(CNN) – Something is rotten in the state of Denmark – but the smell is coming from somewhere else.
This week, after calling President Donald Trump’s idea to purchase Greenland “absurd,” the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, joined the ranks of an exclusive but growing club of women, the one with people Trump calls “nasty.” Its members? Latest count: a former Secretary of State, a current Speaker of the House, a handful of U.S. Senators, the CEO of General Motors, the Duchess of Sussex. (There are also over a dozen guys, many of whom were running for president at the time of their induction.)
As Frida Ghitis pointed out, “nasty” is “one of the insults he [Trump] generally” deploys when going after “strong women.” Kara Alaimo concurred, suggesting that Trump’s predilection for dismissing women who challenge him is an example of his troubling misogyny.
In this case, Ghitis assessed, his disparagement of Frederiksen is also a sign of Trump’s obsession with Scandinavia and the Nordic countries. “There’s just something about Trump and Scandinavia,” she wrote, from Trump’s false claim in “The Art of the Deal” that his grandfather was Swedish (he was German) to his plaintive question during the notorious meeting where he allegedly complained about people coming from “s***hole countries”: why don’t more Norwegians want to come to the United States?
