Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he is skipping Thursday night’s Fox News Republican debate because Megyn Kelly is hosting it, and he really doesn’t like Megyn Kelly.
This chart shows just how many sexist slurs Trump supporters are tweeting at Megyn Kelly
Vocativ
Neither do Trump’s supporters — and they are letting Kelly know it with vicious gendered insults on social media.
A Vocativ analysis of 80,000 tweets directed at Kelly’s Twitter handle from Tuesday (when Trump announced his decision) through Wednesday morning found a torrent of misogynist hate. Most of the haters appeared to be on “Team Trump,” according to Vocativ. Here’s a chart of the results:
Trump has had a mostly one-sided Twitter feud with Kelly ever since Fox’s last Republican debate, when Kelly asked Trump pointed questions about his history of sexist remarks. Trump made sexist remarks toward Kelly afterward, implying she had been on her period during the debate and retweeting one of his followers who called her a “bimbo.”
That moment also sparked a wave of online sexism against Kelly from Trump supporters. As Vox’s Max Fisher noted in August, anti-woman slurs against Kelly exploded right when she questioned Trump on sexism at the Fox News debate:
(By Israel Galvez, via Topsy)
Trump often lets his followers do the rhetorical dirty work for him. He’ll retweet insults that his supporters write and be coy about whether he endorses them. But his followers can get nasty; when it comes to Kelly, there’s no exception.
Some Trump supporters are also pretty vicious in real life. In several disturbing incidents, they’ve roughed up protesters at rallies. Trump hasn’t directly incited these incidents, but when they happen he mostly shrugs them off — or even suggests that the protesters had it coming.
VIDEO: Donald Trump responds to Megyn Kelly’s question about women
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