From Pussygrabbers to Protectors
GOP Men Go Off the Rails this Week
“I always thought women liked me,” Donald Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania this weekend before going on an unhinged diatribe about how those of us with vaginas will be so much better off when we re-elect him that we “will no longer be thinking about abortions.”
If Trump is just coming to the realization that he has a woman problem, it’s only because he hasn’t been paying attention. The signs were there. There were the 26 women who accused him of rape or non-consensual groping over the years, plus the $83.3 million a jury awarded one of them for her pain and suffering. There were the 500,000 women who marched on Washington in pussy hats the day after his inauguration and the 4 million others who joined them around the world. Then there was the hush money trial which included a porn star testifying, under oath, that he was a bad lay.
It’s also hard not to notice that his current wife refuses to campaign with him or for him unless paid exorbitant amounts of money and that even his favorite daughter has abandoned him this election cycle.
Like everything else with this image-obsessed narcissist, his decades-late realization seems to be based on ratings (which real politicians like to call polls). He’s right, the polls show that women don’t like him very much. A recent NBC News poll, for example, shows him trailing Harris among women by 21%.
Trump—who last week announced in ALL CAPS that he hated Taylor Swift—can’t stand it when people hate him back. He took to Truth Social to try to rectify the situation:
Much of this is just plain wrong. Women are not less safe than we were four years ago; violent crime is down. No one is having abortions in the last few months of pregnancy, and no one supports killing babies after they’re born. It’s also wrong to say that everyone wanted abortion left up to the states, and it’s dangerous to say that the laws states enacted include powerful protection for women in cases of rape or pregnancy complications. While Trump was fuming about losing our love, Vice President Harris was fuming about the very preventable death of Amber Nicole Thurman and rightly blaming Trump for it.
Trump’s misguided love letter to the fairer sex did get a few things right. Many of us are more depressed and unhappy than we were four years ago and less optimistic about the future. It’s been a rough few years. We’ve realized that the Supreme Court is willing to ignore all precedent and gut the rights we’ve come to rely on. We’ve watched as state after state passed draconian abortion measures that take away our control over our bodies and threaten our health. We’ve heard stories about women denied care and imagined scenarios in which this happens to us or our daughters. And we’ve read Project 2025.
That might be the most terrifying part: we’ve seen all of this happen with a Democrat in the White House and Democratic control over the Senate. In addition to being heartbroken over the current state of women’s rights, we are petrified at how much worse it will be if Donald Trump is re-elected and his Christian Nationalist friends get to run the country. (Comparing the U.S. to Afghanistan might be seen as hyperbole or—worse—hysteria, but a modern example of a country in which religious extremists took power and women systematically lost all of their rights is playing out before our eyes, and it’s terrifying.)
Trump upped the creep factor by saying, “You will be protected, and I will be your protector.” And he ended with, “So women, we love you. We’re going to take care of you.” (Anyone else thinks this sounds like an abusive spouse begging for forgiveness?) But he isn’t the only GOP lawmaker who seems to have taken up residence in some kind of alternate universe this week.
Vice Presidential Candidate JD Vance, who said last week that he’s more than happy to make up stories if it gets attention, tried to portray his would-be-boss as a champion of the Affordable Care Act. He told Meet the Press that Trump could have “destroyed the program” but “instead chose to make it better.”
Nope. That’s not how that one went down. Over the years, Republicans in Congress voted to gut or repeal Obamacare over 70 times. For anyone who’s forgotten, here are some pictures of Donald Trump and Paul Permasmirk Ryan gloating after the House voted to get rid of it but before John McCain saved it in the Senate. Vance can’t even pretend that the point of that vote was to put in place a better plan because Trump admitted in the debate—7 years later—that all he has so far is a concept of a plan. (Vance also proved that he doesn’t understand how insurance f**king works by suggesting the best thing would be to put people with similar risks profiles into the same risk pools.)
