“Donald Trump Can’t Win Without Women”: Trump’s Crude Sexist Spiel Has Backfired
Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s freshly-minted presumptive nominee for president, has called his Democratic counterpart Hillary Clinton a weak candidate lacking in stamina whose only asset is the “woman’s card.”
“And the beauty of this is that women don’t even like her,” he claimed after he won the Indiana Republican primary.
Harsh words, but not totally surprising from an unrestrained rich guy who has called Rosie O’Donnell a “fat slob,” among other epithets, and suggested that Fox News host Megyn Kelly was menstruating when she asked him tough questions at the first GOP Debate. (“She had blood coming out of her whatever.”)
Clinton, however, is betting that Trump’s crude sexist spiel has backfired, igniting opposition to him from women across the political spectrum.
“The whole idea of ‘playing the woman card,’ which he charged I was doing, and by extension other women were doing, has just lit a fire under so many women across the country,” she said during an interview with the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times posted yesterday.
“And I think it’s because they see his attacks on me, or Megyn Kelly or Carly Fiorina or whoever else he’s attacking at the moment as really a much broader attack on them. I think we are going to be pushing back and drawing the contrast whenever he does that. Because it’s just absolutely beyond the pale. He’s not going to get away with it, at least going forward.”
About half of Republican women (some 47 percent) say they don’t like Trump.
And several prominent female politicians in the Party of Lincoln are openly antagonistic to the foul-mouthed real estate mogul and his immodest proposals — like banning Muslims from entering the U.S. and deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants. Former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, for one, has compared Trump and other GOP candidates to fascistic dicators like Hitler.
“Trump especially is employing the kind of hateful rhetoric and exploiting the insecurities of this nation, in much the same way that allowed Hitler and Mussolini to rise to power in the lead-up to World War II,” she wrote last December in Politico Magazine.
Whitman has also said she might vote for Hillary Clinton.
Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO and sole female in the GOP race for president before she dropped out, is no ideological sistah to Clinton. But she was quick to attack Trump for boasting about his endorsement in April from “tough” Mike Tyson, the former world heavyweight champion who has had seriously rocky relationships with women.
“Sorry, I don’t consider a convicted rapist a tough guy,” Fiorina told reporters in Indianapolis during her brief stint as Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s pick for vice president. She was alluding to how Tyson was convicted of raping a teenage beauty contestant in the same city in 1992. (He spent three years in prison.)
Fiorina, who antagonized Trump when she was still running for the GOP presidential nomination, noted: “And I think it says a lot about Donald Trump’s campaign and his character that he is standing up and cheering for an endorsement by Mike Tyson.”
Cruz made a similar point with far stronger language when he assailed Trump as a “serial philanderer” and “pathological liar” who supports rapists as voters headed to the polls in Indiana on Tuesday. After they handed the bloviating billionaire a big win, Cruz abruptly suspended his campaign.
He was furious with Trump for making the bizarre and unsubstantiated claim on Tuesday morning that Cruz’s father was somehow involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Trump’s proof? He had seem a picture in the National Enquirer of a man who looked like Cruz’s Dad standing next to Lee Harvey Oswald. Cruz seemed astounded: “This is nuts. This is not a reasonable position This is kooky.”
Cruz’s has depicted Trump before as “utterly amoral,” in his apparent bid for the evangelical vote. Those words are among the sound bites that appear in a brutal anti-Trump ad released by the Clinton campaign earlier this week. Clinton lets Trump’s former Republican rivals on the campaign trail and other detractors do the talking. (“A con artist,” summed up Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who lost to Trump in his home state; “a race baiting xenophobic religious bigot,” stated Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina who was among the first of 17 GOP candidates to drop out of the GOP contest).
Another Clinton ad shows Trump talking himself into further trouble with female voters, telling Chris Matthew’s of MSNBC’s “Hard Ball” that women should receive some sort of unspecified “punishment” for having abortions in the event the procedure becomes illegal. He’s also shown in an interview refusing to disavow an endorsement from KKK leader David Duke.
Trump’s popularity among GOP standard bearers is hardly whole hearted.
“There’s more enthusiasm for @realDonaldTrump among leaders of the KKK than leaders of the political party he now controls,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts. wrote on Twitter. Warren, who has yet to endorse anyone, has become a one-woman scourge of Trump.
Meanwhile, a recent CNN/ORCA survey shows Clinton mopping up the floor with her fellow New Yorker, leading him by 54 to 41, a 13 point edge. That figure augurs well for the former two-term junior senator from the big blue state should she capture the Democratic Party’s nomination over Sen. Bernie Sanders in Philadelphia.
