GOP’s women problem
Trump’s mockery of accusers and empathy for accused men may cost party in election.
WASHINGTON — Two autumns ago as another election day neared, Donald Trump, then a Republican presidential nominee trailing in most polls, responded to accusations that he had sexually harassed a number of women by mocking one’s appearance: “She would not be my first choice.” All of them, he said, were “liars.”
On Tuesday night in Mississippi, with the midterm election five weeks away, Trump stood before supporters at a campaign rally and mocked Christine Blasey Ford, one of three women accusing his Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, of sexual misconduct.
As the president riffed off Ford’s testimony to the Senate last week — and off her inability to recall certain details surrounding the alleged attack 36 years ago — his audience responded with laughter and applause.
For a politician whose coarseness has been as much a selling point as a liability, the comments were not out of character. But for Trump and a Republican Party already facing a possible shellacking in the midterm election, his remarks may prove poorly timed, further animating female voters poised to deliver a rebuke in November.
The rally came just hours after Trump, while leaving the White House, offered his inverted view of the #MeToo phenomenon, telling reporters that women coming forward with assault allegations have made it “a very scary time for young men in America.” A day earlier, at a televised Rose Garden news conference, he’d shocked many when he snapped at two female reporters, telling one: “You’re not thinking. You never do.”
Even before election day, Trump’s behavior could carry a cost: His rally remarks were condemned by several senators who were undecided about voting to confirm Kavanaugh to the nation’s highest court — a vote too close to predict.
“This issue is so personal and so visceral. When he gets a rally full of people mocking a sexual assault survivor, every woman in America who’s had to deal with that feels like he is mocking us,” said Amanda Litman, a former Hillary Clinton campaign aide who runs an organization to help people with their first run for office.
Her group, Run For Something, which launched on Trump’s Inauguration Day, has helped get more than 400 first-time candidates — mostly women and people of color — on state and local ballots. Last weekend, after Ford and Kavanaugh testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, volunteer sign-ups increased to 20 times the normal level, Litman said. “I don’t think Republicans realize how that broad humiliation and embarrassment can fuel action,” she said.
Yet Trump — having won election weeks after the disclosure of his boasting of sexual assault on the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape, and after insulting his many accusers — doesn’t see a big electoral risk now. Indeed, he and some Republicans see the potential to galvanize their own voters with his male-centered strategy.
Despite the cultural reckoning of a #MeToo movement that is in part a reaction to him, Trump has persisted as an avatar for a counter-movement of aggrieved white men. He has repeatedly described Kavanaugh as the victim — of uncorroborated allegations and a smear campaign by Democrats. And after initially speaking sympathetically of Ford, even calling her “a very credible witness,” he has reversed himself to the point of Tuesday night’s mockery.
Rather than recognize that many women are victims of sexual assaults, and why so many decline to report them, Trump this week has expressed concern only for young men who, in his view, could see their reputations falsely besmirched.
At the rally, he criticized the #MeToo movement in remarks directed at women who typically lean Republican — mostly white, married and without college degrees.
“Think of your son!” Trump said. “Think of your husband!”
At the White House on Wednesday, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the president. “It seemed to me that he was stating facts that Dr. Ford laid out in her testimony,” she said, referring to Ford’s memory lapses.
Yet Trump mischaracterized much of Ford’s testimony, claiming she recalled nothing besides having one beer. But she has described in detail a drunken 17-yearold Kavanaugh trying to rape her in an upstairs bedroom, her fear of suffocation when he stif led her cries, and “uproarious laughter” between him and an alleged witness, Mark Judge.
Asked whether Trump still thinks Ford was credible, Sanders said only that he “believes Judge Kavanaugh should be confirmed.”
Most GOP senators avoided commenting on Trump’s rally remarks. “I haven’t seen that; thanks,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, ducking into the Senate. Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, echoing others, told reporters, “I don’t have any comment.”
But the three Republicans considered to be swing votes — Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — slammed Trump’s mockery of Ford.
On Tuesday, an anti-Kavanaugh group began running digital ads using the president’s words in their states.
Murkowski called his rally performance “wholly inappropriate and in my view unacceptable.” She said she was “taking everything into account” in considering her vote.
Jennifer Palmieri, who was communications director on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and has written a book about gender politics and the election, called Trump’s comments “grossly unfair to most men in America, to assume that most men feel threatened by women coming forward with their accounts of being sexually assaulted.”
According to statistics compiled in 2012 by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 63% of assaults do not get reported, while just 2% to 10% of those reported are deemed false.
“We were overdue for a moment where women came forward and shared more stories of sexual assault, and it’s just really tragic that the moment when that happens, the president is someone who has a political strategy that tries to pit men and women against each other,” Palmieri said in an interview.
While energizing their base could help Republicans hold their Senate majority, it may further jeopardize their House majority.
Even before Ford’s allegation was public, polls showed Democrats had increased their advantage with suburban women. A national USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll released last week reported that Democrats had even significantly narrowed Republicans’ edge with blue-collar white women.
Jessica Zender, who was drawn into politics after 2016, is heading Indivisible Denver, a group of women who became active to oppose Trump. She sees his message to men — and women — as a spur to further action.
“It makes me want to knock on more doors to get Democrats elected,” she said.