Trump Hurled A 2-Word Insult. It Revealed Something Deeply Troubling About Him

Trump Hurled A 2-Word Insult. It Revealed Something Deeply Troubling About Him — And Our Country.

Trump Hurled A 2-Word Insult. It Revealed Something Deeply Troubling About Him — And Our Country.

Jennifer Friedman, M.D.

Fri, January 9, 2026 at 1:17 PM UTC

5 min read

As a neurologist, I care for some of society’s most vulnerable individuals — children with severe disabilities who are often mocked, dismissed or misunderstood. My career is rooted in supporting people with physical and cognitive differences, educating about empathy and respect for human diversity, and applying the principles of science and medicine to improve the lives of those facing challenges of one kind or another.

From that perspective, President Donald Trump’s public admonition of a female reporter in November — “Quiet, piggy” — was gut-wrenching and continues to resonate weeks later. To some, it was an offhand, albeit misogynistic, fat-shaming insult. To me, the remark instantly evoked Piggy, the vulnerable and marginalized character in William Golding’s novel “Lord of the Flies” and revealed something far more troubling: a display of dominance, denigration and the subjugation of those deemed less worthy.

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The rapid spread of the phrase across media platforms underscored a deeper danger — one that has only grown more unsettling as public displays of intimidation and condemnation increase. It is not just the cruelty of the words but the authority of the speaker, and the delight of many in his audience, that makes them so corrosive.

“Quiet, piggy” is not a joke. It is an illustration of how normalized bullying has become, and an affront to the people I care for and the values that guide my work.

Others have drawn parallels between “Lord of the Flies” and our political moment. In 2020, The New York Times published Jennifer Finney Boylan’s essay “President of the Flies,” in which she described feeling cast onto “some cruel and hostile strand ... where people with disabilities were mocked, immigrants ... were reviled, and grabbing women by their private parts was ... A-OK.”

Boylan compared the “Flies” boys’ descent into savagery with a society in which democratic norms erode, expertise is dismissed and cruelty is sanctioned. Her metaphor captured profound moral decay and warned of the danger of unchecked power divorced from reason, science and shared truth.

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Yet even as Boylan wrote, darker chapters still lay ahead: the attack on the U.S. Capitol; the dismantling of asylum protections; and the normalization of aggressive immigration enforcement tactics stripping primarily people of color of due process. What began as boasts about grabbing women’s bodies metastasized into a broader posture of possession — an expanding sense of what can be seized without consequence: democratic institutions, marginalized populations beyond our borders and — most recently — entire territories and nations framed as objects to be claimed. Golding captured this descent in “Lord of the Flies,” where casual cruelty gradually hardens into loss of restraint and hunger for control.

These events raise a troubling question: What has become of a society that greets such assertions of entitlement with indifference — or even approval? When the targets are distant, vulnerable or politically inconvenient, outrage seems to dissipate. Increasingly, the United States feels less like a democratic exemplar than a cautionary tale of how quickly ethical bearings can be lost.

In Golding’s novel, Piggy is intelligent, physically fragile and socially marginalized. He is mocked — and ultimately killed — for the very qualities that make him indispensable. When his glasses, the symbol of knowledge and reason, are shattered, civilization collapses into savagery.

The parallels today are difficult to ignore. Scientific expertise is ridiculed. Anti-vaccine rhetoric is elevated. Universities are portrayed as threats. Books are banned, history sanitized and facts themselves rendered suspect. Like Piggy’s broken glasses, our collective means of illumination is being smashed.

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As a physician, I see the consequences of this erosion. Public health experts are harassed. Families distrust lifesaving medical advice. Vulnerable children absorb a cultural message that intellect and difference make them contemptible. What makes this moment especially dangerous is not merely who initiates the cruelty but who echoes it.

In “Lord of the Flies,” it is not Jack, the overt villain, who says “Quiet, Piggy,” but Ralph, the boy aligned with order and conscience. This is the moral creep Boylan warned about: the moment when those who believe themselves principled begin to accommodate degradation. That is what made the aftermath of this remark so disturbing. Piggy memes spread widely — not only among Trump supporters, but among critics and political leaders who claim to reject his politics. The very behaviors we teach children to avoid — mockery, humiliation, ridicule — have become entertainment, modeled by adults in positions of authority.

This casual embrace of cruelty — and the willingness to look away as acts of intimidation, coercion and lawlessness accumulate — reveals something deeper. “Quiet, piggy” conveys that bullying is acceptable, vulnerability is shameful, intellect is unwelcome and force — not dialogue — is the currency of public life. It is not a passing insult but an alarm bell, reverberating against barriers I have spent my career trying to overcome.

In Golding’s novel, the Beast is an imagined external threat, but it is Simon who speaks the most unsettling truth before he, too, is murdered: “Maybe there is a beast. Maybe it’s only us.”

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That is the real warning.

The greatest danger is not a single leader, but a collective moral drift — a human capacity for dehumanization when norms collapse. Leaders do not invent this darkness; they unlock it.

We are not innocent bystanders. History shows where dehumanization leads — not through lone tyrants, but through ordinary people who acclimate to the erosion of decency. Like Golding’s boys, we have shown ourselves willing to normalize cruelty, relish humiliation and allow the expanding reach of those in power to go unchallenged. We cannot reclaim innocence, but as professionals, parents, educators and voters, we can resist the further unraveling of our civic soul.

As we start a new year, the question remains, more urgently now than ever:

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Who will save us, if not ourselves?

Jennifer Lederman Friedman, M.D., is a physician in San Diego and a Clinical Professor in the Departments of Neurosciences and Pediatrics at the University of California San Diego. She has devoted her career to supporting individuals with severe neurological and developmental conditions and to advancing public understanding of disability. Outside of medicine, she co‑created and directed the Understanding Differences Program, a California Golden Bell award‑winning curriculum that fosters compassion and teaches students to approach differences with curiosity, empathy, and respect.

Statements from Jennifer Friedman reflect her individual views and not the views of the University of California, the Regents of the University of California or UC San Diego, its officers, agents or employees.

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