Donald Trump is a tough guy. He threatens to punch out protesters and insists he's not going to let China push us around anymore. He prides himself on his combativeness, his willingness to mix it up.

But critics are pointing out that his John Wayne swagger gets a hitch in it when the showdown is with a woman -- and that this isn't because of gallantry. The latest example came in Flint, Mich., on Wednesday when Rev. Faith Green Timmons interrupted the Republican presidential nominee's attack on Hillary Clinton to remind him that he had been invited to the Bethel United Methodist Church to talk about Flint's water-quality crisis and the church's work in the city, not to give a partisan speech. Trump responded graciously: "Oh, oh. OK, OK, OK," he said. "That's good. Then I'm going to go back onto Flint." But later, after leaving the church, he changed his tune.

Writes James Fallows in The Atlantic:

[I]n Flint, Michigan, Donald Trump revealed a trait that is strikingly recurrent in his own behavior, and strikingly different from what I can recall from any other presidential nominee.

That trait is the combination of his bombast about women when they are not present, and his reluctance or inability to confront them face-to-face.

The man is a bully, and like most bullies he is a coward.

Fallows pointed out that "Trump meekly accepted correction in person from Pastor Faith Green Timmons, when she told him he was not supposed to be making a political speech -- and then, once safely out of her gaze, flat-out lied about what had happened and had been captured on tape."

Trump didn't just lie, in fact. He attacked Timmons as a "nervous mess" who had sandbagged him.

"I noticed she was so nervous when she introduced me," he told Fox News the next day. "When she got up to introduce me she was so nervous, she was shaking. I said, 'Wow, this is kind of strange.' Then she came up. So she had that in mind, there's no question."

NPR's Scott Detrow, who was in attendance at the Flint event, disputes this narrative. He said that Rev. Timmons "didn't appear nervous at all" when she introduced Trump. And that, in fact, when she interrupted his speech, she was saving Trump. People had begun to "heckle" the candidate, "asking pointed questions about whether he racially discriminated against black tenants as a landlord" as Trump plowed forward with his usual remarks about NAFTA and Clinton. Detrow said Timmons told the audience to show him "respect." Watch video of Trump's Flint appearance below:

Trump is well known for insulting women, calling those he doesn't like "slobs" and "disgusting animals." Last spring, during the Republican primaries, he insinuated something awful about Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's wife with a tweeted threat to "spill the beans" on her. He has made clear that he values women based chiefly on their physical beauty. "Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?" he famously said of GOP primary opponent Carly Fiorina. (Later, when in the same room with her, he insisted he was misunderstood and said she was "beautiful.")

Cosmopolitan magazine, addressing Trump's sexism, wrote in May: "These are the attitudes that hurt women, that keep us out of power, that keep us poor and marginalized."

Trump, of course, doesn't put much stock in Cosmo. After a reporter at the magazine pressed Trump's daughter Ivanka this week about the limitations of her father's new child-care plan, the Republican nominee called the interviewer a "rather non-intelligent reporter" and Cosmopolitan "a dying magazine ... a useless magazine, worthless magazine."

-- Douglas Perry