Chicago (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – American women reject Trump. From his criminalizing of abortion to the ridiculing of unmarried women, from his predatory sexual harassment to racist attacks on immigrants, Trump has been very successful at repulsing female voters.
Women favor Kamala Harris 58-37 in a recent NBC poll, while men prefer Trump 52-40. The gender conflict spans across swing states and racial groups. And the gender disparity is overwhelmingly pronounced among young women, who favor Harris by 38 points, and young men, who favor the MAGA candidate by 13 points, a 51-point gap.
If you are a woman in America, Trump wants you to be a mother whether you want to or not. As the misogynist-in-chief, Trump personifies the radical rightwing movement to outlaw abortion nationwide, restrict contraception, and severely limit the scope of reproductive health care. Trump wants women to birth more babies even if it means risking their health or endangering their lives, as women die from Trump‘s abortion ban in states such as Georgia.
“Women know that the feminist struggle to dismantle sexism and male power and ensure that women have opportunities in life will not be achieved until all women have control over their sexual reproductive lives,” writes Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer in their book The Fall of Roe. “It’s a fundamental human right to control one’s own body and that it’s crucial to the ability of women to exercise their other social, economic, and political human rights.” Until they can fully decide when and if to become pregnant, women cannot be truly equal with men.
Along with his misogyny, the litany of Trump’s liabilities is well known to the American electorate: his corruption, narcissism, malevolence, racism, nepotism, mendacity, depravity, duplicity, hypocrisy, and venality are seared on the psyches of American voters. A convicted felon and insurrectionist, he has unmistakably signaled that a second term would bring about a blatant assault on the justice system, a ruthless prosecution of political enemies, a violent expulsion of immigrants, a reckless abandonment of the nation’s allies, an emboldening of tyrants worldwide, and a deepening of the nation’s racial and cultural rifts.
For these reasons, apparently, a majority of American men — MAGA Men — support him. Loathed by most women, Trump’s hope of winning the election depends on getting enough people — enough men — to join him in the curtailment of women’s rights and its fascistic merger with the termination of immigrants‘ rights.
He appointed hardline anti-abortion activists to help lead the Department of Health and Human Services, in his disastrous first term, and encouraged evangelical VP Mike Pence to engineer a governmental anti-abortion machine. And, of course, Trump nominated the three Catholic justices who voted — with three other Catholic members of the Supreme Court — to overturn Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision and end the constitutional right to an abortion. Incidentally, their decision was released on June 24, 2022 — the Catholic Feast of the Sacred Heart.
All of this is deeply unpopular, and Trump knows it. This is why he tried the laughably transparent contradiction of exulting in his appointments to the court but distancing himself from the consequences, both practical and political, of his draconian anti-abortion accomplishments. During his monumentally stupid debate with Harris, he also tried to tar Democrats as extreme with the deranged claim that they want to “take the life of a child in the ninth month, and even after birth” — baby “executions.”
Trump has spent a lifetime evading responsibility for his actions, whether that’s defrauding customers or instigating an effort to overturn constitutional government in the United States. While he can try to run away from Dobbs, he can’t escape the anti-abortion zealots that helped him secure the presidency in 2016 and support him now. He disingenuously suggested he might vote for a Florida amendment to protect abortion rights. Unable to withstand the torrent of criticism from anti-abortion extremists and fearful of demobilizing anti-abortion voters, Trump caved and voted with the anti-abortionists.
A second Trump presidency would be catastrophic for reproductive rights. Starting with radical Catholic VP J.D. Vance and Project 2025, abortion opponents will be integral to the entire ecosystem of his administration — their priorities woven into its very fabric, whether or not their cause is a priority for Trump. Part of the purpose of Project 2025 was to ensure a deep bench of MAGA apparatchiks ready to staff a second Trump administration and educated to use the levers of the federal government to further constrict women’s sovereignty over their bodies.
In a desperate and duplicitous attempt to woo female voters, Trump — during that humiliating debate with Harris — grandly proclaimed, “I have been a leader on fertilization, which is IVF.” Trump is not a leader on “fertilization,” unless by “fertilization” he means the kind of stuff that people use to kill weeds on lawns. To say he was a leader on IVF, or in vitro fertilization, it follows that he would have rallied Republicans to support it.
