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This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 24 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Less than 10 days to go until election and what’s the message Donald Trump wants voters to take away from his campaign? Well, we got a hint of it at the former president’s rally in Georgia on Wednesday, where he was joined by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
After taking the stage, Carlson described Trump as the father of the country and compared his return to the White House to a father returning home to discipline a “bad little girl” with a “vigorous spanking.”
The Republican Party is now explicitly running on a campaign of male dominion: Trump’s your daddy and he stands ready to put all the “nasty women" in their place.
That is not just the creepy fantasizing of a disgraced TV personality or content from one of those weird right-wing podcasts. Carlson said that on a national stage as part of a Republican presidential campaign — warming up for a man whom a jury of his peers found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a case brought by a woman who said he raped her in a dressing room.
The Republican Party is now explicitly running on a campaign of male dominion: Trump’s your daddy and he stands ready to put all the “nasty women,” as he calls them, in their place.
The idea that this overt sexism is a viable electoral strategy has gained a lot of currency lately. Pollster John Della Volpe wrote about it in The New York Times this week: “Aware that boasting about 'killing' Roe v. Wade drove away young women, Mr. Trump zeroed in on capturing a larger share of the young male vote.”
“His playbook?” Della Volpe wrote. “A master class in bro whispering.”
Della Volpe cites Trump’s embrace of cryptocurrency along with his decision to give a prime speaking spot at the Republican National Convention to UFC president Dana White, who was videotaped slapping his wife in 2022.
Just as journalists once obsessed over the “white working class,” they’re now focusing on the anxieties, and the political agency, of men. Republicans were capitalizing on this well before Vice President Kamala Harris entered the race. Think back to January, when Trump was facing a primary challenge from former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and his disapproval ratings among women became a campaign issue.
At the time, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders, told conservatives to trust the process because that was baked in: “For every Karen we lose, there’s a Julio and a Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement. And that bodes well for our ability to be more diverse and to be more durable as we head into not only the rest of the primary contests but also the general election.”
Misogyny has been central to Trump’s identity and, in a weird way, to his political appeal.
In a certain far-right mind, alienating women makes them more diverse, because they think it will peel off votes from Black and Latino men. It’s cynical, it’s gross and it’s condescending. But what else are they going to do to sell Trump?
After all, he is the man who bragged about ending Roe v. Wade, who has dozens of sexual assault allegations — including a new one this week from a woman who says Trump groped her after Jeffrey Epstein, of all people, introduced them. (Trump has denied all the sexual misconduct allegations against him.) He's a man who was convicted of 34 felonies after paying an adult film actress to stop her from divulging his extramarital affair with her (an affair he denies).
Misogyny has been central to Trump’s identity and, in a weird way, to his political appeal. There is a clear constituency for this kind of 14-year-old boy’s idea of what manhood is. But it’s just as repulsive to large swaths of the electorate, especially women.