Florida’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo doesn’t understand how vaccines work. He told residents—including the scores of senior citizens who live in the Sunshine State—that they shouldn’t get their Covid boosters because mRNA vaccines are dangerous and might “alter the human genome.” (He did not expand on this suggestion to tell us exactly what new genetic traits we might get, but I’m hoping for teleportation while a friend I was discussing this with thinks mind control would be better. Wait, I’m starting to agree.) Lapado’s official state-published health bulletin included misinformation about the development of mRNA vaccines, the clinical trials that were conducted, and the potential negative outcomes.
Instead of getting vaccinated, he suggests that the Floridians stay physically active, minimize processed food, prioritize vegetable and healthy fats, and spend time outdoors to support necessary vitamin D levels. I suppose prescribing sunshine and olive oil is better than suggesting we inject ourselves with bleach, but this man is a Harvard-educated doctor. He should know better.
North Carolina’s Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, who is running for governor, has lived in his own world for many years, and we keep finding old posts and videos to prove it. The anti-choice, anti-trans, anti-sex politician was exposed last week as the “black Nazi” who frequently posted on a message board called Nude Africa from 2008 to 2012. A self-proclaimed “perv,” he wrote about missing slavery and getting off on “tranny” porn.
Fast forward to his politician days, and Robison sounds a little different. He promises to protect women from someone who goes to bed a man, wakes up a woman, and uses the wrong bathroom, but keeps blaming us for abortion.
In 2019, he said abortion was about “killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.” In a newly unearthed speech from 2022, he scoffed about empowering young women: “Why don’t you use some of that building up of your mind and building up of empowerment to move down here, to this region down here. Get this under control,” he said while making circular motions around his own genitals. He continued:
See, because this region right here, that’s the only region on your body that can make life and take life. If there’s anything we need to be telling our young people, it’s they need to be responsible with their reproductive systems. That means you don’t lay down and act like you’re making a baby [un]til you’re ready to have a baby.
Robinson himself did not wait until he was ready to have a baby to lay down and act like he was making a baby. In a campaign ad seemingly designed to soften his image on the issue, he admitted that he paid for his now-wife to have an abortion in 1980.
I’m also stumbling over how the genitals take life unless we’re talking about a Todd-Akin-style toothy vagina that can shut the reproductive system down during legitimate rape. (The Patron Saint of “that’s not how it f**king works” was yet another GOP politician who lived in an alternate reality.)
Which brings us to Bernie Moreno, the Republican who is trying to unseat Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Moreno passed the first “that’s not how it f**king works test” by realizing that women over 50 rarely get accidentally pregnant (the bar is very low), but it was downhill from there. During a town hall event in Warren County last week, he said:
“You know, the left has a lot of single-issue voters. Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.’ It’s a little crazy, by the way, but ― especially for women that are like past 50. I’m thinking to myself, “I don’t think that’s an issue for you.”
He might have heard about menopause, but he doesn’t understand women. For one thing, we don’t only think about ourselves. We have friends and colleagues and daughters and wives and granddaughters and neighbors who we worry about. For another thing, we have empathy. I never met Amber Nicole Thurman, but when the story of her dying because of extremist legislation came out last week, I teared up. It doesn’t have to be happening to you to make it real and wrong.
The other thing Moreno doesn’t understand is that reproductive rights are about much more than abortion. This issue is about the status of women. The GOP has consistently told women that we are second class citizens whose value lies solely in our uteruses, and that we cannot be trusted to make decisions about said uteruses on our own. Abortion is not a single issue, it’s a bellwether.
Republicans have already told us where they stand on this issue, and Harris is right to call it a crisis of Trump’s own making. Still, Trump pleaded and promised, “I will fix all of that, women, I will fix all of that. And at long last, this national nightmare that we’re going through will be over. Women will be happy.”
I know I speak for many women (though crazily not all) when I say that this national nightmare will only be over when the Trumps and Vances and Robinsons and Morenos of the world have lost their elections and been run out of politics for good.
September 30th is National Get Tested Day
out this campaign. One of the spokespeople might look vaguely familiar.
