Trump's closing argument is all about demeaning women

"Locker room talk" might finally be his undoing

At a rally on Wednesday Donald Trump said his advisors had warned him against the continued use of rhetoric that many women find patronizing and sexist. “I said, well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not,” Trump concluded.

“I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not” is more than a creepy campaign line; it’s an ethos Trump spelled out in the Access Hollywood tape that was made public in 2016:

DONALD TRUMP: I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

When that tape surfaced in 2016, Trump famously defended his comments as mere “locker room talk.”

In the last week, two more women have come forward to accuse Trump of groping them, bringing the number of women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct to 28.

Earlier this year, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and ordered him to pay $83 million in damages for abusing and defaming her. In response to Trump’s attempts to minimize the jury’s finding that he had sexually abused Carroll, the judge in the case clarified that the jury found that Trump had raped Carroll, as the term is used in “common modern parlance.”

It was never just talk. And demeaning women has never been something Trump and his top supporters confined to a locker room.

Just last week, Trump’s top surrogate and primary funder, Elon Musk, used his political action committee to run an ad declaring “KAMALA HARRIS IS A C WORD”:

That ad appeared timed to coincide with Trump’s hatefest at Madison Square Garden last weekend, at which Trump supporter Tony Hinchcliffe planned to use the entire word:

“He had a joke calling [Vice President Kamala] Harris a ‘cunt,’” a campaign insider involved in the discussions about the event told The Bulwark. “Let’s say it was a red flag.”

[…]

Campaign staffers had asked all speakers to submit drafts of their speeches ahead of time—before they were loaded into the teleprompter—according to the aforementioned sources. Once the objectionable “cunt” joke was spotted, the sources said, a staffer asked Hinchcliffe to strike it. He complied.

Lines the Trump campaign apparently didn’t have a problem with included Hinchcliffe’s suggestion that Travis Kelce should kill Taylor Swift, another speaker’s reference to Kamala Harris as a prostitute, and Tucker Carlson calling Harris a “Samoan-Malaysian,¹ low IQ² former California prosecutor.”

Other prominent Trump supporters are freaking out over the possibility that women might exercise free will.

Charlie Kirk, whose organization Turning Point USA is leading Trump’s get-out-the-vote operation — to the tune of more than $100 million — is panicking that women are voting:

But what has really set Trump’s biggest supporters off over the last week is the realization that some women might not vote the way their husbands tell them to vote.

Fox News host Jesse Watters said that if his wife voted for Kamala Harris, it would “violate the sanctity of our marriage”:

JESSE WATTERS (CO-HOST): I don't believe these fake stories that you're saying on television about these guys, that they say that they voted for Trump and now they're voting for Harris because of their daughters. That is such a lie, Harold. I know you and I've met your friends and none of your friends strike me as that lame. And if I found out Emma was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that's the same thing as having an affair. That violates this sanctity of our marriage.

Dale Partridge, a Trump-supporting pastor in Arizona with more than 100,000 followers on Twitter, announced that women should vote “according to her husband’s direction,” adding — unconvincingly — “This is not controversial.”³

Partridge followed that up with an angry denunciation of an ad campaign reminding people that their votes are private:

Rebecca Solnit observes:

“It’s not just that the party eager to deny women bodily autonomy is full of husbands eager to deny their wives political autonomy. It’s also a reminder that democracy and its opposites exist at all scales.”

The television ad campaign picks up on the theme of a grassroots effort that has played out in recent months:

In a world where the political gender gap is growing as women become more liberal, a clever grassroots campaign is reminding women of a fundamental truth: Their vote is private. This guerrilla movement uses a simple yet powerful tool—Post-It notes—to reach women whose partners may disagree with their political choices.

The premise is simple: small, brightly colored notes discreetly placed in public spaces, like bathroom stalls, libraries, cafes, dorm buildings, workplace lounges, doctors’ offices and community boards. Each note carries the message that every woman has the right to cast her vote freely and privately.

“Woman to woman, your vote is private,” read one Post-It in a bathroom stall at the Minnesota State Fair, tapping into the pressure some women face to align their political beliefs with those of their spouse or partner.

In the end, it might just be some locker room talk that stops Trump.

1. Kamala Harris is of Afro-Jamaican and Indian-American descent. Tucker Carlson is virulent racist who might not literally be a Nazi but sure seems to admire them.

2. Kamala Harris is obviously intelligent. Tucker Carlson is a prick.

3. Dale later added that a woman “has free agency to operate under the general direction of her husband. But she is not free to oppose his will.” Kind of like an employee, I guess?