Twitter users claim #nastywoman after debate
It's too soon to tell if "such a nasty woman" will go down in history as one of those memorable debate moments. The shelf-life of everything is short now.
And the shelf may be running out of space for unusual utterances from Donald Trump, especially after his "I'll keep you in suspense" comment about whether he would accept the result of the election if he loses, which all but buried what would have otherwise been classed as a major blunder, particularly for a candidate facing a potentially game-ender gender gap.
But "nasty woman" certainly had a fine run overnight on the internet in the hours after Trump said it, in response to this dig from Hillary Clinton, while on the subject, of all things, of the Social Security Trust Fund:
CLINTON: Well, Chris, I am on record as saying that we need to put more money into the Social Security Trust Fund. That's part of my commitment to raise taxes on the wealthy. My Social Security payroll contribution will go up, as will Donald's, assuming he can't figure out how to get out of it. But what we want to do is to replenish the Social Security Trust Fund ...
Within an hour, by the BBC's calculation, about a quarter of a million tweets mentioned "nasty woman," a vast number of them from women proudly declaring themselves nasty women too, or as one woman on Twitter put it reclaiming their nastiness.
By 4 a.m. #nastywoman was Twitter's number 2 hashtag after #TrumpBookReport, a hilarious (unless you're a Trump supporter) collection of Tweets inspired by this tweet: Trump's foreign policy answers sound like a book report from a teenager who hasn't read the book. "Oh, the grapes! They had so much wrath!"
And Michelle Wolf tweeted, "Nasty woman is probably the coolest thing Hillary has ever been called."