The Junkyard Election

I'll Have An Arnold Palmer

"Women, you have to treat 'em like shit." – Donald Trump, New York Magazine, 1992.

In his closing arguments to the American people, Donald Trump is calling his opponent — the Vice President of the United States — “a shit vice president,” and sharing observations about the size of late pro golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis. 

It is on brand for Trump to bolster his flimsy case for another term as president by comparing his female opponent to excrement and talking about Big Dicks. We are now a nation more divided by gender than race and naked misogyny is on the ballot. 

For years, political pundits — a male-dominated profession — ignored the signs, or outright denied, that it was possible for women to be a bloc and move elections. This year, women very well could decide the outcome. Women outnumber men among recent voters: In 2020, women accounted for 54.7 percent of the electorate while men accounted for just 44 percent. 

Trump desperately needs his bros to come out bigly. But he still needs a few women too.

Trump’s legacy is to have unchained the drooling junkyard dogs of toxic masculinity. His rise coincided with the success of manosphere god Jordan Peterson and odious accused rapist Andrew Tate. Meanwhile, his fanboys include the Silicon Valley pronatalists — revered by younger tech bros — like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. The tech bros are in the process of reducing women to bio-trackable baby-making machines. (Remember that Silicon Valley itself, the site of the greatest economic shift since the industrial revolution, has mostly shut out women, creating vast boys club fortunes controlled by men. or occasionally, their widows and ex-wives — plus ça change.) 

Trump is everything these men admire: His natural habitat is Hooters crossed with the Vatican, the Rolling Stones' groupie jet, and Harvey Weinstein's suite at the Tribeca Grand Hotel. He is most himself at the model contest or beauty pageant afterparty, circa 1989, venues where old guys ogle and paw giddy out-of-town contestants, fresh meat. "He kissed me directly on the lips," former Miss USA contestant Temple Taggart told The New York Times. "I thought: Oh my God. Gross. He was married to Marla Maples at the time. I think there were a few other girls that he kissed on the mouth. I was like, ‘Wow, that's inappropriate.’”

Trumpworld is thick with men like that, orcs who skate away from accusations of predatory behavior: Justice “Boohoo” Brett Kavanaugh, was saved from credible accusations thanks to Trump White House FBI manipulations; Corey Lewandowski, shover of a female reporter, rewarded with campaign business; Trump surrogate Jason Miller, credibly accused of having slipped a girlfriend an abortion pill in a smoothie and who ought to be detailing cars in Ronkonkoma remains a welcome talking head on national political cable. 

Trump also enabled the legal assault on women’s bodies, invading the private lives of women and girls of child-bearing age across the country. In 21 states, thanks to him, the embryo is privileged over its human incubator. Horror stories are piling up, women are maimed or dying. It’s not a popular thing he’s done. But he can’t back out or he’ll risk losing MAGA’s fanatic zygote wing. 

After some flailing, he and his team settled on gaslighting: “Every legal scholar, the great ones,” wanted abortion to be sent back to the states, Trump likes to say. That’s not true, but it is true that women and girls who need care in states with abortion bans are living out the most harrowing stories in America. Rape and incest pregnancies carried to term are rising, according to the Journal of American Medical Association, which estimated 65,000 rape pregnancies since Trump’s Supreme Court fanatic wing overturned Roe.

The cruelty is the point, of course. We’re in a severe backlash cycle. Witches and bitches need to pay for recent decades of economic and educational advancement. Abortion bans negatively affect the U.S. economy, with an estimated $68 billion per year in lost earnings and economic activity. But Republicans are doubling down anyway, pandering to a shrinking but still reliable voting bloc. 

More than 171,000 women found themselves forced to travel from ban states to seek legal abortions and related medical care in 2023 alone, according to the U.S. Senate Joint Economic Committee. Nationally, women are traveling three times longer than they were for care before the Dobbs decision.

In Texas, women from Houston must scrape up money for airfare or gas or a Greyhound bus ticket to travel by land 11 hours each way to the nearest clinics — in Albuquerque or Carbondale, Illinois. They must endure pre and post-surgical voyages whether they seek elective abortions or medically necessary ones. The Texas ban claims to distinguish between the two situations, but in fact, the law tortures all. Women with unviable or life-threatening pregnancies must fill out dozens of pages of doctor-signed forms, and even then are often denied care in Texas. 

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis recently tried to criminalize the airing of ads promoting Florida’s constitutional right to abortion ballot measure — an egregious assault on the First Amendment that prompted one of the involved attorneys to resign in protest.

The legally sanctioned abuse of women's and girls’s bodies has cultural knock-on effects. Trump’s running mate diagnoses childless women, “single cat ladies,” as depressed. J.D. Vance’s pals in the larger Christian right openly proclaim women shouldn’t vote, shouldn’t enjoy sex, and that marital rape is, well, just normal hetero sex. 

Why would any self-respecting woman vote for this cabal? 

Pollster Celinda Lake specializes in American women’s political behavior. She says Trump might have a little success deploying what she calls “the protection norm.” 

In these last weeks, Trump has been selling himself as a “protector” of women. “You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger. ... You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today,” Trump said recently. “You will be protected, and I will be your protector.”

As risible as that sounds from a self-admitted sexual abuser, some women buy it. Lake has over the years run an index of sexism, assessing two elements that she calls benign sexism and hostile sexism. To measure benign sexism, Lake’s researchers ask respondents to agree or disagree with the statement “women should be cherished and protected by men.” In recent surveys, 79 percent of men and 75 percent of women say they agree. 

To gauge hostile sexism, Lake asks respondents to agree or disagree with the statement “Most women interpret innocent remarks and acts as sexism.” In the most recent surveys, 44 percent of men agree with that statement, and 49 percent disagree, while a surprising 34 percent of women agree, and 58 percent disagree. So fully a third of women, and nearly half of men think women just can’t take the joke. 

Even more troubling, Lake also finds a small but not insignificant percentage of women who will vote with their husbands simply “to avoid conflict” or out of the habit of submitting to men’s “presumed expertise.” These women will often say, when queried, “You should be talking to my husband, he knows more about it than I do.” 

To counter that self-effacing impulse, Lake and other Democratic strategists have created ads to keep blue-collar women from voting with their husbands, challenging the notion of male expertise and encouraging women to vote with their daughters and granddaughters in mind. 

The good news is that more young women identify as feminists than ever. The bad news is that some young men are buying into The Return of the He-Man. The divide among younger male and female voters is twice as large as it is in the overall population.

On the morning of November 6, we will probably know whether the devastating effects of eight years of Trumpism on us and our daughters have moved a decisive majority of women fed up with invasions of medical privacy and top-down public misogyny. More than a hundred Republican officials joined Harris and Liz Cheney last week to pledge their support to the other party’s presidential candidate. “He just cannot be in the Oval Office again,” former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA) told the Daily Beast. She predicted that Harris would win. “I think there’s a silent majority. I think there’s a silent group of women who will crawl over broken glass to vote against Trump and who will quietly vote for Harris.”