Trump Wants Women to Smile. Palm Royale Reminded Me Why.

A call from Anderson Cooper interrupted my Palm Royale binge. What happened next reminded me why Trump can't stand women like Kaitlan Collins.

Welcome back to The Red Letter.

Last night, I was laying on my couch exhausted, so I decided to turn on Season 2 of Palm Royale for some mind-numbing humor. Before I could really relax into the show, I got a call from Anderson Cooper’s booker, Eliza, asking if I wanted to come on the show to talk about Trump’s latest attack on Kaitlan Collins — again, for not smiling. He is clearly obsessed with her.

Eliza phoned at just the right time because while I was tired, I was also slightly worked up watching the Apple TV comedy set in 1960s Palm Beach. The costumes were gorgeous, but the women were comically aimless — obsessed with status and willing to contort themselves for the power their husbands possessed in the form of money.

The phone rang while I was watching Kristen Wiig wrapped in a straight jacket, plopped on a recliner by the pool in the “wives wing.” It was the upscale psychiatric institution her hapless husband checked her into against her will after she broke her perma-smile to express rage that he impregnated her friend and manicurist, played by the much younger and somehow even more waifish Kaia Gerber.

Every time her husband arrived and she remembered his indiscretion, she was promptly sedated. Her only escape from the looney bin was to smile.

In so many ways, even today, women are still expected to grin and bear it to hold onto their semblance of freedom.

When Anderson asked me why men are never asked to smile, I just blurted out:

“What you are seeing is just the day in the life of a woman.”

Trump could have easily made a cameo in Palm Royale. It’s filmed in his backyard. He wouldn’t have to wear a costume. He wouldn’t even be acting.

I could almost hear him delivering the same line Wiig's husband spits at her after having her committed:

“I’m sorry I make you so crazy.”

This is the era that Trump longs for when he says Make America Great Again. A world where women smiled, waited, and hoped to be chosen.

If you didn't marry into wealth, you were the chief-cook-and-bottle-washer, as my father likes to say. It's also an era I suspect he misses.

Unlike the characters in Palm Royale, where the comedy lies in how desperately these women scheme for financial security, Kaitlan would not be cast in the show.

Because she’s a woman of this era.

She has agency. She has power.

When she goes to work, she stands in the White House at the top of her profession, holding the President accountable on behalf of the American people — asking him whether his $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund is truly dead.

Trump could not bear to be challenged by a woman. That’s why she had “hatred in her eyes.”

She wasn’t being nice. And for that reason, she became the problem.

In this instance, Trump was not her boss, a beauty pageant owner, a modeling competition judge, or a celebrity who could “grab ‘em by the p*ssy.”

He was a civil servant being asked a question about how he uses taxpayer dollars.

And not by the many men in the room who were also not smiling.

What bothered him was that a woman wasn’t smiling in deference to him. That she was a woman who wasn’t waiting to be picked. A woman whose fate did not rest in his hands.

Although he tried to challenge that idea by suggesting her future at CNN might be up for grabs under new ownership.

To reclaim his power, Trump belittled her by commenting on her appearance. It was his way of reducing her to an object while pretending to compliment her.

This is a man who married two models and a beauty pageant queen. Women celebrated for a fleeting feature — their beauty.

Trump was also performing for the cameras in this kabuki-fight-of-a press conference.

In my personal experience covering him, he often tries charm first. He sees himself as a great seducer.

But Kaitlan didn’t move aside.

She stood there, unfazed, and kept going.

The women in Palm Royale survive by smiling.

Kaitlan Collins kept asking questions.

And that may be what bothered Trump most.