The five women who could bring down the president

With US Congress having voted to release the Epstein files following Donald Trump's U-turn, Katie Rosseinsky looks at the lawyers and survivors who could trigger his downfall

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“Quiet, piggy.

” It’s the sort of crass insult that you might hear yelled in the school playground - and certainly not what you'd expect a president to hiss at a journalist (accompanied with a finger point, no less) during a press call on Air Force One. But this disturbing incident, which saw Donald Trump berate Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey, is just the latest grim example of the Potus's well-documented woman problem.

From the Access Hollywood tape, when a pre-politics Trump notoriously alluded to “grabbing” women “by the pussy”, to his slights on “nasty woman” Hillary Clinton, to calling actor Stormy Daniels “horseface”, his history of insulting women is long and depressing. Even when he's not going out of his way to offend, his tone can seem, well, more than a little problematic. “I just like to watch her talk,” he said in one recent press conference encounter with another female journalist, before condescendingly telling her she’d done a “good job” and addressing her as “darling”. His administration's track record on women's rights (or the rolling back of said rights) speaks volumes on this count, too.

How ironic, then, that it has been women who have forced his hand in what is arguably the biggest threat to his leadership so far. Earlier this month, Trump was forced to make a major U-turn when he called for Republican members of Congress to vote for the release of the Epstein files, a collection of documents relating to the sex trafficking charges against Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial. Previously, the president had been reluctant to do so, and even claimed that such demands were a “Democrat hoax” to “deflect” attention away from his Maga grand plans.