In 2016, when Donald Trump won his first US election and Britons voted for Brexit by a narrow margin, both results were understood as part of a backlash against the iniquities of neoliberal economics. Globalisation had left too many people behind. Voters wanted to stick it to establishment politics. They wanted change and voted for it.
Now, in the headline show of the 2024 “mega-election” year, Trump has won again, and analysts are explaining the Republicans’ decisive victory through the vagaries of the economy, inflation and an out-of-touch, establishment Democrat party failing to sell itself to voters and being hit by the “incumbent’s curse”. But the word backlash is relevant in another sense, too. This had been dubbed “the gender gap” election: Kamala Harris was thought to be more popular with women; Trump was more popular with men. It turns out that the term may also serve as a euphemism for something darker.
When Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016, people asked whether the US simply “wasn’t ready” to be led by a woman. With Harris losing the popular vote by nearly five million ballots (the first time the Republicans have won the popular vote in 20 years), and far underperforming Biden’s vote count in 2020, this year’s result raises a similar question: is the US simply too misogynistic to elect a woman president? There is something deeper here than negative reaction to the mere idea of a female in the Oval Office: in choosing Trump, Americans have elected a candidate who reflects a general, growing discomfort with the changing place of women in society.
The last time Trump ran against a woman and won, he had been caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women, while it was revealed his ex-wife had accused him of rape in a sworn divorce deposition. After his inauguration, women marched in their millions, wearing pink “pussy” hats, in Washington DC and cities worldwide, in protest at his evident sexism (wielded so bluntly against Clinton), and out of fear that women’s rights were under threat. This feminist activism coincided with the growth of the MeToo movement, which would soon reach its first peak of momentum.
This time Trump embodied even more blatantly, through his actions and words and those of his supporters and allies, the backlash against progress on women’s rights and against the women calling out how violence and misogyny impacts their lives. Amid the various grievances that might move an individual to vote one way or the other, Trump channelled resentment against the gains made by feminists and the challenges made to a patriarchal system—resentment that seems increasingly evident in recent years.
That Trump stands for putting women in their place had only grown clearer in the eight years since 2016. The president-elect stands for complacency over violence against women, for one. In 2023, a New York court found Trump liable for sexual abuse, in a case brought by the advice columnist E Jean Carroll. A judge later found Carroll’s claims that Trump raped her were “substantially true” after Trump counterclaimed for defamation. Last month, allegations (which Trump denies) surfaced of him groping and sexually assaulting a former model. Trump had met her through Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in prison in 2019 while awaiting his trial on sex trafficking charges (and who, it seems, Trump was close friends with, something he also now denies). Trump also ruminated in public about Liz Cheney (a Republican who had urged people to vote for Harris ) being shot: “let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her”, he said in an onstage interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host.
Trump stands for the stripping away of women’s rights, including to bodily autonomy and healthcare. Trump’s installation of conservative Supreme Court justices has led to abortion rights being trampled on across the US, after Roe v Wade was overturned in June 2022. Currently, 13 US states have abortion bans, with another two states, Arizona and Florida, banning abortion from after 15 and six weeks of pregnancy respectively. These bans, nine of which do not include exceptions for rape or incest, criminalise women and medical professionals and lead to preventable harm and death.
The most ideologically conservative Trump backers believe this is a public good. Project 2025, the near 900-page document produced by the Heritage Foundation thinktank, which provides a blueprint for a conservative overhaul of the federal government, is specific about rolling back feminist gains and modelling the US on conservative Christian family values. Project 2025 proposes further restrictions on abortion and contraception access, as well as the promotion of a “biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.” Trump has said he would appoint a man, Robert F Kennedy Junior, to be in charge of women’s health, where can “do what he wants”.
Trump has also aligned himself with people who evince a machismo and certain set of values which undermines and excludes women. Recordings surfaced of vice president-elect JD Vance maligning unmarried women who don’t have children as “childless cat ladies” (an anti-feminist trope) and talking about the “whole purpose of the postmenopausal female” being to look after grandchildren. (Liz Cheney described Vance and Trump as a “misogynistic pigs”.)
And towards the end, as the polls continued to predict a tight race, when the gender gap was increasingly cited as something that might even cost Trump the win, he was even more brazen. At a rally in Madison Square Garden, among a litany of racist and sexist remarks made by his supporters, businessman Grant Cordone said that Harris “and her pimp handlers will destroy our country”. On Fox News, Nikki Haley, a Republican, said that this display of “bromance” and “masculinity stuff” could make some women voters “uncomfortable”. And yet Trump won, decisively, gaining ground in all but two states. Young white men, attracted by his channelling of a certain masculinity, voted for him, but so did young white women, as Francesca Donner, editor of feminist newsletter The Persistent, points out.
That America is a conservative country, particularly when it comes to gender roles, has only been made clearer by this election. Remember that some pro-Harris campaign ads reminded Republican women they didn’t have to tell their husbands who they were voting for. This led to a backlash among Maga men, seemingly furious that their wives might exercise this democratic right. In the Guardian, Rebecca Solnit cited the pastor Dale Partridge, who argued on X that “in a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction”. Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker, describe such ads as proof of societal “decay”.
In the face of his predicted rejection by women voters, the president-elect positioned himself as their “protector”, “whether the women like it or not”. To his male supporters he presented increasingly visible misogyny in a race that often revolved around questions of what it is to be a man, and at a time when resentment against feminism is on the rise, including among the young.
What happens if women volunteer themselves as the subjects of their male “protectors”? At the end of a momentous year, when more people than ever went to the polls across the globe, American voters have reminded the world very clearly what’s at stake for liberal democracy, or whatever is left of it: not only freedoms in general, but the very specific freedoms that women have fought for.
