At closing argument time, it turns out that Donald Trump is making Kamala Harris’s closing argument. What is it? That women should not vote for him. He is making the case better than she ever could. And it looks like it may be sticking.
Let’s start with what Trump said to Tucker Carlson about Liz Cheney at a forum Thursday night. It is, straight up, a very strong contender for the most shocking and vile thing he’s ever said. I know that’s saying something, but judge for yourself: “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Cheney is a war hawk. I disagree with her about all that. But that’s neither here nor there. A candidate for president of the United States just called for a fellow American to face a firing squad. A firing squad! Who’s the last presidential candidate to do that? Maybe someone like 1820 also-ran William Crawford? More likely no one, ever.
Some might argue that Trump was merely noting that Cheney had never been in the literal line of fire in combat, because he went on to talk about the swagger of Beltway interventionists like Cheney and John Bolton: “They’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building.” I’ve opposed most U.S. wars of my lifetime (I thought we were morally and legally justified in responding to September 11 in Afghanistan but worried that we’d overdo it, which of course we did), but I’ve always found that to be a real cheap-seats line—if you’re so crazy about war, why don’t you go fight it? No. If you oppose a war, oppose it on serious grounds, not on the basis of peanut-gallery arguments like that.
But Trump knew exactly what he was saying here—intentionally suggesting that Cheney should face a firing squad, but doing so in such a way that he could plausibly deny it. No prominent candidate for office has ever taken the next step of saying let’s put such a person in front of a firing squad. It’s a literal and specific sentence of death for a literal and specific human being, and that’s what makes it so outrageous.
And it’s not an accident that he said it about a woman. Trump has contempt for all of humanity, but his contempt for women is special, because women aren’t full human beings with intellect and agency in the same way men are. They’re there for sex, and if they’re not hot enough for sex, why are they hanging around taking up space, food, and water?
Which brings us to Trump’s second hideous comment of the week about women, that he’s going to protect them “whether the women like it or not.” Again, he pulled his usual trick of using plausible deniability language; what he meant, he continued, was that he’s going to protect them from migrants and foreign attacks (and I guess his rhetoric has become so offensive on so many levels that the clearly fascist nature of this pledge—that Dear Leader personally will protect them—is now worth only a parenthetical).
Whatever he meant, whatever was sludging through that sewer in his brain when he spoke the words, lots of people (not just women) took the remark as Trump reminding women of the power he has already exercised over their lives and will exercise again if he’s returned to the White House. And that properly freaks a lot of women out.
A month ago in Georgia, Candi Miller, a married mother of three who had lupus and diabetes, found that she was pregnant. She’d been warned by doctors that another baby could dramatically endanger her health. She ordered abortion pills online. They didn’t quite work. She was in need of a procedure that is fairly common—but that the state of Georgia had recently made illegal. She died. She didn’t want to visit a doctor, her family told the coroner, “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.”
That’s just one of many stories we now know about in which women and their doctors have been forced into impossible conversations and decisions because of the hideous laws passed after Trump’s Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. These stories are abstract to men. I very much doubt they’re abstract to women.
And finally: Trump really said Thursday that he’s going to put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of women’s health? Does he think women don’t hear this, and they don’t understand that Kennedy (before he ended his presidential campaign) said he’d sign a national abortion ban and that he might deny their children vaccines?
They do. And it seems they’re paying attention. The early voters so far are 54 percent women and 44 percent men. That seems an encouraging sign.
People are writing a lot of articles about the gender gap. Supposedly, it’s lower than expected. Supposedly, men are breaking for Trump by larger percentages than women are breaking for Harris.
Of course, this could end up being true. But two points: One, the margin of error on subgroups within polls is high. So say there’s a poll that shows Trump leads among men by 14 but Harris leads among women by only 11. But if the margin of error on those numbers is, say, five points, Trump could be winning men by as little as nine, and Harris could be leading among women by as much as 16. Such polls are not useless, but they’re also nothing to freak out about.
But second and more important: What matters more than the gender gap per se is what percentage of the overall electorate is female and male. In 2020, according to exit polls, the electorate was 52 percent women and 48 percent men. Isn’t it reasonable to think the female percentage might be a little higher? Might women not be a wee bit more motivated to turn out for Harris than they were for Joe Biden? Pollsters generally will not make that assumption; they tend to base their polls on past electorates. But let’s say women are, oh, just 53 percent of the electorate. If 180 million people vote, that’s 1.8 million voters. If Harris carries them with 55 or 56 percent (which I think is conservative), that’s one million more Harris votes. It depends on where they’re distributed, of course. But in a close election, that’s a lot of votes.
The media have obsessed over Black people and Latinos turned off by Harris and various other #Demsindisarray narratives. The enthusiasm of women for Harris is a storyline that has been entirely unexplored. Women, and Black women in particular, are invisible in the media, as I wrote two weeks ago. But they exist. And their votes count just as much as the votes of white working-class men in Wilkes-Barre.
It’s a close election. But Trump is getting weirder and more unhinged
every day. Every hour. Who knows what he’ll be saying by Sunday? The
true nature of the man is finally becoming unavoidable. And Harris is
getting sturdier. A lot of men are too blinded by their prejudices or
assumptions to notice this. I suspect women are noticing, in big
numbers.
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