Donald Trump called Ted Cruz a “pussy” — and the media won’t repeat it

There’s no way to skirt the word used to describe Ted Cruz at a Donald Trump rally last night: pussy.

Trump was criticizing the Texas senator’s unwillingness to support widespread uses of torture when a woman in the audience called Cruz, Trump’s chief rival for more conservative voters, a “pussy.”

Then, amazingly, Donald Trump repeated it so the entire crowd could hear.

“She said — I never expect to hear that from you again!,” he told the crowd, in mock disapproval. “She said: ‘He’s a pussy.’ That’s terrible.”

Now, technically it was the supporter in the audience who called Cruz a pussy, not Trump exactly. But this is part of Trump’s MO throughout the campaign: He’s let his supporters put the insults in their mouths, while he just amplifies them. Trump never called Megyn Kelly a bimbo; he just retweets his fans who do.

Similarly, at the event in New Hampshire, Trump polled the crowd, asking, “Can she stay?” According to the Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson, who witnessed the event, the answer was a resounding “yes.”

(The woman, later tracked down by Mic, said Trump has “the balls the size of watermelons, whereas [Cruz’s] got the balls of little grapes.”)

The exchange went viral on social media, but many news outlets —perhaps finding the language too reprehensible to print or broadcast — skipped the story entirely.

The FCC, which regulates “indecent material” on broadcast radio and television, does not generally permit the word pussy to be aired between 6 am and 10 pm. That means that though a broadcaster can publish a story containing the word online, it can’t do the same on its main network, which has a far broader reach.

So Trump created something of an interesting media moment, where broadcast outlets are skittish to air the word but their websites are free to post it.

At Vox, we think it’s significant enough to report. It’s bizarre to see a presidential frontrunner – one who’s poised to win the New Hampshire primary today – hurling deeply degrading insults from the stump and later saying he would change course if elected president. Or, worse, that an entire crowd reacted so positively to the word’s use.

This may sound like the precise policing of political correctness that Trump and some of the other Republican candidates have so assiduously shunned. But it seems reasonable to point out that a man this close to the presidency is criticizing his rival’s important policy position this way. It doesn’t demonstrate much nuance or thoughtfulness on the subject of torture.