I went for a run earlier this week under a wind advisory. The gusts were brutal, the kind that make you question the lengths you will go to avoid the treadmill.
At one point I passed a construction site, and hovering around it was a thick, low-hanging cloud of dirt. When a gust hit, it didn’t drift, it exploded. It rained all over me. It got up in my face. It stung my eyes. It crackled in my ears. It caked on my wet shirt like paste.
By the time I got home, I regretted my disdain for running inside on the treadmill.
And after I showered and sat down, I couldn’t stop thinking: this is exactly what Donald Trump is like.
He’s dirty. Comprehensively, constitutionally, irreversibly dirty. He has a dirty mouth. A dirty mind and hands, “grab ’em by ...” he told Billy Bush in 2005. They were words a jury would later consider a kind of personal confession when they found him liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll.
And according to Carroll, he doesn’t “smell good” just like dirt.
He has a dirty name. It’s one he’s now smeared across the Kennedy Center, the Institute of Peace, federal buildings up and down the capital, American currency, national park passes, and, soon on United States passports.
In fact, his name was so dirty in New York City that they took it off buildings.
He has a dirty face, plastered with dirty orange cosmetics. He has dirty hands used for the grabbing, and now also because they are covered with another cosmetic meant to hide bruises. He gets no sympathy from me for that.
His whole persona works exactly like that construction-site dirt in a wind advisory. He gets in your face. The image of him stings your eyes. He crackles incessantly in your ears, from Truth Social, from behind the Resolute Desk, from the tarmac, from every rally.
He coats everything he touches and doesn’t wash out easily.
And on Thursday, he showed up at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool for what was supposed to be a photo op for his so-called “beautification” project, painting the pool an “American flag blue,” and proceeded to do what he always does: make everything dirtier just by being there.
When ABC News senior White House correspondent Rachel Scott asked him the entirely reasonable question of why he was focused on renovation projects while a war in Iran raged and gas prices were soaring, Trump did not answer her. He aimed a dirty insult at her.
“You probably don’t see dirt, but I do,” he told her. Then, more pointedly: “You can understand dirt, maybe better than I can, baby, but I don’t allow it.”
Just typing those words makes me feel filthy.
A racially charged, condescending gut punch to Scott, certainly, although she is as resilient as they come, but also to anyone listening to his mudslinging. As he walked away, a hot mic caught him apparently calling her a vulgar misogynistic slur and dismissing her as “a horror show.”
Trump was right that someone at that reflecting pool on Thursday night understood dirt intimately. It was him.
Trump’s first wife, Ivana, accused him of rape during their 1990 divorce proceedings, and at least two dozen women have accused him of sexual assault, harassment, or misconduct dating back to the 1970s.
But his treatment of Black journalists, especially women, is uniquely sickening and reflects exactly what a dirty, disgusting pig Trump is.
He called CNN’s Abby Phillip’s questions “stupid.” He viciously labeled veteran White House correspondent April Ryan a “loser” and “very nasty.” He accused PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor of asking a “racist question” when she pressed him on white nationalism. He called Don Lemon “the dumbest man on television.” He had already labeled Scott “the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place” back in December.
Thursday was simply the latest example of Trump using Black women as targets for his mudslinging.
He’s also slinging mud all over Washington, defacing the Kennedy Center and national park passes, replacing images of the very nature those parks were created to protect. And the ways he has dirtied the White House are too numerous to mention, but the dirt where the East Wing once stood is a reminder of the ruinous effects of the dirt that is Trump.
Starting in July, his soiled visage will appear in U.S. passports. His grimy signature, which was reportedly used to represent pubic hair in a Jeffrey Epstein birthday note, will smudge paper currency.
That filthy face is on commemorative $1 coins. His name is on the Institute of Peace. His banners hang from the Departments of Labor, Justice, and Agriculture. He even named a class of battleships after himself.
Everywhere Trump goes, he leaves a film of himself on everything. Just like dirt.
When he looked at Rachel Scott, who is a truly brilliant, fearless reporter who asks him every uncomfortable question she needs to ask without skipping a beat, and told her she understood dirt better than he did, he might have been telling the truth.
Here’s why: she has been covering Trump consistently since the 2020 presidential campaign. Her job involves reporting on a man who is dirt. She goes to work every day, asks her questions, and gets pelted with mud for it, from the dirt-in-chief.
She and her White House press colleagues have the dirtiest job in Washington, even dirtier than the construction workers ripping up the East Wing.
Scott knows what it’s like to have dirt sting your eyes and crackle in your ears and cake onto you.
Only one person standing at that reflecting pool on Thursday night had spent a lifetime generating, spreading, and wallowing in dirt. Only one of them woke up the next morning still filthy.
And it wasn’t Rachel Scott.
