As Steve Kornacki of NBC News explained Monday, the polling gender gap between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is “off the charts.” New polling by NBC shows a 58% to 37% split among with women overwhelmingly favoring Harris in the presidential race, while men back Trump 52% to 40%. Taken together, that’s a shocking 33-point gender gap between men and women.
This is hopeful news for a few reasons. Harris leads among women by a wider margin than Trump leads among men, pushing her ahead in the national poll. Women tend to vote more often than men and, in fact, have turned out in higher numbers in every presidential election since 1980. There’s every reason to believe that trend will continue, as concerns about abortion bans continue to activate female voters in large numbers. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Trump is screaming at women voters as if he were accusing a soon-to-be-ex-wife of ingratitude.
“You will be protected, and I will be your protector,” recently procliamed the man who was found liable for sexual assault by a jury in 2023. In a tone that sounded like a bad actor playing a hypnotist in a bad movie, Trump intoned, “You will no longer be thinking about abortion.” He then protested, “That’s all they talk about, abortion,” adding, “The fake news keeps saying women don’t like me.”
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Alencia Johnson, a former adviser to Joe Biden’s campaign, reacted on CNN by saying, “So disgusting,” adding that the diatribe reminded her that Trump is a “predator.” Jonathan Chait of New York magazine wrote that Trump “sounds like a domestic abuser,” who is gaslighting women by telling them their concerns about abortion rights aren’t real. “It’s like he’s talking through the locked basement door to the pregnant woman he’s imprisoned,” wrote blogger Rude Pundit on Threads.
This was not an off-the-cuff riff from Trump. It echoed an earlier all-caps Truth Social post, where he repeated the command to women, “YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION.” Nor is Trump the only Republican candidate lashing out in rage against women for disobeying the right-wing thought police. Fake MBA-holder and Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno has also pronounced women’s concern about abortion rights to be “crazy.”
“Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else,'” Moreno said at a Warren County town hall. “It’s a little crazy, by the way, but — especially for women that are like past 50 — I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.’”
Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who is as anti-abortion as these fellow Republicans, thought it was unwise of Moreno to tell women they’re “crazy” for caring about abortion rights. “Are you trying to lose the election?” she asked on Twitter.
What ties Trump and Moreno’s rants together is a deep resentment that they have to care what women think at all. In his speech, Trump can’t hide his irritation that women’s legitimate concerns about health care access are interrupting what he cares about, like his bizarre fantasies about cat-eating immigrants. His order to women to “be happy, healthy, confident and free” was delivered in angry tones that made clear this is more a threat than a promise. As Chait notes, “Why do I get the feeling Trump has made a version of this spiel in his personal life?” In other words, Trump doesn’t actually think he’ll make American women healthy or confident, but he believes that if he wins he’ll have the power to force them to pretend otherwise.
Moreno’s whining is rooted in the same assumption: Women are here to serve his interests, so it’s outrageous that women insist not just on the right to bodily autonomy, but the right to think for themselves. In response, feminists are understandably tempted to turn to evidence and statistics to “prove” that women aren’t “crazy” to care about abortion. About one in four American women will have an abortion in their lifetime. Even women who think they would never willingly abort a pregnancy understand they are still at risk of rape, or might need emergency treatment for a failing pregnancy. Moreno’s snark about post-menopausal women also showed a failure to imagine women as full humans with functioning brains. Even if you can’t personally get pregnant, other people in your life are likely still at risk. Some women may even — gasp! — have empathy for the suffering of strangers. Many were upset, for instance, by the stories of two women in Georgia who died because of the state’s abortion ban. It’s easy to imagine that those women could have been one’s own daughters, friends, students, neighbors or coworkers.
But it feels a bit dirty to even write out all the reasons women should be “allowed” to care about this issue. There’s a simpler issue at stake: Trump and Moreno are not the boss of the ladies. Oh, they clearly think they should be. Their tone and rhetoric indicate a deep belief that women’s beliefs, concerns and hopes should be of no consequence. Nor are they outliers in the GOP. It took revelations about North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson calling himself a “black NAZI” for Republicans to finally cut him loose in that state’s gubernatorial race. Previous comments calling for an end to women’s suffrage and declaring that women should be “led” by men, however, were just fine. This is a party that has captured by the Christian right, after all, which is organized largely around a belief in male “headship” over women.
It makes sense that most media outlets, in covering Trump’s “protector” remarks, highlighted his history of sexual assault, which he bragged about on tape and was established in a court of law. The irony is just too much: a sexual predator declaring himself to be the “protector” of people he likes to assault. But in fact his rant exposes the sexist attitudes that feed his impulse toward sexual violence. Trump outlines what he expects of women: to be compliant, smiling, uncomplaining objects that serve him without protest. When women show flashes of having minds of their own, however, he reacts with rage. He spent the entire debate with Harris glowering at having to tolerate this woman talking back to him. And of course, when journalist E. Jean Carroll laughed at him, however gently, he responded by violently assaulting her in a department store dressing room.
For all the GOP talk about women being “crazy,” the polls show that the majority of women have their heads screwed on straight, preferring a pro-choice Democrat like Harris to Trump’s authoritarian madness. It’s scary, however, that so many men are on board with the Trump agenda, even though abortion bans and other such draconian policies hurt men, too. Talking down to women like they’re dummies still appeals to a slim majority of men, it appears, even at the cost of bringing Trump’s chaos back into power.