By: Mary Reinholz, Featured Post, The National Memo, May 6, 2016
“A Spectacularly Stupid Strategy”: Why Trump’s ‘Woman Card’ Attack On Clinton Is Sheer Lunacy
I have no idea what kind of discussions go on when Donald Trump is talking to his campaign advisers, though I suspect there’s a lot of “You were terrific, Mr. Trump!” and “That’s a great idea, Mr. Trump!” But it’s hard not to wonder what they’re telling him about how enthusiastically he’s been going after Hillary Clinton for allegedly playing the “woman card.”
This seems on the surface to be spectacularly stupid as a strategy, yet Trump won’t stop saying it. So I have a theory about what he’s up to, but even if I’m right, he’s going about it in exactly the wrong way.
Here’s what he said yesterday on Fox News Sunday when Chris Wallace asked him about it. It starts with Wallace telling Trump that people in both parties think Trump is being foolish in attacking Clinton this way, to which Trump replies, “Really? OK. Well, I’m my own strategist and I like that — what I said and it’s true. I only tell the truth and that’s why people voted for me.” Then he recites a bunch of poll numbers about how well he’s doing against Ted Cruz, and goes on:
“I mean, Bernie Sanders, what he said was a lot worse than what I said and I’m going to use that. We’ll have that teed up. But Bernie Sanders said she shouldn’t be allowed to run, that she’s not capable.
“And, you know, what he said is incredible. It’s a sound bite. It’s an — in fact, as soon as he said it, they broke in and they said, I can just imagine Donald Trump watching these statements Bernie Sanders has made — is making about Clinton.
“So, look, she’s a strong person. She’s going to have to be able to take it. The fact is, the only card she has is the woman’s card. She’s done a lousy job in so many ways and even women don’t like her. They don’t like her.
“But it is the woman’s card and she plays it, and I’ll let you know in about six months whether or not she plays it well. But I don’t think she’ll play it well. I don’t think she’ll play it well at all. And it’s true, if she were not a woman, she wouldn’t even be in this race.”
For the record, Bernie Sanders never said Clinton “shouldn’t be allowed to run.” Trump’s assertion that “If Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get five percent of the vote” led multiple commentators (see here, here, and here) to wonder just how well someone with Trump’s lack of experience and colorful history and ideas would fare in a presidential race if he were a woman, and the answer is pretty obvious. And you couldn’t find a worse candidate to make this argument, given that Trump’s unfavorable ratings among women in recent polls have ranged from 67 percent to 74 percent.
So how can he possibly think this is a good argument to make? Here’s my hypothesis: Trump is trying to execute a version of a strategy Karl Rove used so effectively throughout his career. That strategy says that you don’t go after your opponent’s weakness, you go after her strength. The most well-known case was that of John Kerry, where Republicans took the fact that Kerry was a war hero with multiple citations for bravery during his service in Vietnam, and convinced voters that not only wasn’t Kerry a hero at all, he was almost a traitor. In another colorful example from earlier in Rove’s career, he had a client opposing a candidate known for his volunteer work with children, so he spread rumors that the opponent was a pedophile. Suddenly, pictures of the candidate with kids he was helping took on a different meaning.
If this is what Trump is trying to do, it starts from an accurate premise: Clinton’s gender may indeed be one of her greatest strengths. She enters the general election with plenty of weaknesses, particularly since she’s been embroiled in an endless string of controversies over her quarter-century as a national figure. Yet her election as the first woman president would be truly historic, and the closer we get to the election, the more salient that fact may become to women voters (and many men as well). And Clinton isn’t hamstrung by many of the unfair questions that many female candidates have to endure. She’s viewed as strong and competent, and since her daughter is grown, no one is asking why she isn’t at home taking care of her family (a question female candidates with children get, but male candidates never do). There has been a significant gender gap in recent presidential elections, but this election could see the widest one in history, particularly if Democrats can succeed in turning out single women, one of the groups they perform best with.
