Quiet, piggy,

President Donald Trump says, "Quiet, piggy," in response to a female reporter's question about Jeffrey Epstein aboard Air Force One on Nov. 14. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump says, "Quiet, piggy," in response to a female reporter's question about Jeffrey Epstein aboard Air Force One on Nov. 14. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)


Last month, when pressed by a Bloomberg News reporter about the release of emails written by Jeffrey Epstein that mentioned him, President Donald Trump lashed out.

"Quiet, piggy," Trump said, cutting off the veteran journalist, Catherine Lucey, who was traveling with the White House press pool aboard Air Force One.


At first glance, this crude insult didn't measure up to the onslaught of anti-media actions Trump's administration has unleashed in the year since the 2024 election.

It wasn't eliminating money for public broadcasting or shutting down the Voice of America or restricting White House access to the Associated Press for defying his dictum to rename the Gulf of Mexico or squeezing millions in tribute payments from ABC and CBS over baseless defamation claims or getting late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel suspended for snarky comments about a slain right-wing activist.

It wasn't threatening media owners with regulatory reprisals or forcing editorial management changes in an embarrassing number of news organizations targeted for ideological discipline (or, in the case of the BBC, threatening astronomical litigation over a questionable video edit) or tightening the boundaries of Pentagon coverage so that news about the world's most powerful military is entrusted to media outfits of borderline competency but unswerving Trumpist loyalty.

Related video: 'You're all radical left': Trump gets fed up with negative media coverage, takes his anger out on reporters in the Oval Office (Slingshot News)
Washington was the most dangerous place in this country.Video Player is loading.
Slingshot News

'You're all radical left': Trump gets fed up with negative media coverage, takes his anger out on reporters in the Oval Office

To be sure, as this list attests, the administration has indeed been busy tormenting the media in ways that are more obviously consequential than a childish rebuke.

But "quiet, piggy" is still worthy of special attention. It's not just insolent, rude and sexist; it's an expression of disdain meant to undermine a basic practice that lies at the core of the relationship between the public and the powerful in a democracy, and it's part of a pattern.

In the days that followed the piggy comment, Trump described a female New York Times staffer in an online post as "a third-rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out," called a female ABC reporter "a terrible person and a terrible reporter" and asked a female CBS News reporter "are you a stupid person?" for her question about government screening of Afghan refugees.

This kind of vilification, not always reserved for women, has become standard practice among Trump devotees when dealing with the media.


"The automatic response to any inquiry now (is) to insult the reporter and malign the news organization, often ad hominem and often without addressing the substance of the inquiry," said New York Times reporter Peter Baker, who has covered every president since Clinton.

When CNN reported that the need for a personal signoff from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had delayed relief funds after catastrophic flooding in Texas, Noem responded by calling CNN "fake news" and "absolute trash."

In the aftermath of his own baffling mistake in including the Atlantic magazine editor Jeffrey Goldberg in a Signal group chat before air strikes in Yemen, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called Goldberg "a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who has made a profession of peddling hoaxes."

Kari Lake, head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, asked in a deposition about coverage of Trump administration efforts to slash the agency, said the Washington Post was "the biggest piece of garbage in journalism in this country."


Notably, Trump has battled other powerful institutions without defaulting to this kind of harsh and bullying invective. He has come out swinging against big law firms, the Federal Reserve, medical science, the country's top universities, the leaders of our closest foreign allies and even the federal judiciary in ways that often seemed reckless and unmoored to fact.

But the most venomous language, the nastiest verbal abuse, is reserved for the news media.

There's a good reason why a reporter with a vexing question is singled out for insult and disdain. Direct, face-to-face confrontation between reporter and official is the purest expression in our political culture of the bedrock expectation that the government be held accountable. Tell us what you did and why you did it.

An official response consisting of repudiation and slander constitutes a frontal assault on accountability. When any effort to question a policy or action is met with a denunciation intended to ridicule the questioner, impugn their motives and destroy their credibility, the official act skates past unexamined. The topic instead becomes the spectacle, with the boldness of the reporter in outsmarting the boorish putdown. Accountability is shredded.

The press does itself no favors by failing to collectively respond and collaboratively insist on answers to the questions that the annoyed official tossed aside. But the cause of accountability faces stiffer headwind. The news media can by itself do little more than raise these questions; with law enforcement machinery increasingly in brazenly partisan hands and without control of at least one house of Congress so that authoritative hearings can be held, there is a near-total absence of authoritative venues where answers to the same questions the reporter asks can be demanded.

In the meantime, we can take some comfort by realizing that muzzling the media has rarely been a winning tactic. Questions about the Epstein and Trump relationship persist, despite the insolence of the president's response. And the Pentagon coverage restrictions haven't kept awkward disclosures about air strikes against alleged drug boats out of the media spotlight.

Still, every time a reporter pulls back from asking the tough question for fear of being insulted and ridiculed by a powerful official, the government slips further away from the scrutiny it deserves.

Edward Wasserman is a media ethicist and professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he is a former dean.