When The Predator Says He’s Your Protector
Trump’s latest appeal to women is the essence of paternalism.
Despite weeks of trying, Trump and his allies have yet to unearth a single credible story of Haitian migrants killing anybody’s dog. Someone who has been credibly accused in that department, per the Guardian this morning: Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts.
The man behind Project 2025, the rightwing policy manifesto that includes calls for a sharp increase in immigrant deportations if Donald Trump is elected, told university colleagues about two decades ago that he had killed a neighborhood dog with a shovel because it was barking and disturbing his family, according to former colleagues who spoke to the Guardian.
The reported victim was supposedly a pit bull, so the discourse on this one should be pretty wild. Happy Tuesday.
American Women vs. MAGA Men
—William Kristol
“The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”
Sigmund Freud didn’t know the answer to this question back in 1913. It remains a mystery to many in 2024.
But what we do know now is that American women don’t want Donald Trump. In the latest NBC News poll, American men supported Trump by 52 percent to 40 percent. American women were for Kamala Harris by 58 percent to 37 percent.
This confirms my long-held suspicion that women are in general a lot more sensible than men, have better judgment than men, and have a greater capacity than men to think for themselves. It is American women who’ve come to the altogether reasonable and evidence-based judgment that Harris will be a better president than Trump. It’s American men, swayed by suppressed emotions, unresolved anxieties, odd fixations, and—yes—a touch of hysteria, who support Trump.
Trump finds this annoying. So he’s recently taken to lecturing American women that he’s their man. Last night, at a rally in Pennsylvania, he told women that “You will be protected, and I will be your protector.” He also informed them they “won’t be thinking about abortion.”
This was a follow-up to Trump’s social media post late last week, in which he asserted, in all caps, that if he wins “WOMEN WILL BE HAPPY, HEALTHY, CONFIDENT AND FREE!” He went on, speaking directly to women, “YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION.”
So says a man who famously stated, “when you’re a star, they let you do it,” who was found liable for sexual abuse, who repeatedly boasts of overturning Roe. But this is Trump’s view: He should get to do what he wants to women. He should also get to tell women what to think. And of course women should be grateful to their beneficent guide and protector.
Trump’s followers share this view.
Trump’s handpicked Ohio Republican Senate nominee, Bernie Moreno, at a town hall in Warren County last Friday night, deplored the fact that some women choose to vote on the issue of abortion rights. Indeed, he continued, “It’s a little crazy, especially for women past 50. I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.’”
So Moreno, like Trump, likes to tell women what issues they should care about. He’s even got this one conveniently broken down by women’s age.
Of course, in his MAGA-male way, Moreno can’t seem to imagine anyone caring about anything for any reason other than the narrowest self-interest. Could women past 50 care about their daughters? Or about younger women in general? Or about personal freedom?
Not in Moreno’s world.
In Moreno’s world, and Trump’s, men act in their self-interest, and women are not to think for themselves.
Fortunately, American women aren’t listening to MAGA men. Nor are they too perturbed, it seems, by Freud’s bewilderment. One has to be impressed by the good sense and self-confidence of today’s American women. Now, if only a few more American men had the good sense and self-confidence to listen to American women.
Omaha to the Rescue
—Andrew Egger
Nebraska GOP’s push to change its election laws to lock down its five electoral votes for Donald Trump is looking pretty dead. “It’s over,” Sen. Deb Fischer told our Joe Perticone yesterday.
At issue, as we noted yesterday, was Nebraska’s unusual system for allocating electoral votes: two to the statewide winner, one each to the winner in the state’s three congressional districts. Instead of notching five easy electoral votes for Trump, Nebraska is currently on pace to give him four, with the last a tossup that somewhat favors Kamala Harris.
Nebraska Republicans—backed by a huge national GOP push—have been hustling to try to change the law. But they don’t quite have the supermajority of support in the state legislature they need to do it. And yesterday, the key Omaha Republican standing in the way announced he’d made his final decision to oppose it.
“After deep consideration, it is clear to me that right now, 43 days from Election Day, is not the moment to make this change,” state Sen. Mike McDonnell said in a statement.
That single electoral vote could prove crucial. Harris is strongest in the northern “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, while Trump is building momentum across the sun belt: Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia.
If the states break along those lines on Election Day, but Harris also captures one vote in Nebraska, she’ll win the presidency, 270 to 268. Without that vote, the candidates tie, the election is decided by a vote among state delegations in the House of Representatives, and Trump likely wins.
Earlier this year, the possibility of Nebraska changing its rules seemed unimportant, for a simple reason: Maine. The Pine Tree State is Nebraska’s mirror image: a blue state whose similar Electoral College rules put a single electoral vote in play for Republicans. If Nebraska were to change its system, Maine lawmakers previously said, they would too.
