Women hate women’, Madonna says on Trump's victory

US singer-songwriter Madonna poses arriving on the carpet to attend a special screening of the film "The Beatles Eight Days A Week: The Touring Years" in London on September 15, 2016. Madonna is voicing despair over Donald Trump's election victory and blamed women, saying they had a "tribal inability" to accept a female president. PHOTO | BEN STANSALL | AFP

What you need to know:

  • Madonna said she knows Trump and found him to be “a very friendly guy, charismatic in that boastful, macho, alpha-male way.”
  • President Barack Obama delivered his final address on the fight against terrorism on Tuesday, in a speech aimed at his successor who has not yet publicly outlined his own anti-terror strategy.
  • Trump, who has pledged to upend his predecessor’s entire agenda including foreign and security policy, takes over in the White House in just over six weeks.
  • Obama banned extreme CIA interrogation techniques used on terror detainees as soon as he took office.

NEW YORK

Madonna is voicing despair over Donald Trump’s election victory and blamed women, saying they had a “tribal inability” to accept a female president.

The election “felt like a combination of the heartbreak and betrayal you feel when someone you love more than anything leaves you, and also a death,” the pop icon told Billboard magazine in an interview published on Monday.

The pop icon, who campaigned for Hillary Clinton in her bid to become America’s first woman president, said an “insanely high” percentage of female voters backed Trump, who has boasted of his ability to sexually assault women with impunity.

“Women hate women. That’s what I think it is,” Madonna told the music magazine.

“Women’s nature is not to support other women. It’s really sad. Men protect each other, and women protect their men and children.

“Women turn inward and men are more external. A lot of it has do with jealousy and some sort of tribal inability to accept that one of their kind could lead a nation,” Madonna said.

Madonna will be honoured by Billboard on Friday as its Woman of the Year at the magazine’s annual Women in Music celebration in New York, which will be broadcast three days later on cable network Lifetime.

Women on a whole narrowly sided with Mrs Clinton, who won the popular vote in the November 8 election.

But Trump edged her out in battleground states such as Madonna’s native Michigan through overwhelming support from working-class white men.

Madonna said she knows Trump and found him to be “a very friendly guy, charismatic in that boastful, macho, alpha-male way.”

FIGHT AGAINST TERRORISM

“People like that exist in the world; I’m OK with it. They just can’t be heads of state,” said Madonna.

“I just can’t put him and Barack Obama in the same sentence, same room, same job description.”

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama delivered his final address on the fight against terrorism on Tuesday, in a speech aimed at his successor who has not yet publicly outlined his own anti-terror strategy.

Speaking from MacDill Air Force Base — the Florida headquarters of the Special Forces Command and CENTCOM, command for the US military in the Middle East — Obama gave a rundown of operations in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria during his two terms in office.

Mr Obama touched upon his failed bid to close the Guantanamo military prison in Cuba and his continued strong opposition to the use of torture — positions greeted with scorn by President-elect Donald Trump during the campaign.

Mr Obama, who ordered the successful raid against Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011, also underscored the “complexity” of the fight against terror, according to top advisor Ben Rhodes.

“That’s something you can only experience as president,” Mr Rhodes said, adding it will be crucial for the future US administration to precisely understand the threat, maintain strong relations with allies and pair military action with clear diplomacy. In particular, Rhodes stressed, it is necessary to keep in mind “who we are as a country”.

Trump, who has pledged to upend his predecessor’s entire agenda including foreign and security policy, takes over in the White House in just over six weeks.

On the campaign trail he pledged to restore waterboarding — a form of simulated drowning widely regarded as torture — and permit “far, far worse”.

Obama, in contrast, banned extreme CIA interrogation techniques used on terror detainees as soon as he took office.

He has long argued that such practices are ineffective, violate American values and hand militants a potent recruiting tool for groups like the Islamic State (IS).

The US president also plans to defend his warfare tactics against IS jihadists in Iraq and Syria: no ground troops but military support for local security forces, and an intense air campaign with support from an international coalition.

RETHINK HIS STANCE

Since his election, Trump seems to be to modifying his views on waterboarding — a change that may reflect the influence of his nominee to head the Pentagon, retired marine general James Mattis.

Mattis appears to have convinced Trump to rethink his stance on torture, after reportedly telling the real estate mogul that he is unconvinced about its effectiveness during interrogations.

“He said, ‘I’ve never found it to be useful’,” Trump told the New York Times in a wide-ranging interview with reporters and senior editors last month.

Mattis told Trump that winning a prisoner’s trust is a far more effective way of prying information from him.

‘”Give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I’ll do better,”’ Trump told staff members at The Times, recounting what the general had told him.

“I was very impressed by that answer,” he said.

As the handover nears, and Trump and his top advisors prepare to roll back Obama’s policies, the White House seems intent on highlighting the progress made of security issues under the outgoing president’s leadership.

Administration officials point to the recovery of almost half of the territories controlled by IS in 2014, the ongoing offensive in Iraq, and a slowing of foreign fighters joining the ranks of the jihadists.

Trump has not yet announced a nominee to head the State Department and has been vague at best about how he plans to defeat IS, but during months on the campaign trail he emphasized that in order to win, it was essential that America be “unpredictable”.

And he has ridiculed Obama for refusing to brand IS an “Islamist” threat — a term that the Democratic president has avoided, for fear of offending Muslims around the world.

Trump also boasted late last year that on the subject of IS, he knows “more than the generals”.

In the waning days of his presidential campaign, Trump said he would get a detailed plan from his military brain trust on beating IS once and for all.

“They’ll have 30 days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS,” Trump said in a campaign speech in September.