Donald Trump has always been wildly sexist. Generally, his sexism takes the form of reducing women to their looks, either praising their sex appeal or denigrating them as ugly. In private, of course, Trump behaves like a sex pest.
But his new campaign riff to women voters is something altogether more disturbing. He sounds like a domestic abuser.
The Trump pitch begins with a winking acknowledgment that he is losing among female voters. (He calls his deficit among female voters “fake news” but proceeds to follow the premise anyway.) Then Trump makes a normal, or normalish, pitch that his administration will deliver lower crime, inflation, and illegal immigration. Then the pitch gets very weird.
Trump casts himself as a kind of husband to America’s women. “I am your protector,” he declares repeatedly. He presents himself as the solution to all the problems he imagines they are having in their personal lives:
You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger. You’re not gonna be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident, and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.
Appealing to the electorate in blocs is a necessary element of campaigning. (There are too many voters to address us all as individuals.) But even accounting for the unavoidably reductive nature of group appeals, Trump’s message to women is notably infantilizing.
What makes it so creepy is that he implicitly acknowledges that women are reluctant to support him and that their disagreement over abortion is the reason. But rather than claim that his abortion stance is more reasonable than they assume or that they should vote on the basis of other issues — that is, the way you would try to win over a voter who has rational concerns — he presumes women are crazy.
Trump addresses what he believes is the underlying distress that is causing women to think they don’t want Trump to serve another term as president. Women “are more stressed, and depressed, and unhappy than they were four years ago,” he says. This is because they are “lonely and abandoned.”
Their “anxiety” is being misdirected into the belief that they want abortion to be legal. But their actual problem, he insists, is loneliness and abandonment, which will be resolved by giving themselves over to Trump.
Trump offers this solution metaphorically — he is not literally inviting over a hundred million American women to join his harem. But he is still overtly telling women that he will be their “protector,” that their personal fears will disappear with him in office, and that once they accept him as their protector, they will stop caring or even thinking about the public-policy issue that concerns them.
That is not an argument you’d make to free citizens. It is quasi-authoritarian appeal, Trump as national father figure, with an unmistakable undertone of menace. Women of America, you may think you don’t want to be with Trump. But you are wrong, and you are crazy, and if you return to Trump, you’ll realize he was right, and you will leave the worrying to him.
Why do I get the feeling Trump has made a version of this spiel in his personal life?
