Donald Trump Strikes Back After NYT Piece: ‘Media Is TOTALLY Dishonest!’

Donald Trump went on a Twitter rampage recently, responding to a New York Times piece accusing him of mistreating women. The real estate mogul’s reaction went as expected, but this time he has the GOP establishment at his back as well. Even RNC Chair Reince Priebus came out to say “people just don’t care” about the story.

The NYT called Trump’s public treatment of women “degrading, impersonal, performed,” citing his insults against Rosie O’Donnell and his telling a female contestant on his show The Celebrity Apprentice, “That must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.”

The newspaper went looking for more examples of poor treatment from Trump’s past, and they found it.

The reporters conducted over 50 interviews over the course of six weeks. They say the interviews “reveal unwelcome romantic advances, unending commentary on the female form, a shrewd reliance on ambitious women, and unsettling workplace conduct.” Donald Trump shot back on Twitter today.

The failing @nytimes wrote yet another hit piece on me. All are impressed with how nicely I have treated women, they found nothing. A joke!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 15, 2016

Everyone is laughing at the @nytimes for the lame hit piece they did on me and women.I gave them many names of women I helped-refused to use

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 15, 2016

Why doesn’t the failing @nytimes write the real story on the Clintons and women? The media is TOTALLY dishonest!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 15, 2016

Still, the Times did admit in the piece that the total picture was “complex,” acknowledging that Donald Trump promoted several women to high-level positions in his organization despite a male-dominant culture in his industry.

Reince Priebus, the Chairman of the RNC, defended his party’s candidate to Chris Wallace, explaining that these kinds of pieces come out “every couple weeks – people just don’t care.”

The Huffington Post reports that Wallace was “flummoxed” by the response, saying “I don’t know why you say people don’t care about that.”

The polls also appear to show that women voters do care. According to Gallup, 70 percent of women respondents had a negative opinion of the real estate mogul (although 58 percent of men didn’t like him either).

Polls from Quinnipiac University reported by the Inquisitr showed a similar trend, but with one crucial difference – when matched against Hillary Clinton, men favor Trump by about the same margins as women favor Clinton.

Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac Poll, explained.

“This election may be good for divorce lawyers. The gender gap is massive and currently benefits Trump. In Pennsylvania, Clinton’s 19-point lead among women matches Trump’s 21-point margin among men. In Ohio, she is up 7 points among women but down 15 points with men. In Florida she is up 13 points among women but down 13 points among men.”

There are a few tidbits from the NYT that might make Donald Trump a little more disliked by women, and probably by some men as well.

When his then-teenage daughter Ivanka Trump ran in the 1997 Miss Teen USA pageant, he asked Brook Antoinette Mahealani Lee, former Miss Universe, “Don’t you think my daughter’s hot? She’s hot, right?” according to his recollection.

“I was like, ‘Really?’ That’s just weird. She was 16. That’s creepy.”

The Times also brought up allegations that the real estate mogul once raped his ex-wife Ivana during the last few years of their marriage.

Ivana said “the story is totally without merit” and explained that the source material was a depiction from her of how the tenderness had left their marriage by that time, rather than a literal rape.

Donald Trump’s poor image among women is a serious handicap for the candidate, and the New York Times isn’t the first and won’t be the last to dig deeper on the issue this election season.

[Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]