Long after insults, a breakout moment
When Hillary Clinton told the 84 million people watching the presidential debate how Donald Trump disparaged Alicia Machado’s weight and ethnicity during her tenure as Miss Universe, the former beauty queen, watching in Los Angeles, began to cry.
Then she began to tweet: first a message supporting Clinton, then a pledge to vote, complete with a picture of her smiling with her U.S. passport, bestowed when she became a citizen after leaving her native Venezuela.
Clinton’s recitation of the insults Trump lobbed to Machado was a breakout moment in Monday’s lively debate. In the day that followed, Machado, 39, now an actress, emerged as Clinton’s latest breakout political weapon.
His nickname for Machado after her weight gain, “Miss Piggy,” got attention as alienating to women. Also potentially toxic was his other nickname for her: “Miss Housekeeping,” a dig at her ethnicity.
“It’s a dignified job, but he said it in a way that was meant to insult me,” Machado told The Los Angeles Times on Tuesday. “It really is a reflection of how he feels about Latinos.”
Machado, who has been campaigning for Clinton since June, said she was surprised to hear the Democrat tell her story Monday night. Her selfprofessed shock belied the obvious groundwork laid by the Clinton team: a campaign video was rolled out online within an hour, an interview and photo shoot with Cosmopolitan magazine landed Tuesday.
Machado was crowned the Miss Universe winner in 1996, the same year Trump purchased the pageant organization.
About eight months into her tenure, she asked Miss Universe officials about help to lose weight. Trump got involved and convened a media scrum to watch her work out.
Trump was unapologetic Tuesday.
“She was the worst we ever had, the worst, the absolute worst. She was impossible,” he said in a TV interview. “She was the winner and she gained a massive amount of weight and it was a problem.”
Machado said she felt Trump publicly pressured her to slim down as a publicity stunt. “It hurt me a great deal,” she said.
Machado, who went on to star in Spanish-language soap operas in Venezuela, is no stranger to working in an industry with exacting standards of female beauty.
In the 20 years since her Miss Universe tenure, Machado’s life has at times resembled the telenovelas she starred in.
In 1998, she was accused of being an accomplice to an attempted murder. A judge ruled there was insufficient evidence to arrest her, ordering only her boyfriend’s arrest. The judge later accused Machado of threatening his life. Six months ago, Machado moved to Los Angeles, in hopes of jumpstarting her acting career.
Time hasn’t softened her views on Trump. “I want people to know about his levels of racism,” she said. “He’s a misogynistic man. He considers women to be inferior to him.”