What, most politicians ask themselves, do women want? American women vote in larger numbers than men. Issues that affect our lives are routinely diminished as “women’s issues,” even as we make up more than half the population. Both parties, but Republicans much more than Democrats, have a male dominance problem. There has never been a female president.
So, what do women want? Last week, Republican presidential contender Donald Trump took a shot at answering that question when he sat down with Fox News host Harris Faulkner and a female-only audience for a town hall event that aired on Wednesday. Trump’s answer to the age-old question? Bizarre ramblings about safety, nonsensical talking points about reproductive rights, and strongman promises to just fix things, democratic processes be damned. What was clear, though, was how Trump and his team approach women: As dependents in need of protection, and as a special interest group that doesn’t particularly interest him outside of the fact that he needs them to win.
If you’ve watched a Trump debate or a Trump rally, very little of what he said on The Faulkner Focus will come as a surprise. His talking points are well-established, if they tend to come out in streams of gibberish and have little relationship to reality. He had the best border; Biden had the worst border. He had the best economy; Biden had the worst economy. This time, he added a few newer ones: He had the best child tax credit, although, he said, it was mostly his daughter’s idea, and Biden turned it into the worst tax credit. (In reality: Joe Biden expanded the child tax credit; Republicans, aided by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, then refused to renew it; and this summer Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have expanded it.) Trump’s Republican Party is also the best on IVF, he said, better than Democrats—and in fact, he, Trump, is the “father of IVF,” an absurd claim he boasted three separate times.
Setting aside how offensive and stomach-roiling it is to hear that phrase out of Trump’s mouth, the claim that Republicans are good on IVF couldn’t be more false. Republicans have opposed Democratic efforts to protect IVF nationally and have introduced bills that could ban it nationwide. But it’s really clear that Trump knows how bad Republicans look on this—and he credited the “fantastically attractive” Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama with teaching him so this year after the Alabama Supreme Court effectively made it illegal in that state.
How he learned what IVF was this year and still became IVF’s father was left a mystery. But this Big Daddy posturing was his central theme.
It was clear from the start that Trump’s team had told him to emphasize safety—that the pro-Trump women in the audience (and they were almost all pro-Trump) wanted to hear about how Trump would protect them. Faulkner kicked off the conversation by complaining about Democratic “prebuttals” to the town hall, playing footage of Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock telling voters to get out and cast their ballots because Trump is a threat to democracy. Trump responded by bragging about his endorsements from the Border Patrol and the Fraternal Order of Police—not exactly organizations with tons of women in their ranks—and continued, “So when you talk about safety …” (Faulkner had not talked about safety). But Trump did want to talk about safety or, to put a finer point on it, to convince suburban Georgia women that they are imperiled by undocumented immigrants and criminals, and that Trump is the only one who can save them.
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Trump also played the protector when asked about the child tax credit, which has become far less generous thanks largely to Republicans. Always careful to maintain a macho posture, the former president actually gave someone else credit for once—his daughter Ivanka, who he said begged him to do something to support struggling families. He suggested he didn’t have any great desire to take on the issue, but, well, his daughter demanded it, and Daddy wasn’t going to say no.
The same theme showed up in Trump’s answer to a question about transgender girls playing sports. The solution, Trump said, was simply to ban it. How would he prevent trans girls from playing sports, Faulkner asked? He would just ban it, Trump said. That’s it—he’ll be the president, after all. Just ban it.
The audience cheered.
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On the campaign trail, Kamala Harris has rightly been emphasizing the threat Trump poses to democracy (it is actually Democrats, Trump said in this town hall, who are the real threats to democracy). And many voters are certainly persuaded that democracy is worth defending, and that Trump imperils it. But for Trump’s loyalists, his authoritarian tendencies are part of the draw. He won’t mess around with the separation of powers or slow process of democratic lawmaking. He’ll be the president—if he doesn’t like something, he’ll just ban it. Like the women in the Fox audience, his supporters love it. And if women are good to Daddy, maybe he’ll take their problems into consideration, too.
Women are more than half of the population. There is no one thing we all want. Except, I suspect, the right to bodily autonomy when our lives or health are threatened by a situation out of our control. Trump’s pitch to women is that they won’t need autonomy. They can just trust in the man who promises to bend the country in their favor, even if he winds up breaking it.