But the clock ran out for Maine due to a provision in the state constitution that stipulates a bill typically can’t go into effect until 90 days after passage.
The more you drill down on this story, the more interesting cross-currents emerge. McDonnell, a union leader and former firefighter, is a former Democrat who was essentially driven from the party earlier this year for holding some socially conservative views. He was censured by the state Democratic party back in March for voting for a handful of anti-abortion and anti-trans bills. In April, he announced he was switching to the GOP, saying he no longer felt there was room among the Democrats for his “religious-based, pro-life position.”
His latest stance has little to do with ideology; instead, it’s a matter of pure regional politics. Omaha loves its status as the Corn Belt’s “blue dot,” which draws national attention and spending to the area every four years. And McDonnell wants to keep Omahans happy: He reportedly is eyeing a run for mayor next year.
But if he thought his pro-life views made him unwelcome in the Democratic party, he’s about to find out that the Republican party has some uncrossable lines too. The most uncrossable of them all: making life harder for Donald Trump, for any reason, ever.
One Trump-allied conservative operative openly mused yesterday that Nebraska Republicans should toss him from their ranks, just months after he joined them as a Democratic exile. And Trump himself was typically biting.
“Unfortunately, a Democrat turned Republican (?) State Senator named Mike McDonnell decided, for no reason whatsoever, to get in the way of a great Republican, common sense, victory,” the ex-president posted to Truth Social Monday evening. “Just another ‘Grandstander!’”
Quick Hits
A CAMPAIGN IN FREEFALL: The hits keep coming for North Carolina’s Mark Robinson in the wake of CNN’s report on a heap of racist, degenerate, and politically insane comments he left on a porn site a decade ago. Nearly every member of Robinson’s campaign staff quit over the weekend, and reporting from Raleigh’s WRAL News yesterday suggested why. Despite his public insistence that he would punch back—“you better understand that I am coming after CNN full throttle”—Robinson “rejected multiple offers from supporters to connect him with information technology specialists” to help him get to the bottom of the matter, WRAL reported.
“Robinson’s alleged rejection of the offers sowed doubt among some staff members,” they went on. Can’t imagine why! At least some national Republicans are pulling the plug too: The Republican Governors Association said yesterday it has no plans to spend additional money advertising on Robinson’s behalf in North Carolina.
LEAKING LIKE A SIEVE: For how much time he spends going after the media, Donald Trump sure is benefitting handsomely from their restraint. A number of outlets have said in recent weeks that they’ve been shopped hacked internal materials from the Trump campaign. But so far, none have published any of them. Why not? Because they’re suspected of having been stolen by a malign foreign actor, likely Iran.
Whoever is stealing the materials, the scope of their access is remarkable. Today, Popular Information’s Judd Legum reports that new materials are still being stolen: The same actors who have been shopping dirt on Trump to other outlets sent him a dossier yesterday containing information stolen from the Trump campaign within the last ten days.
THE ROYALE WITH CHEESE: At yesterday’s rally, Donald Trump remained fixated on his belief that Kamala Harris is lying about working at McDonalds early in life. The ex-president has seemed obsessed with this idea that Harris is cosplaying as a hardscrabble, blue-collar worker; so much so that he now says he is willing to do it himself. “I’m going to go to a McDonald’s, and I’m going to work the french-fry job for about a half an hour,” Trump said. Depending on how many fries he personally consumes on the job, this could easily be Trump’s path to 360-plus Electoral College votes.
Cheap Shots
What women want is for people to stop telling them what to do.
Former POTUS Trump is a product of his upbringing. There are millions of Americans who grew up with fathers who treated their mother with disdain or worse. The duties of a mother were to sexually satisfy, raise offspring, clean, cook and do everything the father found beneath doing, "woman's work." Trump occupies a "don't worry your pretty little head" male/female paradigm. That view of the role of women in society remains "traditional" to Trump supporters, but repressive, stifling and disrespectful to what is emerging as the gender enlightened generation.
I was raised by a Trump-like father, raised in a "traditional" home. Luckily he married a woman with a 140+ IQ who worked him to her will, often without him realizing it. When he finally realized the asset he was sleeping with, he encouraged (as much as he was capable) and watched his spouse become CFO of the family business, school board president, starter of a women in the oilfield management organization, State Board of Education Chairman and co-chairman of Bob Dole's Texas presidential campaign.
I was raised by Grace Shore, the smartest and most emotionally disciplined (with her husband) and open (with her children) woman I have ever met. Because of who raised me, Trump looks like an idiot to me regarding his relationships with and views toward women generally.
When it comes to the role of women, there are a lot of 78 year old men who see it like Trump. We give them an extra beer at Thanksgiving so they fall asleep in the recliner in the 3rd quarter of another Cowboys' loss. We do not elect them POTUS in 2024.