But if Trump is trying to undermine Clinton’s ability to use her gender to her advantage, he’s going about it in exactly the wrong way. Instead of arguing that a Clinton presidency would actually be bad for women, he’s actually using sexist tropes against her, tropes that women voters find all too familiar. When he says she’s not qualified, every woman who’s ever held a job will be reminded of how she had to work twice as hard to be taken seriously as her male colleagues. They’ll also laugh at the idea that being a woman confers some kind of unfair advantage, in politics or anywhere else. And we’re talking about someone who was a senator and secretary of state, whatever else you might think of her. Trump has never worked a day in government and doesn’t understand the first thing about policy, but she’s the unqualified one? It’s as though the 2004 Bush campaign, instead of “swift boating” John Kerry to convince voters he was no war hero, instead said, “Sure, John Kerry is a war hero, but bravery and service are stupid and military experience should disqualify you from the presidency.” You can imagine how well that would have gone over.
The challenge for Clinton is to figure out exactly how to react to Trump’s blundering attacks. Her initial response — “If fighting for women’s health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal me in!” — was her way of saying that there’s a substantive basis to this argument, that it’s about more than just rudeness. But she needs to keep women motivated to vote against Trump for emotional reasons, too: in the best scenario for her, women are so disgusted by Trump that they register and vote in unusually high numbers. And as some early political science research shows, there’s a wrong way to do it: celebrity endorsements touting Clinton as a strong, accomplished woman have little effect, while a recitation of Trump’s vulgar statements about women move voters powerfully against him.
Of course, it’s also possible that Trump doesn’t have any Rovian strategy in mind when he tells voters that the only reason anyone supports Hillary Clinton is that she’s a woman. It could be that Trump is just a misogynistic jerk who can’t help himself, and isn’t following any strategy at all.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, May 2, 2016
“Tough Guy Assertiveness”: Membership Has Its Privileges; Donald Trump’s Man Card Pays Off
Donald Trump cut to the chase after his big wins Tuesday night: “Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the women’s card.”
Which is a hell of a thing to say after almost 250 years of American presidential candidates implicitly playing their “men’s cards”—perhaps no one more so than Trump himself, whose campaign rests largely on tough guy assertiveness and machismo bloviating. For many of his supporters, his appeal is very much that he’s a white man.
Don’t believe me? Try to imagine a woman of color running for president on his playbook. “Trump’s attitude coming from a woman or minority would make that person even more beloved by Trump supporters,” one person tweeted me. Which is not only incorrect but preposterous.
First of all, I can’t think of a single woman of color in American politics today who would back the sorts of ludicrous attacks on women and people of color that Trump supports. I can’t name one woman of color who wants to ban Muslims from entering the United States, summarily round up and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants—let alone who habitually calls other women like “dogs” and “fat pigs.”
But even if some Trump-ian woman of color Trump were to exist, it’s impossible to imagine her suffering the same landslide of critiques as Trump and yet emerging similarly unscathed. Women and people of color are simply held to a higher bar in our society. When you’re the only white woman in the corporate board room or the only black man in the legislature, you’re under constant pressure to prove that you’re as smart and qualified as everyone else and that you deserve to be there. It’s a bar white men are simply presumed to meet.
That’s the very definition of privilege—which is not just about where you come from, but what’s assumed about you the moment you walk in a room. And we know from study after study that the sexism and racism baked into American culture means that women and people of color are presumed less than—less than qualified, less than talented, less than deserving.
Try to imagine a woman of color skating by in a presidential primary with Trump’s thin soup of policy “ideas.” Imagine a white woman candidate reading a meandering, inconsistent and impractical foreign policy speech off a teleprompter. Imagine a black male candidate asserting he doesn’t need to give specifics on his policy proposals or how he’ll get things done because people should just trust him. Imagine a woman of color saying she only likes the soldiers who don’t get captured.
You know as well as I do they would be laughed out of politics.
Meanwhile Trump’s entire appeal is based on hyper-masculinity and machismo. He critiques Clinton, saying it’s “always drama” with her and she “doesn’t have the strength” for the job while he calls his Republican opponents names like “little Marco” and “low energy” Bush. He brags about his hot wife and how rich he is. Hand size innuendo aside, Trump is literally and figuratively boasting that he is the biggest guy in the room and as president will be the biggest guy in the world and will “Make America Great Again” because he’s great.
To buy into Trump’s candidacy, you have to buy into the Trump persona— because, let’s be honest, there’s nothing much else to go on there.
And his appeal is most directly to those who feel they have nothing else to go on themselves—mostly working-class white men who feel somehow that the ever-so-modest increase in rights for women and people of color in America has somehow meant less rights and opportunity for white men such as themselves. These voters would not, very simply, vote for a woman or person of color because that’s who they implicitly blame for their lot in life. Data have shown that, among white voters, higher levels of racial resentment correspond with higher support for Trump.
