Why would any woman swipe right for this man?
It’s the ageless cry of the jilted man.
“Will you please like me?” President Donald Trump asked at a campaign rally Tuesday. “Please? Please?”
Trump’s entreaty was addressed to suburban women, or, as he has previously called them, “housewives.” To his plea to be liked, he added this justification: “I saved your damn neighborhood, OK?”
It’s a wonder Trump’s manifold charms aren’t working on women. Who among them wouldn’t swipe right on this profile?
Big, beautiful, Straight Orange Male with history of adultery seeks white housewives for Big Macs and friendship with political benefits. Enjoys QAnon pedophile conspiracies and armed intimidation of civil rights demonstrators. Turnoffs: science, fitness, manners. Prefers that women sign NDAs and answer to “pig,” “dog,” “monster” and “nasty.”
The term “gender gap,” a fixture of American politics for three decades, no longer captures what’s happening here: the wholesale repudiation of Trump by women. In the latest Washington Post/ ABC News poll, Joe Biden leads Trump among female likely voters by 23 points, 59% to 36%. Men are evenly split at 48%.
The Post/ABC poll is one of many showing the same thing.
The new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found Biden’s advantage among women to be 26 points — double Hillary Clinton’s final margin among women in 2016.
But the reality is even worse for Trump. His remaining support from women is heavily concentrated among white evangelical Christians. The Post’s polling director, Scott Clement, ran the numbers for me without white evangelicals, and Biden’s advantage among women doubled, jumping to an astounding 45 points, 70% to 25%.
The Navigator poll, fielded by Democrats, finds white evangelical women favor Trump over Biden by a whopping 53 percentage points, while all other women favor Biden over Trump by 32 points. This indicates that among the few women who support Trump, gender is not the factor driving that support.
This is why Trump’s hamhanded attempts of late to appeal to suburban women are misdirected. He seems to imagine the suburbs are still 1950s collections of white people in traditional households. “The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article,” he tweeted in July.
“Biden will destroy your neighborhood.” Since then, Trump has been ridiculing those who question his “suburban housewives” talk as purveyors of political correctness. He says he’s “saving” suburban women from violent riots that would otherwise be exported from cities. With racist overtones, he has promised to protect the suburbs from zoning that admits lowincome residents.
But the suburbs are as racially diverse as the rest of America: 35% minority, according to the Brookings Institution. Their family structures are equally diverse, full of single parents, working moms, professional women. Talk of riots in their towns and fear of nonwhite invaders make no sense.
This, of course, comes on top of Trump’s longstanding women troubles. They find him vulgar, they recoil at his history of sexual boasting and his buying a porn actress’s silence, and they are repulsed by his contempt for professional women (“ditsy,” “bleeding,” “that dog,” “nasty woman,” “horseface,” “crying lowlife,” and recently calling Democratic VP nominee Kamala Harris “this monster”).
And now he insults women by treating them as frightened, racist housewives.
If Trump loses in two weeks, he will have been taken down by women, exactly a century after they gained the right to vote. After a presidency marked by reckless exercise of the Second Amendment, alarming curtailment of the First Amendment and occasional talk of the 25th Amendment, it would be poetic justice for this man to be done in by the 19th Amendment.