Column: What do women want? Not Donald Trump
Women of America, how do you feel about a man who says he’ll be your protector “like it or not”? Another question: Do you even believe you need a protector?
The fact that Donald Trump thinks you do, and believes that he’s the one to safeguard us damsels like it or not, is why he might well fail to win back the White House (please!).
Most women are voting against Trump, pollsters tell us, and they include at least two daughters of former Republican presidents, Barbara Pierce Bush and Susan Ford Bales. The political world was stunned late Saturday when the widely respected Iowa Poll of the Des Moines Register/Mediacom showed that Kamala Harris had leapfrogged Trump to take a 3-point lead in that typically red state, a turnabout driven largely by older or politically independent women, according to pollster J. Ann Selzer. Women constitute 53% of the national electorate, and so far they’ve dominated early voting returns. According to Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics, “Women have registered and voted at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980,” and the gap has grown every four years.
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
If Trump loses, it will be women who proved to be the protectors — of Lady Liberty.
Right now she is a damsel in distress, threatened by a presidential candidate who’s not only a wannabe autocrat but a convicted felon, adjudicated sexual abuser, philanderer, admitted sexual assaulter, former club-hopper with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and, not least, proud architect of the end of abortion rights.
With that last claim to fame, Trump has subjected women to danger and even doom, as doctors have withheld lifesaving care to pregnant women for fear of running afoul of state abortion bans enacted after the Supreme Court, packed with Trump’s far-right appointees, struck down Roe vs. Wade. Several have died. On Wednesday, ProPublica reported on the death of a wife and mother in Texas denied timely treatment as she miscarried a much-wanted baby.
Bidenomics has been spectacularly successful but not enough voters understand that: It’s the misinformation about the economy, stupid.
The transphobic Trump thinks women should worry about imaginary medical threats he’s conjured: “Your child goes to school and they don’t even call you, and they change the sex of your child, ” he recently said in Arizona. But women are concerned instead about real threats: abortion care, a reelected Trump putting anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “to work on health, and women’s health,” and a Trump vice president, JD Vance, who denigrates “childless cat ladies” and says procreators should have more votes.
Trump is rightly unnerved by the female blowback. After all, he won’t be protected — from prison — unless he’s reelected and able to wield the presidential seal as a legal shield. Hence his insistence in the final days of the 2024 election that he’d be women’s savior — a pledge so patronizing that he admits he’s making it over his aides’ advice.
“They said, ‘Sir, please don’t say that,’” Trump told a rally near Green Bay, Wis., on Wednesday. “I said ‘Why?’ They said, ‘We think it’s, we think it’s very inappropriate for you to say.’ I said ‘Why? I’m president — I want to protect the women of our country.’” By his manly telling, Trump stood firm: “Well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not.”
As usual, this is a man who doesn’t take no for an answer.
It doesn’t hurt that she’s not Donald Trump. But there are plenty of other reasons to be for a Harris presidency.
Since 2016, more than two dozen women have alleged sexual misconduct by Trump. A 27th woman went public last week, saying that Trump groped her in 1993 while Epstein watched: “He put his hands all over my breasts,” she told the Washington Post, choking up. The woman said she was speaking out now not to influence the election, as Trump’s camp claimed, but because she was interviewed in 2022 for a documentary just released in October.
Trump’s inane Sir Galahad claim has renewed attention to the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape, which was an October surprise before the 2016 election. Unfortunately, its electoral toxicity was offset weeks later by then-FBI Director James Comey’s announcement of a revived, and ultimately dropped, investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private emails. Now, women voters too young to have been aware of the tape are seeing it for the first time, and TikTok is crackling with their outrage at “just how depraved it is,” as one Gen Z-er said. Here’s the would-be protector of American women, speaking to “Access Hollywood” anchor Billy Bush as they spied a young actress they were about to meet:
“You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy.”
Donald Trump’s supporters brush off his threats against democracy, but past performance gives us every reason to believe he’ll do exactly as he says.
That describes to a T for Trump his earlier sexual assault of writer E. Jean Carroll in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store, as she alleged and a jury found last year. Which is why the “Access Hollywood” tape was introduced as evidence in Carroll’s 2023 defamation lawsuit. We got to see Trump in his taped deposition, oozing smugness and condescension, saying to Carroll’s attorney that he was only telling the truth — stars do have license to grab women’s private parts. “If you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true,” he said. “Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately.”
Although the Carroll jury found that Trump was liable under New York law for sexual abuse, not rape, the judge clarified that “as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape’ ... Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
It shouldn’t need to be said, but here goes: A rapist should not be president. Women and men, you can protect us all from Trump. Vote against him, if you haven’t already.
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