The women lining up against Trump

 Washington, DC

It’s no secret that President Donald Trump has women problems. His relationship with his wife seems strained. Feminists loathe him. His popularity among the opposite sex is lower than ever, according to the polls. And, to rub salt into his wounded machismo, he appears to have just lost a fierce political battle over the government shutdown to Nancy Pelosi, the newly reinstalled Democratic speaker.

All week, the commentariat has gushed over the way Pelosi ‘schooled’ Trump in the art of politics by forcing him to reopen the government without giving him the funds he wants to build a wall on the Mexican border. She ‘spanked him’, they say. She ‘kicked his behind’ and ‘brought him to his knees’. Pelosi’s admirers have started to refer to her as ‘the Queen’. They rejoice that Trump, famously adept at coining rude nicknames for his enemies, has lost his knack when it comes to her. ‘Nancy Pelosi, or as I call her, Nancy,’ he said last week. Democrats now think the President is scared of Pelosi. So do anti-Trump Republicans, who feel he isn’t sophisticated enough to handle a powerful woman with a majority. She ‘grabbed him by the balls’, said one former Trump White House official. It’s a remarkable turnaround for Pelosi. Less than two months ago, she had to face down a rebellion from the younger, more radical Democrats. Her critics said that the party needed a fresh face; Pelosi is 78, centrist, and Botoxed to the nines. But she is shrewd. She dealt with the threat by cutting deals with potential rivals and making the right lefty noises on healthcare, diversity and the awfulness of Donald Trump. Pelosi knows how power works. She relishes her public confrontations with Trump. But the Democratic hoopla over her ‘owning’ the President seems premature.