In 2012, the GOP fielded candidates who didn’t know how our bodies worked. In 2024, Trump drones on about protecting us, and is equally disturbing.
Former president Donald Trump speaks at a rally on September 21 in Wilmington, North Carolina. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
In 2012, it seemed like Republicans hit their low in talking about women. Missouri GOP Senate candidate Todd Akin insisted that we couldn’t get pregnant after rape because “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Indiana GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said, “Even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that’s something God intended to happen.” GOP megadonor Foster Friess said “gals” just “put aspirin between their knees” as contraception when he was younger.
Presidential candidate Mitt Romney talked about having “binders full of women” he could hire, although he didn’t choose one as vice president, and nobody liked the idea of women being shut up in binders anyway. Of course, he was the least bad of them—he called on Akin to drop out of the race, which Akin did not and lost it to Claire McCaskill. But Romney had taken that sad procession from being a pro-choice Massachusetts governor to being an anti-choice automaton.
They didn’t really know how our bodies worked—they didn’t care—and that year, we shut their whole thing down.
Four years later, though, this country elected Donald Trump, who had been credibly charged of sexual abuse by two dozen women and is now an adjudicated rapist following his conviction in E. Jean Carroll’s suit against him last year. And Trump is sounding ever scarier as he talks about women in the last few days—especially as he talks about “protecting” us. He seems more and more like the world’s oldest incel, and it matters.
In recent speeches in North Carolina and, last night, in Pennsylvania, Trump has reiterated what he wrote in a Truth Social post when claiming to be a “protector” of women. As Jeet Heer pointed out, it’s a ludicrous claim that completely misses the role of Dobbs in mobilizing women voters. But the fact that he’s repeating this message again—and that the Truth Social post is as grammatically garbled as it is deranged—bears noting. Trump is spiraling when it comes to women, and is getting ready to blame us for his loss in November. I hesitate to predict he will lose, but it’s getting impossible to avoid.
Focus on how menacing his speech in Pennsylvania sounds:“We have to talk, because I always thought women liked me.” (We don’t, Donald. We always vote against you. Only three of us married you. And where is Melania these days?)
“I never thought I had a problem. But the fake news keeps saying women don’t like me. I don’t believe it. They like to have strong borders, they like to have safety.” (We like strong borders around our bodily autonomy, Donald, which you and your Supreme Court picks have violated.)
He went on: “I make this statement to the great women of our country. Sadly, women are poorer than they were four years ago, are less healthy than they were four years ago, are less safe on the streets than they were four years ago, are paying much higher prices for groceries and everything else than they were four years ago,
None of this is true. On the day he said it, the FBI confirmed that crime rates have tumbled. Women’s (and men’s) incomes are higher. Some grocery prices are higher, some lower. And if our health has worsened (and it hasn’t, overall), it’s because Trump’s Supreme Court made pregnancy a much more deadly condition than it was before 2022.
“I will fix all of that, and fast, and at long last this nation, and national nightmare, will end. It will end. Because I am your protector. I want to be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector. I hope you don’t make too much of it. I hope the fake news doesn’t go, ‘Oh he wants to be their protector.’ Well, I am. As president, I have to be your protector.”
That’s some scary, incel shit. What makes me think about incels is their completely faulty way of sizing up male-female relationships, and what makes them work. We don’t want a protector. We want a partner.
We now confront a second Trump presidency.
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Also, we all know Trump is a predator, not a protector.
Oh, he also trashed the woman who is ready to become our first female president, Vice President Kamala Harris. “She’s worse than him,” Trump said, comparing Harris to Joe Biden. “I’m telling you, watch. She’s not as smart as him. He’s not smart, he never was smart…. But she is a very dumb person. And we can’t do that. We can’t do that. I don’t want to be rude.”
Meanwhile, over in Ohio, GOP Senate candidate Bernie Moreno had more dumb words about women. He’s angry at suburban women who prioritize abortion rights with their votes, but that’s not all: “It’s a little crazy by the way, but—especially for women that are like past 50—I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.’”
Um, Bernie? I have a daughter. I have nieces—and nephews, too. Every one of them cares about reproductive justice. If you don’t think many of us are livid that we’ve seen our daughters lose rights that our mothers had… you don’t know us. You’re as clueless as Todd Akin or Foster Friess. And I believe you’ll go down in history as a footnote to Senator Sherrod Brown’s racking up another historic win in Ohio in November.
Joan WalshTwitterJoan Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is a coproducer of The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show and the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America. Her new book (with Nick Hanauer and Donald Cohen) is Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power and Wealth In America.