A watch party for the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, at the Harlem Tavern, in New York, on September 10, 2024.
Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux
On Truth Social, Donald Trump recently posted a special message to American women. “WOMEN WILL BE HAPPY, HEALTHY, CONFIDENT AND FREE!” he announced. “YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION, BECAUSE IT IS NOW WHERE IT ALWAYS HAD TO BE, WITH THE STATES.” The first sentence sounds like an Always commercial; the second is a bit more pernicious. It is difficult to be “happy, healthy, confident and free” as women die from abortion bans in states such as Georgia. Nevertheless, Trump is fond of his new pitch. At a campaign event in Pennsylvania on Monday, he called himself a “protector” of women, adding that ladies will no longer be “abandoned, lonely, or scared.” How wonderful.
Trump’s pledge is hollow for many reasons, not least because he has been found liable for sexual abuse and because dozens of other women have credibly accused him of sexual harassment and assault. His personal conduct makes him a natural fit for a GOP determined to roll back crucial protections for women, including abortion rights. Trump cannot take credit for ending Roe v. Wade and at the same time call himself a protector of women. The discrepancy will alienate all but the most zealous white women in the MAGA world, who want a strongman figure of the kind embodied by Trump. They embrace the notion that he will protect them, that with him in power they will no longer have anything to fear. As the national patriarch, Trump would safeguard their status.
Many other women will see the ruse for what it is, especially if they are young, or college-educated, or nonwhite. Trump’s pitch invokes the bad old days, when abortion was difficult if not impossible to obtain and women overall had fewer legal rights than they do now. The idea that women need a protector or provider to guide them and keep them safe from harm was once common, reflected in the law as well as in public opinion. In truth, though, those ideas left women vulnerable to danger and to threats from men in particular. If the only way for a woman to be happy or healthy or confident runs through a man, then she can never be truly independent of him. She relies on him and his whims for every good grace that she receives. That’s not freedom, no matter what Trump says.
The rhetoric is characteristically authoritarian in the sense that Trump admires strongmen and wishes to become one. He will thus deliver further subjugation, not liberation. Not even his female supporters will be safe from the anti-feminist backlash heralded by his party. If it’s dangerous to be pregnant in America, then it’s dangerous for anyone who can conceive; a doctor won’t check a patient’s political views when he refuses to perform a D&C under the threat of prosecution. That is the world that Trump’s supporters have signed up for; it is a world that social conservatives have labored to create.
Though the former president did not cite the Bible chapter and verse in his stump speech or his Truth Social post, it’s possible to hear echoes of the religious right in his remarks. That may not be deliberate on Trump’s part; despite his appeal to white Evangelical Christians, for example, he’s never become a pious churchgoer. It’s more likely that his secularized authoritarianism overlaps with a familiar religious authoritarianism. Some religious traditions, like the one I grew up in, still hold that women need a patriarch in the home. Such traditions have a right to their beliefs, even though I find them odious, but they cross a red line when they coalesce around the notion of a patriarch in the White House. The government is not a church or a home, and the religious beliefs of a few should not dictate the lives of the many. Even women who choose to live under certain religious constraints may not want the law involved in their practices.
Trump may not realize that women are capable of such nuance. He is a misogynist, and his latest appeals to women voters are profoundly emotional, as though women weren’t governed by rational instincts but by feelings like fear. It can be rational to fear, of course. I fear getting pregnant in the United States because of politicians like Trump. But women don’t vote solely because they feel lonely or scared. Instead, women are full human beings with minds of our own. We can review the facts, and polling suggests that most of us are inclined to reject Trump as our improbable protector. Trump is not capable of protecting anyone, let alone women, from himself or from anyone else. He is the wolf in the pasture, the threat in the dark. We can run, or we can fight.
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