, Jonathon Green, Ben Zimmer, and a couple of noted linguists.

Obviously, the real question for us on this here blog today is “Why did Donald John Trump object so strongly to being called a ‘cat donkey dog’?” 

You’re here on the sweary blog about swearing, so you know as well as we do (and Trump did too) that Teigen’s characterization was not meant in its most literal, schoolbook sense. We’ve had articles about pussy and Trump – Nancy Friedman wrote “A feline profanity” part 1 and part 2, and Colleen Barry gave us “‘Pussy’ on a hot Trump mic.” We’ve learned about the excellent usability of ass – Stan Carey introduced us to Ismo Leikola’s perspective on it. And bitch is a whole-ass category. But there’s something special about Teigen’s usage, and what it tells us about English-language crude terms of abuse… and about Trump in particular.

As Nancy Friedman and Colleen Barry discussed, Trump has a longstanding association with the word pussy through his infamous “grab them by the pussy.” But that’s not the same pussy. Pussy referring to a person doesn’t come by way of pussy meaning ‘vagina’; it started as a term for feline, endearing women, and was then applied to effeminate—especially homosexual—men. From there it became a term of abuse for any man who fails to display proper “manly” dominance and instead lets himself be dominated by others. 

So Teigen was calling Trump timid and effeminate, which is especially insulting to someone who thrives on a hypermasculine domination, subjugation, and humiliation of others. It is perhaps ironic that although, when the two words are used anatomically, cunt is a synonym for pussy, when applied to people cunt typically means someone who engages in exactly Trump’s favorite kind of deliberately unpleasant behavior, whereas pussy is applied to someone who entirely lacks the nerve for it.

And then comes a donkey! Well, of course, ass doesn’t mean ‘donkey’ here; it’s an American rendition of the word that was originally arse – it merged in form with ass meaning ‘donkey’ and, in the figurative senses meaning ‘jerk’, has a lot of overlap and blurred lines as to which ass is which. But here it’s ‘butt’, being used as a modifier to pussy, meaning more or less ‘like’ or ‘in the manner of’ or just intensifying the descriptive in a negative way (making its object the butt of the joke, or worse). You’ve likely seen it in expressions like “broke-ass friends” or “lazy-ass brother”; it attaches to an adjective or, more recently, an attributive noun, to make a compound modifier of a following noun. 

This -ass apparently got this function – as a clitic or a suffix, depending on whom you ask – among US Marines during the 1940s, when big-assed, used literally (referring to a woman, typically), spread to use on other objects and got trimmed down to big-ass; the Oxford English Dictionary gives a first citation of this use as “big-ass nightstick” from 1945. You can read much, much more about its development in Wilson Miller’s 2017 master’s thesis, “Grammaticalizaton in English: A Diachronic and Synchronic Analysis of the ‘ass’ Intensifier.” Anyway, though pussy and ass carry an anatomical taint between them, in Teigen’s use pussy ass is better rendered as ‘contemptibly timid’.

And, as mentioned, if you have [something]-ass you need a noun following it, which in this case is bitch, which continues the theme to mean a subjugated man. Its application to people started with women, who continue to be its main targets, since after all a bitch is most literally a female dog. It can mean an unpleasant and ill-tempered woman, but it first of all meant a lewd or lascivious woman, like a “bitch in heat,” and from that extended to prostitutes – male and female – and gay men. For a whole historical tracking of its different uses, see Green’s Dictionary of Slang, written by our illustrious co-fucker Jonathon Green. The use of phrases like “my bitch” or “his bitch” to mean a prostitute who is controlled by a pimp is quite recent, dating from the 1960s, but that’s an extension of a well-established use.

And that implication, of a controlled sexual subordinate, is clearly present in Teigen’s phrase. It’s the same reason why when people called Trump “Putin’s bitch” they meant that he was in a (metaphorically sexually) subservient position to Putin, doing his bidding in the same way as a dominated woman is expected to for the man who dominates her. So the irony piles on further, not only because in a literal sense a pussy is a cat and a bitch is a dog, but because when originally applied to a woman pussy and bitch meant opposite kinds of person (sweet versus nasty); but since both are terms referring to women, the application of either to a man, in the male-dominance schema, is a grievous insult. 

And that is how “cat donkey dog” – well, “cat buttocks dog” – becomes “contemptibly femininely timid kind of sexual subordinate.” It shows very clearly the misogynistic basis of a lot of English swearwords (this is also true in many other languages, as I wrote about for the BBC), and Trump’s response to it shows how strongly he objects to being treated as he aims to treat women… especially when he’s being treated that way by a woman. Boo hoo… what a chicken, and what a turkey.