Instead – a mere week after Trump’s comments on IVF, Senate Republicans blocked, for the second time, a bill that would have provided a nationwide right to the fertility treatment. Sen. Vance wasn’t present for this vote, but had voted against the bill in June. Trump, the self-proclaimed “leader on IVF,” couldn’t even lead his own running mate to vote “yes.”
A man of zero convictions, Trump has no plans to protect IVF rights; rather, he subserviently does the bidding of ultraconservatives intent on systemically dismantling women’s rights. “The reality is that Trump is the reason that IVF is at risk in the first place,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth on the Senate floor after the vote. “The Dobbs decision is what led us to today’s nightmare, taking the power to decide how and when to start families from us women, and handing it to politicians in statehouses across the country.”
Blocking IVF protections creates an insidious pathway for Republicans to enshrine into law the biggest threat to IVF which is “fetal personhood” — the idea that a fetus or embryo should have the same rights as a child. If an embryo is a person, clinics could not dispose of unused embryos, something that is a common, necessary part of the IVF process. Fetal personhood would also ban abortion nationwide by granting full rights to fetuses. Vance, anti-abortion leaders, and Trump’s Project 2025 agenda have admitted that is their goal.
“American Women v. Trump,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024″
Despite his obvious anti-woman agenda, Trump is surprised that women don’t like him. Stuck in a 1950s Playboy version of womanizing masculinity, sad old Trump has recently taken to promising women that he will be their steadfast guardian — the national patriarch and women’s patron saint. At a recent rally in Pennsylvania, he told women that “You will be protected, and I will be your protector.” Like a malevolent horror movie villain come to life, Trump’s delivery alone made my skin crawl. I can only imagine its nauseating effect on women.
This was a follow-up to his bleat on Untruth Social that, if he wins, “Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free!” He went on, speaking directly to women, “You will no longer be in danger. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.” So says the man who famously stated, “when you’re a star, they let you do it,” who was found liable for sexual abuse, and who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by dozens of women. Most women recognize that when the predator offers protection, safety comes at the cost of freedom and submission so it’s time to fight.
Trump’s paternalism apparently extends only toward married women with children as his running mate Vance — along with the Republican party — disparage women who resist marriage and motherhood as “childless cat ladies,” who must be miserable. A recent convert to Catholicism and Trumpism, Vance ordains that adults without children should pay higher taxes and receive fewer votes. As heir apparent to the post-Trump MAGA party, the dogmatic Vance thinks he should decree other people’s sexual and reproductive choices.
Like Trump, he admires Hungary’s far-right Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán and has spoken admiringly of Orbán’s efforts to boost his nation’s marriage and birth rates, including a policy that offers subsidized loans to couples who wed before the bride’s forty-first birthday. “Why can’t we do that here?” Vance asked in a speech. “Why can’t we actually promote family formation?”
“Vance appeals to evangelicals with the message that we find happiness by fulfilling traditional gender roles, which is a cornerstone of white evangelical Christianity,” said Vanderbilt assistant professor Sophie Bjork-James, who has written extensively on evangelicals and populist politics. “He also speaks to a misogynist trend emerging out of the tech world among people who would prefer not to talk about any kind of diversity at all. Vance represents a new articulation of rightwing politics that is bridging the Christian right and a tech-influenced, hyper-masculine conservatism.
Twitter/X owner and painfully unfunny edgelord Elon Musk encouraged Trump to pick Vance as his running mate. He joins them in their disparagement of childless women singling out Taylor Swift after she endorsed Kamala Harris for president. (Trump later wrote, “I hate Taylor Swift.”) Musk posted the creepiest response possible. Replying to Swift’s identification of herself as a “childless cat lady,” he offered or perhaps threatened to impregnate her, saying “I will give you a child,” suggesting that Swift has no choice in the matter. What Musk proposed “was another way of saying rape,” said Hillary Clinton.
Musk also joined Trump and Vance and other Republicans in terrorizing Springfield, Ohio, by baselessly asserting that Haitian immigrants there are cannibalizing pets. Through xenophobic, sexist online memes, the Trump campaign has been aggressively courting what might be called the “bro vote, the frat-boy flank” — a slice of low propensity, low information 18-to-29-year-old males that has long been regarded as unreliable and unreachable.
