‘Quiet, Piggy’: Trump’s viral insult has already become an anti-MAGA clapback

Pigs famously have thick skin, and Donald Trump does not. It’s just one of myriad distinctions between the cloven-hoofed barnyard animal and America’s 47th president.

There’s a good reason, however, why many social media users are currently addressing Trump as “Piggy” and sharing crude AI-assisted images of him in porcine form. Rest assured, he paved his own pathway to hog heaven.

On November 17, a clip of Trump addressing reporters aboard Air Force One went viral. It begins with Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey pressing Trump about the eternally unfurling Epstein scandal. The president seems as though he’d rather not answer the question—at least, that’s how it comes across when he admonishes Lucey: “Quiet, Piggy.”

While leaders in most professions might be disciplined or even fired for such a transgression, Trump has proven uniquely immune to formal consequences for violating norms. But he is in no way immune to informal consequences, which is why the internet has already repurposed “Quiet, Piggy” into a memetic insult against Trump.

Bluesky users have started quote-tweeting Trump’s latest TruthSocial dispatches with the new catchphrase, and they’re doing the same for media appearances from Trumpian underlings like House Speaker Mike Johnson and U.S. Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina.

Over on X, California Governor Gavin Newsom is among the many users adding a body-shaming component to the catchphrase, tweeting unflattering photos of the president along with it.

Meanwhile, some TikTok users are also posting unflattering images of the president to accompany the insult, and others are posting AI-generated images of the president, alternately as Miss Piggy or as himself yelling at Miss Piggy.

If social media users seem especially eager to weaponize “Quiet, Piggy” by reflecting it back at the president, it’s likely because of how well this outburst fits in with Trump’s previous behavior.

Trump has a documented history of calling women like Rosie O’Donnell and former Miss Universe Alicia Machado “pigs”—along with “dogs,” “slobs,” and “disgusting animals.” He also has a more recent and pointed history of insulting and berating journalists.

Just after the 2016 election, 60 Minutes journalist Lesley Stahl said that Trump had told her the reason he regularly bashes reporters is to “demean” and “discredit” them so that the public will not believe “negative stories” about him.

And Trump continued to insult journalists in his tone-setting first post-election press conference, refusing to take a question from CNN reporter Jim Acosta and telling him: “You are fake news.”

Over the course of his initial term, Trump would escalate attacks on the press that seemed to be insufficiently friendly, deeming them the “enemy of the people.” He seemed to harbor a special animosity, though, toward journalists who happened to be women. In one typically fiery exchange with CNN’s Abby Phillip in 2018, for instance, Trump responded to Phillip’s question about the then-special prosecutor Robert Mueller by saying: “What a stupid question that is. What a stupid question. But I watch you a lot, you ask a lot of stupid questions.”

In his second term, Trump appears even more committed to attacking reporters for asking questions he’d prefer not to receive. He regularly refuses to answer questions, tells reporters “You’re not supposed to be asking that,” or calls them “obnoxious” and “very evil” for asking anyway. Indeed, the whole “TACO Trump” attack over the summer, which accused the president of “Always Chickening Out” on tariffs, would likely not have blown up to the level it did had Trump not told a reporter who asked him about it: “Don’t ever say what you said”

Still, despite Trump having been extra combative with reporters all year, he has lately seemed even more prickly due to an uptick in questions about his connection to Jeffrey Epstein.

When an ABC reporter asked Trump about the Epstein files on November 18, during the course of this writing, Trump responded by saying, “I think the license should be taken away from ABC,” and urging Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr to “look at that.”

As heated as Trump can get when asked about this issue, though, “Quiet, Piggy” stands out as an exceedingly juvenile and degrading insult. Many social media users have been speculating about why the schoolyard name-calling went unchallenged in the moment—about why Lucey’s fellow reporters didn’t make sure her question got answered or demand an apology on her behalf.

Perhaps it’s the absence of any heroes aboard Air Force One, though, that has inspired social media users to push back on Trump’s hogwash themselves.

Correction: A previous version of this story mistakenly identified the reporter Trump addressed aboard Air Force One as Jennifer Jacobs. The reporter in question was Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey.