The two-word slur that tells us everything we need to know about Donald Trump

“A whack-job”. That is what Donald Trump called E Jean Carroll after a nine-member jury found him guilty of sexually abusing her in the 1990s. The former US president, to widespread laughter from CNN Town Hall attendees, dismissed Carroll’s testimony of what she experienced “fake” and “made up”.

What does this teach us? That once again, women’s accounts of what happens to them – to their bodies – are all too easily dismissed as false and invalidated. Want to keep women quiet? It’s easy: call us “crazy” or “hysterical”.

This is not an isolated incident. Throughout history, we have seen examples of women being called “over-emotional”, “excitable”, “over the top” or “too much”. In the Victorian era, “hysterical” women were sent to sanitoriums. Before that, some were hanged as witches. Their “crime”? Acting outside the narrow lines of social norms that were sketched out for them. In some cases, even a woman asking for a divorce could see her deemed “insane” and locked up.

And so, words like “mad” or “nuts” have long been trotted out to silence women, or to make us out as liars – simple phrases, weaponised to try and “prove” that women overexaggerate their own memories and experiences.

It’s 2023: women may not be being locked away or hanged, but they face an eternal purgatory of public shame and guilt if they speak up, if they complain, if they show anger, if they are seen to act out of order. It falls on them to prove themselves in the court of public opinion. Just look at what happened to Amber Heard.

When faced with these labels, many women can start mistrusting their own experiences and memories. It is no surprise that so many domestic abuse and sexual abuse survivors do not dare to report the abuse for years. And when women finally do dare to speak up, they are often challenged with questions of why they didn’t speak up sooner, and why now.

The research backs this up: data shows that even when abuse is alleged, the father is favoured in custody battles, with the mother more often accused of parental alienation by the father. Courts and legal teams often tend to believe the outdated and highly contested research in parental alienation that has been deemed to be biased against women, which claims women are more “manipulative and unstable”.

Our legal system and our society let powerful men get away without accountability, while women have to live with the stigma of being hysterical – or a liar.

Trump has said that this case would not deter his women voters, and I think he is right. Even in the last elections in 2020, we saw that almost 55 per cent of white women voted for Trump.

Even in the 2016 elections, almost 50 per cent of white women voted for Trump, as opposed to 45 per cent for Hillary Clinton. Women, especially white women, perceived Clinton to be “unlikable”. In November 2016, more than 61 per cent of 4,183 adults gave Clinton a likeability rating of less than 50 degrees (where 0 degrees was cold and negative and 100 was warm and positive). Meanwhile, Trump went around calling his rival, Clinton, “crooked”, “nasty” and – there it is again – “crazy”.

What’s the effect of Trump making these kinds of slurs? Well, studies show that women can internalise these beliefs and implicit societal messages about other women, and trust men more. (Yes, even when these same men have been shown to make vulgar comments about women publicly, as Trump had done. Even after secret videos of him saying, “They let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy” were released.)

I’m a data and behavioural scientist – and as I have discussed in my book, Hysterical: Exploding the myth of gendered emotions, when women are seen as emotionally unstable or irrational, they may also lose autonomy and agency over their own bodies. We saw this in the case of Britney Spears’ conservatorship.

Plus, once this kind of demonisation has happened, the label is not easy to shift. And while we might try to reclaim some of these stigmatised terms, it is impossible to completely push away the historical narrative that insists that hysteria is a natural part of socially constructed femininity and womanhood.

It is an aide-memoire of the constant fear that we carry: of being pushed down if we dare to stand up against men, especially against those who hold power. Because as soon as we tell the truth, we risk being branded a “whack-job”.

Dr Pragya Agarwal is a behavioural and data scientist, author, speaker and founder of research think-tank The 50 Percent Project