Trump reposted a meme accusing Harris of being engaged in one of Puff Daddies’ freak offs — the horrifically abusive sexual parties that form the basis of the recent federal indictment against the rapper. Vile and entirely predictable, the post included a faked, photo-shopped picture of Harris standing with Diddy and suggesting she was an accomplice.
Along with the sexism, the bigoted former president also shares flagrantly racist memes about Middle Easterners invading America and falsely edited videos showing Harris urging migrants to cross the border. This is part of Trump’s hateful campaign strategy of scare-mongering on immigrants.
Trump’s toxic campaign merges xenophobia, an anti-abortionist agenda, and systematic misogyny into a fascist strategy aimed at further eroding women’s reproductive and sexual rights. “Attacks on abortion rights in the Global North is part of a larger misogynist and white supremacist project of the far right,” writes Sian Norris in her book Bodies Under Siege. “This fascist ideology is focused on a racist and misogynistic conspiracy theory that a white majority is being deliberately and malignly replaced by migration from the Global South.”
When Trump blathered to millions of Americans, during the debate, that “our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” he was not just repeating an egregious fabrication intended to undermine the results of the 2024 election. He was also echoing the latest iteration of a once-fringe racist conspiracy theory — the “great replacement.” It claims that nonwhite immigrants into the United States and other Western countries are replacing white voters to achieve a “white genocide.”
The far right believes reproductive control and immigration control must be the solution to its white supremacist anxiety about the so-called white genocide that, they imagine, eradicates racial purity and destabilizes white majority nations. This fictitious replacement — echoed in the Trump-Vance-Musk attacks on childless women — is enabled, they fantasize, by feminists suppressing the white birth rate with abortion and contraception. Musk — who has fathered at least 12 children with three women — is obsessed with low birth rates, which has led to accusations of his spreading the “great replacement” theory.
While this concocted, delusionary belief in a white genocide may have started as an extremist idea, it has now become mainstream politics, supported by a network of deep-pocketed funders on the radical right such as Elon Musk, anti-democratic billionaire Peter Thiel, and Catholic supremacist Leonard Leo. President of the Federalist Society, Leo picked the six Supreme Court Justices who ended Roe. An abortion abolitionist, he also helped orchestrate the Trump administration’s anti-abortion machine — “the strategic, top-down takeover at every level of American political and legal life,” according to Dias and Lerer, in The Fall of Roe.
The story of the fall of Roe revealed that Leo’s brand of ultra-conservative Christianity built enormous power where it mattered most. “They did not have to be the majority to be the ones now crushing liberal America — all they had to be was a powerful, well-positioned minority,” writes Dias and Lerer. “They had ended a ruling as deeply entrenched in American life as it was opposed in Catholic doctrine.”
For them, the fall of Roe was a beginning, not an end. As these Christian nationalists see it, the entire Roe era created rights that were untethered from the country’s traditions and Constitution: from legalized contraception to same-sex marriage, from affirmative action to immigration access — these were rights they must nullify.
Abortion rights has enabled Kamala Harris to emerge from the shadow that loomed over her during the first half of the Biden administration during which she had been relegated to the worst jobs, including the border. Over the two years since the Dobbs ruling, she traveled extensively across the country and emerged as the administration’s strongest, most compelling voice in the fight to restore abortion rights and access.
Harris reframed abortion as a fundamental freedom — the buzzword of her current campaign, which she and others on the abortion front lines have championed for years. “Harris’s approach to the fight was rooted in the women-of-color-led reproductive-justice movement,” writes Rebecca Traister in New York magazine. “She has linked abortion rights to other inequities, including the country’s high maternal-mortality rates and lack of affordable housing, paid family leave, and child-care provisions.” Together with ensuring free, safe and legal abortion, these policies promote egalitarian, voluntary families that reject the oppressive, unequal, patriarchal structures of gender and family.
Stopping Trump will not extinguish the radical religious movement that bolsters MAGA. Its diseased ecosystem permeates deeply into American life. However, American women realize that defeating Trump will at least prevent these Christian crusaders from seizing control of the government’s most powerful lever while offering a pathway to reverse the far-right direction of the Supreme Court, enact a humane immigration policy, prevent a nationwide abortion ban, and reclaim sovereignty over their bodies. In this election, American men must listen to American women.
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