When Trump bases his entire campaign against political correctness, he’s implicitly evoking opposition to those who traditionally support political correctness—namely people of color and women. It’s no coincidence that Trump is running to succeed the first black president while running against the first major woman candidate. As Jamelle Bouie noted in Slate, this doesn’t feel like change to these voters as much as an inversion: “the end of a hierarchy that had always placed white Americans at the top, delivering status even when it couldn’t give material benefits.”
These Trump supporters—clearly not all, maybe not even most, but definitely many—are arguably the same people who think that racism against African-Americans isn’t really a problem in America today but believe in the myth of “reverse racism” against white people as a growing danger.
The impossibility of it aside, Trump supporters would never vote for Trump if he were a woman of color because they see women and people of color as a symptom of if not the actual cause of America’s problems today. These voters are clinging desperately to their white maleness and to their white male candidate.
By: Sally Kohn, The Daily Beast, May 1, 2016
“Losing The Biggest Game Of His Life—To A Woman”: How Winning The Nomination Could Be Trump’s Worst Nightmare
GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a news conference Tuesday, April 26.
We had been promised something of a new candidate, one more “presidential” in demeanor than we’re accustomed to seeing in the ostentatious settings at which he stages his post-primary speeches. But when Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential frontrunner, stepped up to the mic in Manhattan’s Trump Tower to celebrate his epic sweep of Tuesday night’s GOP nominating contests in all five of the states in play, what we saw was a Trump more subdued in tone but as misogynist in substance as ever.
After declaring himself to be “like, a very smart person,” Trump made an astonishing claim: If Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton—who won four of Tuesday’s five Democratic primaries—were a man, he said, “she’d be at 5 percent” in the polls. As if being a woman granted the female politician some great advantage. Were that the case, each chamber of Congress, one might assume, would be a body in which women represented 80 percent of the membership, rather than the other way around. Surely, given such great gender privilege, the 50 states might muster more than a grand total of six female governors among them.
Trump appeared to be grasping at some explanation for why, in general election match-up polls, he trails behind a woman. (It must be because she’s a woman! The system is rigged!)
“I’ve always been very good at math,” Trump told us, though apparently that prowess ended before the probability exam began.
The only thing that Clinton had going for her, Trump said, was “the women’s card,” perhaps failing to notice that in the 2012 presidential election, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, 71.4 percent of women reported voting, while only 61.6 percent of men did. Add in the fact that there are more eligible female voters than male voters, one might see that very card maligned by Trump as something of a trump in and of itself.
“Women don’t like her,” Trump said of Clinton, apparently not aware of the fact that in all but three states since the beginning of the presidential campaign season, Clinton has won the majority of the women’s vote. Meanwhile, Gallup reports, 7 in 10 women have an unfavorable view of Trump.
The ancient Greek philosophers saw misogyny as evidence of fear of women. Whatever the original roots of the showman’s misogyny, the polls would indicate he has good reason to fear women in November—those, at least, who turn up at the voting booth. Which may explain Trump’s urging, in his latest victory speech, of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s flagging Democratic challenger, to run as an independent in the general election. An independent progressive would presumably peel off votes that would have otherwise gone to the Democrat.
But then Trump went on to echo Sanders’s allegation that Clinton is “unqualified” for the presidency, an attack that many women, including this writer, heard as distinctly gendered in nature. (Sanders has since walked back that claim, which he said was based on the fact that, while serving in the Senate, Clinton had voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq during the presidency of George W. Bush.) But given Trump’s free-associative invocation of that particular Sanders attack on Clinton, coupled with the Bernie Bro phenomenon and Sanders’s dismissal of Planned Parenthood as an “establishment” organization, one could wonder whether an independent Sanders candidacy might just peel off misogynist voters from Trump.
Before the night’s end, the Sanders campaign issued a statement that suggested the U.S. senator from Vermont was no longer in it to win it, but would instead stay in the contest in the hope of injecting his campaign’s driving issues—income inequality and the break-up of big banks—into the Democratic Party platform at the national convention in Philadelphia.
Meanwhile, pundits were once again using such words as “unstoppable” to describe Trump’s march to his party’s nomination, what with the establishment types who had once seemed so vehemently opposed to him on moral ground now submitting, between sighs, to what suddenly seemed inevitable. (Both U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Governor John Kasich fared poorly in Tuesday’s contests—in the Eastern states of Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Maryland—and the non-aggression pact they had forged for next week’s contests unraveled soon after it was announced.)
