Trump’s election triggers new wave of feminist reform

On the day before the Alabama election, I found myself explaining that I needed to get to work despite the bombing at my subway station because there were women coming in to talk about having been sexually assaulted by the president.

Really, we live in interesting times.

The bombing — in which no one was seriously hurt but the bomber — has already faded from the memory of New York’s hardened mass transit riders. But the rest of the story is reverberating. We’re in the middle of a women’s uprising that really does feel like a new wave, maybe the one that could actually get the country within shouting distance of power equality.

Think about it. This week Roy Moore got skunked in Alabama, thanks in great part to female voters who went for the Democratic candidate instead. Then the U.S. Senate got ready for another female member — Minnesota Lt. Gov. Tina Smith is going to replace Al Franken, who is resigning in the sexual harassment scandal.

We have a revolt against sexual harassment that’s running through the political, entertainment, restaurant and communications worlds. And we’re finally trying to focus on the Donald Trump sleaziness sagas that the nation didn’t deal with in 2016. Trump is really behind everything — his election jarred and frightened women so much that there was nothing to do but rebel and try to change the world.

“I think it’s very much because of President Trump,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. Gillibrand is a leader of the anti-harassment campaign in Congress. This week, as some of the women who had stories about Trump’s own hands-on history were talking to the media, she called on the president to resign.

Trump responded — as only he can — with a Twitter attack, calling Gillibrand a political “lightweight” who used to come to him “begging” for campaign contributions “and would do anything for them.”

“I think it was intended to be a sexist smear, and it was intended to silence me and every woman who challenges him,” Gillibrand said in a phone interview.

It’s for sure that when Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton it triggered a visceral response in masses of U.S. women, and that trauma may be turning into a political uprising more powerful than the Tea Party. Female voters delivered Alabama for Democrat Doug Jones — 57 percent came down on his side. The critical mass actually came from the African-American community, where women vote more faithfully than men, and virtually all of them went for Jones.

Other women aren’t exactly standing still. A new Monmouth University poll has Trump’s job approval rating down to another new historic low, 32 percent. The decline, Monmouth said, came mostly from Republican and independent women. All in all, women gave the president thumbs-up only 24 percent of the time. He’s their political equivalent of overcooked broccoli.

We truly could be seeing a new wave of feminist reform.

There could be a lot more if this revolution continues. And while we have no earthly idea who the Democratic presidential candidate will be in 2020, it’s likely that a bunch of women are going to be in the mix — Gillibrand probably among them.

It’s not necessarily bad when the times get interesting.