President Donald Trump mocked a female reporter on Air Force One yesterday afternoon, inquiring why she asked him a “stupid question” ― and it could be part of a strategy, according to communications experts.

CBS News reporter Jennifer Jacobs asked Trump why he wanted the Senate to stay in town when they should be out campaigning for the midterm elections. She referenced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act), which was recently voted down for the second time in the Senate.

“Why the stupid question?” Trump asked Jacobs. “What a stupid question. For Jennifer to ask such a stupid — she’s a smart person. I knew her all the way back in the Iowa days when she said, ‘Trump’s gonna win.’ And, boy, was she right.”

“It’s clearly not the first time he has done this,” Deborah Tannen, an author and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, told HuffPost. “I think it’s pretty straightforward. He doesn’t want to answer something that makes him look bad, so make the other person look bad. And if it’s a woman, might as well call her stupid.”

The White House and CBS News did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comments as of publishing.

Trump has called reporters “stupid” for years. But it feels as though the frequency has increased in recent months, to the point where experts say it feels less like an outburst and more like a strategy to end the conversation with a reporter on a tough topic and call them into question.

“[Trump] views journalists’ questions not as a means of making politicians accountable to voters, [but as] opportunities for him to pass judgment on journalists’ intellect and reinforce his own accomplishments,” Karrin Anderson, professor of communication studies at Colorado State University, told HuffPost.

Jacobs’ question may have specifically touched a nerve and prompted the response. Trump has prioritized the SAVE Act and refused to sign bipartisan housing legislation as leverage to force the act through Congress. The SAVE Act would require proof of citizenship for people to register to vote. It’s passed the House multiple times — most recently on July 23 — but keeps stalling in the Senate.

“Why is he picking the word ‘stupid’? It denigrates the person who asked it,” Tannen said. “It’s just a way to cover the fact that he doesn’t have a good answer.”

By calling the reporters “stupid” and their questions “stupid,” “it undercuts the question so that he can’t be criticized for not having a good answer,” Tannen said. “And so it attacks the asker or the reporter’s competence rather than the substance of the question.”

Anderson read the moment as Trump seemingly changing his mind mid-sentence: Going from calling it a “stupid question” to then calling Jacobs “a smart person.”

“Trump seemed to recognize that he went too far mid-sentence,” she said. “You can almost see the wheels turning in his head as he recognizes that the clip could become another example of his misogynistic treatment of women journalists. So, he switches it up and immediately compliments her, but in a way that also emphasizes his success — she’s smart because she knew he was going to win the Iowa caucus in 2024.”

The president’s interaction with Jacobs is on the heels of his appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Friday night, when he dismissed several reporters and journalists, including CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, which he has done publicly many times before.

Last Wednesday, Trump also slammed ABC reporter Mary Bruce in the Oval Office after she asked him about whether he had a plan to end the Iran war. “Do you know something I don’t know?” Trump asked Bruce. “You don’t know anything.”

Trump is not the first political leader to use this type of tactic with journalists, either. Anderson pointed to former Vice President Spiro Agnew, who worked under Richard Nixon, as someone who openly insulted and criticized journalists and news networks.

But where Agnew attacked the press as an institution, Trump’s insults land on the individuals. At the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, he called Don Lemon “the dumbest man on television” with “the lowest IQ” (which has racial undertones) and made an antigay insinuation about CNN reporter Anderson Cooper.

But his pattern of insults and dismissals does skew heavily toward female reporters, and more so about them as individuals rather than their outlet, as can be the case with male reporters. In addition to “dumb” or “stupid,” other insults the president has used against female reporters include “ugly,” “piggy,” and “incapable.”

“It does get a little bit more personal when it comes to the women reporters that he’s talking to,” Tannen said, compared to male reporters.

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