Yes, the Trump White House Demanded Twitter Remove Chrissy Teigen’s Tweet Calling Trump a “Pussy Ass Bitch”

One needn’t be an expert in psychology to understand that Donald Trump has some of the thinnest skin known to man. A prime example of this would be his apparent decision to run for president because Seth Meyers made fun of him. Another? His administration’s reaction to a celebrity calling him a “pussy ass bitch” on Twitter.

If you’re having trouble accessing this particular incident from the memories so many of us have repressed from the Trump years, a quick refresh. In September 2019, Trump, who’d not yet been banned (and unbanned) from Twitter, logged on to his favorite social media site and complained that he wasn‘t getting enough credit for the bipartisan criminal reform bill that had passed through Congress and been signed into law. Specifically, he wrote: “Guys like boring musician @johnlegend, and his filthy mouthed wife, are talking now about how great it is—but I didn’t see them around when we needed help getting it passed.” Chrissy Teigen is obviously the wife of John Legend, though she had not been tagged or referred to by name, which inspired her to send a tweet of her own reading, “Lol what a pussy ass bitch. tagged everyone but me. an honor, mister president.”

Anyway, life went on and we didn’t hear much about this thereafter. But on Wednesday, amid a congressional hearing about Twitter’s decision to limit users’ ability to read a New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop—which Republicans naturally believe is evidence of a vast conspiracy—it suddenly popped up again.

Specifically, we learned, thanks to the testimony of Anika Collier Navaroli, a former member of Twitter’s content moderation team, that the White House sprang to action upon reading Teigen’s tweet. “The White House almost immediately thereafter contacted Twitter to demand the tweet be taken down. Is that accurate?” Representative Gerry Connolly asked Navaroli. “I do remember hearing we’d received a request from the White House to make sure we evaluated this tweet, and they wanted it to come down because it was a derogatory statement directed at the president,” she said.

Later, in an exchange with Representative Maxwell Frost, the full “pussy ass bitch” quote was entered into the official congressional record.

The tweet, of course, was not taken down. It’s not clear if Trump himself—an avid Twitter user at the time—was the one who told his team to tell the site to remove the insult, or if they acted on their own, knowing he’d have a massive fit over it. Perhaps we’ll learn more in subsequent hearings.