Donald Trump has vowed to protect women whether we “like it or not.” How offensive. How ridiculous.
He is posing as Big Daddy Protector because he is desperately worried that women will defeat him in this presidential election, the first since the United States Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade and deprived women of the constitutional right to abortion. The three justices who were the majority in that decision were all appointed by President Trump.
More women than men vote in the US, and according to Pew Research Center, 64 per cent of American women support the right to an abortion (as do 61 per cent of American men). That should keep Trump and the Republicans up at night. After Roe fell in 2022, voters backed abortion rights measures when they were on the ballot, even in red Republican states such as Kansas, Kentucky and Montana. On Tuesday, ten states will vote not just for the president but also on abortion rights, likely producing a big turnout of women voters. They could decide this election.
Abortion rights has been Kamala Harris’s best and strongest issue in this election. In a rally in Michigan last week, Harris and Michelle Obama condemned Trump for his role in bringing about the abortion bans and restrictions that states have enacted since the Supreme Court’s ruling. Stories of pregnant women bleeding to death or dying of infections because they were denied proper healthcare hammer home their point. “Donald Trump hand-selected three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe v Wade. They did as he intended,” Harris said. “And now, one in three women in America lives in a state with a Trump abortion ban—many with no exceptions for rape and incest. And the idea that somebody who survives a crime of a violation to their body would not have the right to make a decision about what happens to their body next, that is immoral.”
Harris is passionate and genuine when she talks about a woman’s right to choose. While her positions on other issues have shifted over the years, on abortion she has been steadfast. As a prosecutor, Harris stood up for women who had been raped and victimised. As attorney general of California, in 2015 she championed a bill that, among other things, required crisis pregnancy centres—which are often religious and anti-choice—to inform patients about state-provided healthcare programmes, including abortions. As a US senator in 2019, she co-sponsored legislation which would have protected women’s rights to abortion care (it didn’t pass). If elected as president, she has vowed to fight to end the Senate’s procedural filibuster rule—which requires 60 of 100 senators to back federal legislation in order for it to pass—to make it easier for senators to restore abortion rights. Kamala Harris has been a true protector of women.
Trump’s attempt to cast himself as a defender of women is, meanwhile, shallow and self-interested. He plays to his white, male Maga base, bragging about protecting women while spewing racist and misogynist insults at Harris and scoring points against immigrants, who he portrays as perpetrators of criminal acts against women. His critics have questioned how someone who has been found liable for sexual abuse in a civil case and been accused of sexual misconduct by two dozen women could cast himself as a protector; even Trump’s advisers reportedly told him it was inappropriate to do so.
For some, Trump’s rally in Madison Square Gardens, New York—featuring comics hurling racist comments about Latinos and pro-Trump adverts calling Harris the “c-word”—will have been a turning point. Nikki Haley, Trump’s opponent in the Republican primaries who later endorsed his candidacy, finally upbraided him. “This bromance and masculinity stuff, it borders on edgy to the point that it’s going to make women uncomfortable,” she said. Perhaps Haley understands that highly educated suburban women have reservations about Trump’s style.
Harris wasted no time in rebuking Trump for his “protector” remark, saying he does not respect women’s autonomy. At a campaign stop in Wisconsin, she told reporters, “It actually is, I think, very offensive to women, in terms of not understanding their agency, their authority, their right and their ability to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies.”
Still, as the New York Times recently noted, women voters, even those who support abortion rights, don’t necessarily support women presidential candidates. Trump won more votes from white women than Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. As the gender gap has widened in this election—Harris leads in polls of women by 12 per cent and Trump leads with men by 14 per cent—the vice-president is running neck-and-neck with Trump among white women. According to the New York Times’s Matthew Cullen, “White women are the country’s largest voting demographic, making up about 30 per cent of the electorate, and they consistently turn out at very high rates.”
Harris desperately needs them to turn out, in large numbers and in her favour, to offset Trump’s big advantage with male voters, especially those without a college degree. As Celinda Lake, a pollster and expert on women voters told the New York Times, her campaign should have a clear strategy: “Win women more than you lose men,” she said. “That’s how Democrats win.”
