The Method

Four women journalists in four weeks. A decade of public record. Granite Staters should stop calling this a slip of the tongue and start calling it what it is: a speech, delivered in installments, and studied carefully by everyone who wants to govern the way he governs.

On November 14, on Air Force One, the President of the United States leaned toward a Bloomberg reporter named Catherine Lucey, who had just asked him a question about the Epstein files, and told her to be “quiet, piggy.” Four days later, he turned on ABC’s Mary Bruce for asking the crown prince of Saudi Arabia about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Her question was “horrible, insubordinate.” She was “a terrible person and a terrible reporter.”

Eight days after that, he posted on Truth Social that the New York Times‘ Katie Rogers was “a third rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out” — because she had co-authored a story noting he appeared tired in public. On December 8, he told ABC’s Rachel Scott, in front of cameras, that she was “the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place,” “terrible,” and — he wanted this one for emphasis — “actually a terrible reporter.”

Four women. Four weeks. Four public humiliations, delivered from the most powerful podium on earth. The White House press secretary’s on-record response was to suggest everyone “appreciate the frankness and the openness.”

Here is the thing about calling this a pattern: people hear “pattern” and think they’re being asked to see something subtle. They aren’t. A pattern, in this case, is a thing you can count. Four women in a month, on video, posted from his own account, in the public record. If you needed the Times to tell you it was happening, you were not looking.

The temptation — and the American press has indulged it for a decade — is to treat each insult as a discrete event. A bad day. A hot mic. A slip. You run the news cycle, you run the condemnations, you move on. Then the next one lands and you run the cycle again. That is how ten years pass. That is also how a method hides in plain sight.

Because any individual Trump insult is forgettable. That is the design. The power is cumulative. And if you go back to the beginning — really back — you find the method was never a secret. It was announced.

November 2015, South Carolina. Donald Trump stood on a rally stage and physically imitated the arthrogryposis of a New York Times reporter named Serge Kovaleski, flailing his arms in a mocking pantomime of a congenital joint condition. He later denied he was doing it. He had been interviewed by Kovaleski for years. A Bloomberg poll the following August identified the moment as the single most offensive thing he had done to that point in the campaign. He paid no price. He learned the lesson.

July 2016. Khizr and Ghazala Khan stood at the Democratic National Convention and said Trump had “sacrificed nothing and no one.” Their son, Army Captain Humayun Khan, had been killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2004, shielding his soldiers from the blast. Trump’s response was to attack Ghazala — a Gold Star mother, standing in her grief on national television — for not speaking. “She had nothing to say. Maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say.” He paid no price. He learned the lesson.

June 2016. A federal judge named Gonzalo Curiel was presiding over the Trump University fraud case. Trump declared the Indiana-born jurist had an “absolute conflict” because of his “Mexican heritage.” House Speaker Paul Ryan — a Republican — called it “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” Trump paid no price. He learned the lesson.

By November 2023 he was calling his domestic political opponents “vermin” — communists, Marxists, fascists, “radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” A month later, he announced that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase whose historical provenance is, frankly, not subtle.

This is not escalation. It is accumulation. Each line — from Kovaleski’s body, to Ghazala Khan’s grief, to Judge Curiel’s parents’ country of origin, to opponents-as-pests, to a reporter asking about Epstein — sits on the shelf the prior ones built. It is one sustained experiment in what a country will absorb if you degrade the target slowly enough.

Which brings us to New Hampshire.

The presidency is not local. The posture is. The posture is the thing that travels. When the man at the top spends a decade modeling rule-by-humiliation as the routine exercise of executive power, the officials one tier down begin to copy the grammar. You have seen it. You will see more of it. A state representative calls a public commenter at a hearing a liar and walks out. A county official publicly brands a reporter an “agenda journalist” after a records request. A selectman posts on Facebook that a constituent who questioned a budget line is “mentally unwell.” None of these are first-term behaviors. They are learned behaviors. They have a teacher.

For every small outlet in this state that does the unglamorous work of asking questions in small rooms — for this one — the assumption has to be that the same posture is coming. Not because we matter at the federal level. We don’t, to him. But because the method is contagious, and the people who want to govern New Hampshire the way he governs the country are paying close attention to what works.

What works, it turns out, is calling women piggy. Calling reporters obnoxious. Calling judges deranged. Calling veterans losers. Calling immigrants vermin. Saying it often. Saying it from a big enough platform that the insult displaces the underlying fact. Waiting for exhaustion to do the rest.

The 2026 cycle will put this on the ballot again, at every level, and the question for Granite Staters is not whether you like Donald Trump. Three elections have answered that one. The question is whether you want New Hampshire — your State House, your congressional delegation, your select boards, your school boards, your local dailies and weeklies — staffed and surrounded by people who have studied the method and intend to import it here.

That decision is yours. You are entitled to the full record of what the method is, in its own words, before you make it. GSR has compiled that record. I would rather you read it, disagree with me, and vote your conscience than scroll past one more “Trump lashed out” headline and call it news.

Ten years of public record.
It is not a slip of the tongue.
It is a speech.