Trump as ‘Protector’ of Women*
It’s just sad . . . in a pathetic and repulsive sort of way
A predator with an extensive history of attacking and belittling women — and sexualizing and assaulting the ones he deems “chosen” — is now their savior, their “protector.” Down in the polls to women, Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania: “We gotta end this national nightmare because I am your protector. I wanna be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector.”
Past isn’t prologue. Trust him. You can trust him. You must trust him.
The Stepford effect of his magical and charming paternalism is that the idea of abortion won’t even enter their pretty little heads because he will have solved the real source of all problems these “innately helpless” women face. He alone, this self-described alpha-male, will save the weaker sex from their stress, depression, anxiety, unhappiness, pessimism, lack of confidence, loneliness, abandonment, fear, and danger, which are the real causes of their “perceived” reproductive healthcare maelstrom. Since he has no policy or agenda to protect women, he’ll achieve this feat by patriarchal declaration and executive order. Trust him. It’s worked so well in his personal life.
Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine suggested Trump’s “disturbing” “riff to women voters . . . sounds like a domestic abuser.” “That is not an argument you’d make to free citizens. It is quasi-authoritarian appeal, Trump as national father figure, with an unmistakable undertone of menace. Women of America, you may think you don’t want to be with Trump. But you are wrong, and you are crazy, and if you return to Trump, you’ll realize he was right, and you will leave the worrying to him.” (Emphasis in original.)
As Danielle Campoamor explained:
“His falsehoods have been dangerous, inciting riots, bomb threats and foiled kidnapping plots. Others have felt more like performance art, like Trump’s comments about the alleged increase in the number of toilet flushes or assertion that windmills cause cancer.
“Yet somehow, none of those lies and absurd statements have been as outlandish as Trump’s latest attempt to gaslight American women. . . .
“Trump claimed that ‘women are less healthy’ than they were four years ago. And in a post-Roe world, that is in some ways true. An estimated 25 million women live in a state without access to abortion care, thanks to our would-be ‘protector,’ leaving women to bleed out in hospital parking lots, slip into comas due to preventable infections, and in the cases of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, die, all as a direct result of their states’ near-total abortion bans.
“Trump claimed that women are ‘more stressed and depressed and unhappy, and are less optimistic and confident about their future than they were four years ago.’ There is also some truth there. While Trump was busy pontificating on the effectiveness of injecting disinfectant to ‘clean the lungs’ during the onset of the pandemic, women were experiencing an increase in depression, anxiety and burnout as they tried to work from home while facilitating virtual learning for their children.
“Over 170,000 of us have endured the stress of traveling out-of-state for abortion care. An estimated 5.6 million of us are living in a county with limited or no access to prenatal care. Many of us are choosing to travel significant distances so we can safely give birth in a state that will not force a physician to deny us a life-saving abortion if we experience a devastating pregnancy complication, trying to navigate a world where we have less reproductive rights than our mothers.
“So yes, many women are scared and tired and worried about their futures — at least in part because of Donald Trump, his party and their wildly unpopular policies. And while Trump is seemingly hellbent on trying to cast a spell over women voters, conjuring up lie after lie about how his policies will somehow make us healthier, safer and more free, he is not as powerful as the women past generations of sexist patriarchs burned at the stake.
“It’s not surprising that a man who chose the president of the He-Man Woman-Haters club as a running mate would cling to the misogynistic belief that women are innately helpless. It’s not a shock that instead of listening to women voters when they say, in overwhelming numbers, that they want access to abortion care, Trump continues to misdiagnose both the symptoms and the cure to our post-Roe health crises.
“What is shocking is that in spite of all of this, some women — predominantly white women — will continue to believe they need a ‘protector’ to save them. What they really need is the freedom to protect and save themselves.”
American women don’t need a ‘protector’ — especially not one like Trump
As expected, and because past is prologue, Trump defines and characterizes his opponent with demeaning and abusive language which is illustrative of how he defines and characterizes women more broadly. She slept her way to the top: how else could she have become the San Francisco District Attorney, a two-term California Attorney General, a United States Senator from California, and Vice President of the United States? World leaders would treat her “like a play toy.” “They look at her and they say we can’t believe we got so lucky. They’re gonna walk all over her.” “I don’t want to say as to why, but a lot of people understand it.”
Still suffering devastating humiliation at the hands of a multiracial woman, Trump yesterday described the Vice President as “mentally impaired” and “mentally disabled.” “Joe Biden [male] became mentally impaired. Kamala [female, Black, Indian] was born that way,” he told what was left of a crowd of supporters in Wisconsin.
Remember Karl Rove’s post-debate condemnation of Trump’s reactive, emotional, unhinged, and incoherent performance, characterizing it in the Wall Street Journal as a “train wreck for him, far worse than anything Team Trump could have imagined”? Rove reminded us that in July Trump described Harris as “dumb as a rock. Which raises the question: What does that make him?”
Nia-Malika Henderson suggested Trump’s vow to women is an appeal to fragile men. “And so Trump, slowed by age, is running now on sheer muscle, backed by a geriatric Hulk Hogan, a thirsty Elon Musk and vice presidential hopeful J.D. Vance, whose troubled childhood seems to have left him longing for the 1950s ideal, even as his wife’s academic accolades easily outshine his. Trump’s appeal to women is also a direct appeal to men, whose fragile masculinity requires even more fragile women.”
“For decades, there were stereotypes of how women leaders would behave on the job. Surely, they would be addled by estrogen and ovaries and given to fits of hysteria and whining, beset by Chicken Little fears and bouts of unbridled emotion and paranoia, and therefore, unfit to lead.
“That is Donald Trump.”
R.VanWagoner https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner publishes. https://richardvanwagoner.medium.com/subscribe
*My brother the very talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner. Rob’s second novel is a beautifully written suspense drama that takes place in Utah, Wyoming, and Norway. This novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. I have read the novel and listened to the audio version twice. It is a literary masterpiece. The Contortionists is not, however, for the faint of heart.