“I have tremendous respect for women and the many roles they serve that are vital to the fabric of our society and our economy,” the president tweets. | Getty Despite controversial history, Trump tweets he has 'tremendous respect for women'

President Donald Trump, whose checkered history with and questionable rhetoric towards women was a well-documented source of controversy during last year’s presidential campaign, said Wednesday that he has “tremendous respect for women and the many roles they serve.”

Throughout his candidacy and now into his presidency, Trump has battled the perception that he has less than total respect for women. To combat that, Trump and other White House officials have pointed to longtime female employees of the Trump Organization as well as the president’s support for paid family leave as proof that he does, in fact, have the interests of women at heart.


“I have tremendous respect for women and the many roles they serve that are vital to the fabric of our society and our economy,” Trump wrote on Twitter Wednesday morning in a series of two posts. “On International Women's Day, join me in honoring the critical role of women here in America & around the world.”

But thanks likely to his well-documented history of derogatory and disrespectful remarks towards women, Trump has struggled to shake his anti-woman reputation. Millions of demonstrators in cities across the U.S. and around the world protested his presidency at women's marches on the day after his inauguration. In Washington, the crowds for the “Women’s March on Washington” dwarfed those who had turned out to see Trump get sworn in a day earlier.

Perhaps most notably during the presidential election, Trump’s campaign was nearly derailed by the publication of a recording from 2005 in which the president can be heard explaining how his celebrity status allowed him to sexually assault women without consequence. “When you’re a star they let you do it,” he can be heard saying on the tape.

Trump also bristled during one of his debates against Hillary Clinton when the former secretary of state brought up Alicia Machado, a former winner of Trump’s Miss Universe pageant who the president referred to as “Miss Piggy,” because of her supposed weight gain, and “Miss Housekeeping,” a reference to her Hispanic heritage. In an early-morning Twitter tirade in September, Trump lashed out at Machado, suggesting to his followers that she had appeared in a sex tape when she had not.

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In one of his earliest campaign incidents, Trump complained of former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly that “you can see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” after Kelly asked him a debate question about his past comments about women, which included calling them “fat pigs,” “slobs,” “dogs” and “disgusting animals.”