Donald Trump Once Received the Same ‘Piggy’ Insult He Hurled at Reporter

Decades before Donald Trump became president, he was on the receiving end of an insult he would later hurl at a reporter — “piggy.”

Back in the 1980s, Trump was an ascendant real estate developer with a grand plan for Manhattan’s Upper West Side: a massive complex he wanted to call “Television City.” The project — fiercely opposed by many local residents — was designed to lure NBC away from Rockefeller Center and, in the process, secure Trump’s legacy by including what he hoped would be the tallest building in the world.

To make it work, Trump sought large tax breaks from New York City. That’s where he collided with then–Mayor Ed Koch, a Democrat with a reputation for being both popular and blunt. Koch balked at Trump’s request, saying the developer was asking for tax abatements “three times” larger than anything previously granted and arguing that such a deal would overly enrich Trump with public money.

Trump, for his part, maintained that the incentives were reasonable and essential if the city wanted to keep NBC from leaving New York.

By the spring of 1987, the disagreement had escalated into a full-blown feud. Trump and Koch traded increasingly sharp letters and public barbs, each trying to win the upper hand as the high-stakes negotiations teetered on collapse.

Trump accused Koch of being a “horrible manager” and a “moron” who “can’t hack it anymore” and should resign, according to newspaper coverage from the time. At a press conference he convened specifically to attack the mayor’s handling of the city, Trump declared, “The City of New York is suffering, in my opinion, the worst corruption scandals in the history of the city and suffering from totally incompetent management,” The New York Times reported.

Koch, who strategically leaked the correspondence to the press, hit back just as hard. He labeled Trump “greedy, greedy, greedy” and memorably quipped, “If Donald Trump is squealing like a stuck pig, I must have done something right. Common sense does not allow me to give away the city’s treasury to Donald Trump.”

At one point, Koch paused to say he didn’t want the clash to “degenerate into a barnyard kind of contest.” But he also delivered one of the most cutting lines of the showdown when he reportedly referred to Trump as “piggy, piggy, piggy, piggy Donald Trump,” according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

In the end, Trump’s negotiations with NBC and the city collapsed. The dream of building the world’s tallest tower on the Upper West Side evaporated, and after years of delays and revisions, Trump instead moved forward with a scaled-down, largely residential development on the site.

Koch left office in 1989 and died in 2013, but his taunts appear to have stuck with Trump — and would resurface years later in a very different setting.

By 2025, Trump was president, having built a political brand partly around blunt put-downs and derisive nicknames aimed at rivals, critics and reporters. He frequently dismissed unfavorable coverage as “fake news” and singled out journalists for personal attacks. Even so, he shocked many observers with one particular outburst aboard Air Force One.

On Nov. 14, when Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey asked a question about Trump’s past relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the 79-year-old president snapped. Pointing directly at her, he said, “Quiet. Quiet, piggy” — a moment that quickly ricocheted across social media, spawning memes, outrage and disbelief as “quiet, piggy” began trending online.

Afterward, the White House stood by Trump’s remark. In a statement, a White House official said, “This reporter behaved in an inappropriate and unprofessional way towards her colleagues on the plane. If you’re going to give it, you have to be able to take.” The official did not explain what, specifically, about Lucey’s behavior was inappropriate.

Others in the press corps rallied to Lucey’s side. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, a prominent White House correspondent, publicly praised her colleague, saying Lucey does “a great job.”

At a Nov. 20 press briefing, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt fielded questions about the “quiet, piggy” remark and framed it as part of Trump’s trademark bluntness — the same quality she argued helped power his political rise.

“Look, the president is very frank & honest with everyone in this room,” she said. “You’ve all seen it yourselves. You’ve all experienced it yourselves. And I think it’s one of the many reasons the American people reelected this president, because of his frankness.”

Leavitt, 28, went on to argue that Trump’s habit of saying things directly to people’s faces is “a lot more respectful” than what she characterized as former President Joe Biden’s approach to the press, adding, “I think everyone in this room should appreciate the frankness and the openness that you get from President Trump on a near-daily basis.”

The Air Force One exchange, officials suggested, may not have been an isolated case of Trump using “piggy” to demean a woman — just the most widely seen.

During Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, who held the title at age 19 while Trump was a co-owner of the pageant, recalled how he treated her after she gained weight.

“He was overwhelming, I was so scared of him,” Machado said in Spanish at the time. “He’d yell at me all the time. He’d tell me, ‘You look ugly,’ or ‘You look fat.’ Sometimes he’d ‘play’ with me and say: ‘Hello, Miss Piggy,’ ‘Hello, Miss Housekeeping.’ ”

From Ed Koch’s “piggy Donald Trump” in the 1980s to “quiet, piggy” directed at a reporter from the presidential plane, the insult has traveled a long and telling path through Trump’s public life — revealing as much about his adversaries as it does about his own enduring style of confrontation.