AN EVERYWOMAN MOMENT
The direct confrontation between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton over Trump’s treatment of women didn’t come until the final moments of Monday night’s debate. But in many ways, the entire event played out as a big-screen version of what women encounter every day.
There were plenty of aha moments for any woman who is the sole female member of her company’s management team, a female sportscaster, bartender, cop, construction worker, law partner or, yes, a beauty queen. And maybe for the sole female presidential candidate, too.
Clinton leads Trump by double digits among women and minorities. But non-college-educated white women are one of the biggest groups of undecided voters, and her campaign has been wooing them for months, toggling between portraying her as a tough potential commander in chief and a champion of women and girls.
On Monday night, those women got to see Clinton stand up to that common hazard of working while female: the sexist blowhard, the harasser.
When Trump began by addressing Clinton as “Secretary Clinton,” saying, “yes, is that OK?,” Clinton laughed off the condescension. But she wasn’t playing along — she was awaiting her moment. After nearly 90 minutes, it came.
Lester Holt, the NBC News anchor who moderated the debate, asked what Trump meant when he had said in a rally that Clinton doesn’t have a “presidential look.”
“She doesn’t have the look,” he said. “She doesn’t have the stamina.”
Clinton’s response: “Well, as soon as he travels to 112 countries and negotiates a peace deal, a cease-fire, a release of dissidents, an opening of new opportunities in nations around the world or even spends 11 hours testifying in front of a congressional committee, he can talk to me about stamina.”
When Clinton finally got to unload what felt like the pent-up frustration of Everywoman, it was powerful. “This is a man who has called women pigs, slobs and dogs, and someone who has said pregnancy is an inconvenience to employers, who has said women don’t deserve equal pay unless they do as good a job as men,” she said. “And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest. He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman ‘Miss Piggy.’ Then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping,’ because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name. Her name is Alicia Machado.”
Trump blustered, but didn’t deny any of it. Instead, he dug himself in deeper by saying that Rosie O’Donnell, the comedian who was the target of some of those epithets, “deserves it.”
Trump’s misogyny is unlikely to turn off his core supporters. And his bullying of Clinton — as well as his critique of her reversal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and his remarks on the effect of globalization on jobs — may play well with white men reeling from technological change, job losses and addiction. Amid this upheaval, some have come to believe that when minorities, immigrants and women make gains, it pushes them further behind.
The debate’s clash over gender was telling for both candidates, and it may have helped establish Clinton as a standard-bearer for more than Democrats.