As Clinton’s nomination became all but sealed on Tuesday night, the pundits barely seemed to register the historic nature of it. For the first time, a woman was almost certain to be the standard-bearer of one of the two major political parties in a presidential election. But Donald Trump surely noticed.
With his male challengers falling away, Trump is now faced with two outcomes he likely once deemed improbable, if not impossible: that he could win the nomination of the Party of Lincoln, and that he could lose the biggest game of his life—to a woman.
By: Adele M. Stan, The American Prospect, April 27, 2016
“Trump Plays The Man’s Card”: It’s Like A Credit Card That Isn’t Accepted Anywhere But Carries A $3,000 Annual Fee
Republicans have often been indignant at being portrayed as waging a “war on women,” and the rhetoric sometimes was, indeed, a bit over the top. Until Donald Trump showed up.
Trump seems to be trying a strategy of what Ted Cruz would call “carpet bombing,” insulting Carly Fiorina’s face, Megyn Kelly’s menstrual cycle, Heidi Cruz’s looks and now Hillary Clinton’s “woman’s card.”
This is the card that in the United States earns women just 92 cents to a male worker’s dollar, less than one-fifth of the seats in Congress, a bare 19 percent of corporate board seats, an assault every nine seconds — and free catcalls and condescension! Frankly, I’ll stick with my MasterCard.
Yet many on the right passionately believe that Clinton and other women get a pass because of this woman’s card (Rush Limbaugh, even more blunt, calls it playing the vagina card). Really? A twice-elected senator and former secretary of state is benefiting from a gender shortcut, even as her male opponent would be the first president in history never to have held elective, military or cabinet office?
To me, it looks as if Trump is playing the man’s card!
The evidence is that the woman’s card is less than worthless: There’s abundant research showing that men and women alike tend to judge women more harshly than men. One of the best-known experiments is called the Goldberg paradigm, and it asks research subjects to evaluate an essay or speech. In countries all over the world, both men and women judge the same piece more negatively when they are told it is by a woman, more positively when they believe it is by a man.
In a more recent experiment, more than 120 scientists around the United States were asked to evaluate an application for a job as laboratory manager. In half the cases, the name on the application was Jennifer, in the other half it was John, but everything else was identical.
The scientists recommended John more highly than Jennifer, were more willing to mentor John than Jennifer, and on average suggested a salary for John that was 14 percent higher than the one they suggested for Jennifer. It didn’t seem to matter whether the scientists were male or female.
Likewise, female musicians are rated more highly when they perform in gender-blind auditions from behind a screen. One study found that conducting auditions from behind a screen increases by 50 percent the chance that a woman will advance out of preliminary audition rounds.
The problem isn’t exactly misogyny. We’ve come a long way since President Richard Nixon told an aide why he wouldn’t appoint a woman to the Supreme Court: “I’m not for women, frankly, in any job. I don’t want any of them around. Thank God we don’t have any in the cabinet.”
Today it’s not a clear-cut case of men oppressing women. It seems to be more about unconscious bias, a patriarchal attitude that is absorbed and transmitted by men and women alike — which is one reason women often aren’t much help to other women.
“Women aren’t particularly nice to women,” notes Esther Duflo, an economist at M.I.T. who has studied gender issues. She observes that in Spain, researchers found that having more women randomly assigned to a committee evaluating judiciary candidates actually hurts the prospects of female candidates. A similar study found that on Italian academic evaluation committees, women evaluate female candidates more harshly than men do.
A central challenge is that it’s difficult for women to be perceived as both competent and likable: If they’re seen as competent, they’re grating nags, while if they’re perceived as nice, they’re airheads. There’s no such trade-off for men.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a Harvard Business School professor, has conducted pioneering studies of women in the business world and says that the first women at their level tended to be stereotyped in one of four ways: as a mother figure, as a sex object, as a cheerleader or as a tough-as-nails “iron maiden.” “If you have to be stereotyped, that’s the best one, the iron maiden,” she adds.
Indeed, the first women as leaders in democratic systems — people like Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel — have often been tough, hawkish figures, and Kanter says it may be easier for voters to support this kind of woman rather than one who is more traditionally feminine. Hillary Clinton also fits into that hard-bitten, hawkish archetype.
So what do we make of this research? I’d say that if Clinton leads Trump in the head-to-head polls, maybe it’s because of gaps in experience, policies, temperament and judgment. It’s certainly not about the “woman’s card,” which is like a credit card that isn’t accepted anywhere but carries a $3,000 annual fee.
It has been said that Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did — just backward and in high heels. Now that’s the woman’s card.
By: Nicholas Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 30, 2016
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