Trump's got a brand new woman problem

If Kamala Harris wins in November, American women will deserve a lot of the credit. Polls suggest women will vote in record margins for Kamala Harris.

The ABC News/Ipsos poll released September 1 found Harris leading Trump by a whopping 54 percent to 41 percent among women.

Donald Trump has a yuge woman problem. Below, I first examine why; then discuss how women are likely to vote; and, finally, put Trumpism in the context of authoritarianism and fascism.

1. Why Trump has a woman problem

Not just because he’s had many wives and sexual escapades.

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Not just because he had an affair with an adult film star soon after his wife gave birth.

Not just because of his crude references to women: “stars can do anything with women … grab ‘em by the pu**y;” a female interviewer “had blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever;” women are “crazy,” “unhinged,” “nasty.”

Or his recent repost of old photographs of Harris and Hillary Clinton followed by the comment: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently” (referring to Harris’s once dating San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern).

There’s also the issue of abortion. Trump was dead against all abortions in 2016. He put three justices on the Supreme Court who joined Justice Samuel Alito in reversing Roe v. Wade, with the result that one out of three women of childbearing age now lives in a state where abortion is effectively banned.

Swing states Nevada and Arizona have abortion-related ballot measures this fall, which may fuel turnout among independent women.

Beyond all this are the dozen or more allegations of Trump sexually harassing, abusing, and, yes, raping women.

Trump’s lawyers say his accusers lack specifics. But Trump used 45 minutes of a news conference on Friday to graphically recount the specifics for anyone whose memory might be fading.

He had just come from an appeal of last year’s verdict in which a nine-member jury found him liable for sexual abuse, battery, and defamation against New York writer E. Jean Carroll in a dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman in the 1990s, and awarded her $5 million in damages.

The trial judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, noted that “as the evidence at trial … makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did [rape Carroll].”

The day after Carroll won her lawsuit, Trump appeared on CNN and denounced her as a “whack job.” Carroll then sued Trump a second time, claiming that Trump manhandled her, “pulled down her tights,” groped around her genitals, and raped her, which reputedly left Carroll unable to develop sexual relationships. This time, a jury awarded Carroll $83 million in damages.

How did Trump defend himself at his Friday news conference? He said it couldn’t have happened because of his fame.

“If I would have walked into Bergdorf Goodman, the department store that she said, everybody would have said, ‘Oh, there’s Trump.’ And it would have been at that time on Page Six [the New York Post gossip page]. It would have been a big story if I would have walked into that store, got into a dressing room, and supposedly you-know-what to her. Never happened.”

Trump then used a similar defense in discussing another accuser, Jessica Leeds, who claimed he assaulted her on an airplane.

“She said I was making out with her. And then … grabbed her at a certain part and that’s when she had enough.” It couldn’t have happened because “I’m famous, I’m in a plane, people are coming into the plane. And I’m looking at a woman, and I grab her and I start kissing her and making out with her. What are the chances of that happening?”

A third accuser, Natasha Stoynoff, alleged that Trump physically attacked her at his Mar-a-Lago property in December 2005 when she was on assignment for People magazine. As she wrote in 2016: “We walked into that room alone, and Trump shut the door behind us. I turned around, and within seconds, he was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat.”

On Friday, Trump said Stoynoff wasn’t attractive enough for him to have sexually harassed her. “Frankly — I know you’re going to say it’s a terrible thing to say — but it couldn’t have happened, it didn’t happen, and she would not have been the chosen one,” he said.

Trump’s woman problem has grown even worse by his picking JD Vance for vice president.

In an interview from 2020, Vance agreed with a podcast host who said having grandmothers help raise children is “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female.”

When confronted about his 2021 reference that women leaders in America are “a bunch of childless cat ladies,” Vance told Megyn Kelly: “Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats.”

Vance has criticized divorce even for women suffering domestic violence. When “people can shift spouses like they change their underwear” it doesn’t work out “for the kids of those marriages.”

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2. How women are likely to vote

There are 3 million more women in America than men. And they almost always vote in larger numbers than men. In 2020, 74 percent of adult U.S. women said they voted, vs. 71 percent of men.

That split has held true for more than 40 years — in every presidential election beginning in 1980, according to the Center for American Women and Politics.

There’s also a big split in voter registration: 89 million women told census surveyors they were registered in 2020, vs. 79 million men.

The 2024 election may set the record for women voting — and voting for the Democratic candidate for president. As I noted at the outset, the ABC News/Ipsos poll released September 1 found Harris leading Trump among women by 54 percent to 41 percent.

The gender chasm is even larger among women under 30 — an overwhelming 67 percent of whom plan to vote for Harris, while just 29 percent back Trump, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.

A Quinnipiac Poll in mid-August found a similar gender chasm among likely voters in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania: Women backed Harris 54 percent to 41 percent, while men went for Trump, 49 percent to 42 percent. (Overall, Harris was up 48 percent to 45 percent.)

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3. Trumpism and male dominance

Trump’s world view is organized around male dominance. For Trump, as in most authoritarian and fascist states, anything that challenges the traditional heroic male roles of protector, provider, and controller of the family is considered a threat to the social order.

Last week, Trump’s new ally, billionaire Elon Musk — whom Trump wants to run a “government efficiency commission” — promoted a theory that advocates a “Republic” led exclusively by “high-status males” with “high testosterone levels.”

Friends, we’re close to The Handmaid’s Tale territory.

Women of America, this is your time. The nation needs you now more than ever.

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Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/