Vice President Kamala Harris almost never talks about what it would mean to elect a female president, nor does she speculate about why women disproportionately support her candidacy.
Former President Donald Trump is talking plenty.
In the past two days, he has vowed to be a protector of women “whether they like it or not.” He said that if he won the presidential election, he would want Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who is a vaccine skeptic, to work on “health and women’s health.” And, speaking with Tucker Carlson last night in Glendale, Ariz., Trump imagined a supremely violent fate for Liz Cheney, the Republican former congresswoman who has become a prominent surrogate for Harris.
“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump said. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
The remark was graphic even by the standards of Trump, who has always seen provocation as a feature, not a bug, of his political style. And it fed right into Democrats’ efforts to frame the election — the first presidential contest since the fall of Roe v. Wade — as a reckoning over bigger questions of freedom, control and women’s fundamental place in society.
“Anyone who wants to be president of the United States who uses that kind of violent rhetoric is clearly disqualified, and unqualified, to be president,” Harris said today on the tarmac in Madison, Wis.
Trump’s defenders say he was simply making a statement about Cheney’s past support for American involvement in overseas conflicts. But the episode seemed like yet another gift from Trump and his allies to Democrats — making the final countdown to the election feel like an Advent calendar with a sexist, violent or otherwise politically dubious remark behind each door.
Does the playbook still work?
Trump is not the only political figure onstage struggling with a lack of self-control. But he has ratcheted up his threats against his political enemies, even as his allies have sought to make excuses for them. He did not apologize after a comedian at one of his rallies called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage.”
And he and his allies simply cannot stop talking about women.
“Kamala Harris and her team believe that there’ll be millions of women that undermine their husbands,” the conservative activist Charlie Kirk said in an interview this week, as he talked with Megyn Kelly about a Julia Roberts-voiced ad that said women could vote for Harris without telling their partners, or anyone else.
“I find that entire advertising campaign so repulsive, it is so disastrous, it is the embodiment of the downfall of the American family,” Kirk said.
Trump’s supporters, of course, have always loved his base instincts. They want a politician who says what others won’t, and they show up to his rallies demanding that he “fight, fight, fight.” They have embraced his disregard for traditional campaign discipline, and they see any backlash as hard evidence of all they think is stacked against him, and them.
And his playbook has worked before. In 2016, Trump lobbed gendered attacks at Hillary Clinton, like when he questioned her “stamina” for the presidency. The fact that he was recorded boasting about grabbing women’s genitals and accused of inappropriate sexual conduct by multiple women did nothing to block him from the presidency. Indeed, he still won a majority of white female voters that year, and again in 2020.
The question that looms now, and that I think we’ll get an answer to in election returns, is whether or not the country has changed. When Trump won the presidency in 2016, the Me Too movement had not yet forced a reckoning among women about the way sexism shaped their lives. The Dobbs decision had not turned women’s right to an abortion into a matter of geographic privilege, nor had it imprinted searing stories about those denied care into the national consciousness. And Trump is no longer facing a candidate like Clinton, who had been reviled by a swath of the American public for decades.
Sexism could backfire against Trump — or hurt Harris
Harris has responded to Trump’s freewheeling provocations with discipline. She responds carefully, if at all, using them simply to underline her well-worn campaign themes.
It’s a discipline she is proud of, and a quality that stands in stark contrast not only to the unrestrained behavior of Trump, but also to that of just about every high-profile man that has been on the stump in this race. Republicans gleefully pounced when President Biden described either one or all of Trump’s supporters as garbage, depending on how you heard it. Senator JD Vance of Ohio’s past words have haunted him. Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota gets over his skis. Former President Bill Clinton’s comments on immigration and the economy have given Republicans plenty of fodder. Even former President Barack Obama, one of his party’s best orators, made some Democrats cringe when he admonished Black men last month.
Harris’s relative self-control has fueled the sense among some women that the country is voting on something more than the presidency. They see the election as a referendum on how women should be treated in America.
“The question isn’t whether Kamala is ready for this moment because by every measure, she has demonstrated that she’s ready,” Michelle Obama said over the weekend in Kalamazoo, Mich. “The real question is, as a country, are we ready for this moment?”
She was giving voice to a worry that I have heard women across the country quietly express: That the sexism and misogyny Trump and his allies amplify won’t hurt his campaign, and will instead cost Harris the presidency.
“I think some men don’t want to see women in that type of power seat,” said Tielece Perry, a member of the United Auto Workers union in Michigan who has been knocking on doors for Harris. “I think it’s hard for them to relinquish control that way. I know these people, and so that’s been surprising, because I thought we were a lot further ahead than that.”
If Harris herself finds that frustrating, she isn’t saying so. That wouldn’t be disciplined.
“I can’t let frustration get in the way of doing what I need to do right now,” she said last month on the radio show, “The Breakfast Club.”
What a Trump victory could mean for public health
The final year of former President Donald Trump’s administration was defined by a public health crisis. His allies want to make major changes to the nation’s public health system if he wins a second term. My colleague Apoorva Mandavilli explains.
An end to mask and vaccination mandates, including those for schoolchildren, some predicted. Shrunken budgets for research and treatment of infectious diseases. Withdrawal from global partnerships like the World Health Organization.
I asked more than a dozen public health experts, including several former Trump administration officials, what they foresaw should Trump regain office. They described a much altered public health landscape.
Public health may not be getting much attention on the campaign trail, but it is very much a focus of conservative activism. Critics like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. describe an inept, corrupt bureaucracy ripe with conflicts of interest.
Republican lawmakers have spent years dissecting agencies that were once important mainly to scientists: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.
The C.D.C. would almost certainly be a prime target. The agency’s scope and mandate are tightly managed by Congress, but even without congressional approval, a Trump administration could muffle the agency as it did during the pandemic or massage its recommendations to further political goals.
The F.D.A. could likewise be encouraged to approve drugs with little evidence of benefit. Research priorities at the N.I.H. could be tilted toward chronic disease and alternative therapies.
Some aid recipients elsewhere in the world are still reeling from restrictive policies instituted during the Trump administration, most having to do with funding for abortion services, even though President Biden reversed them when he took office.
Much of the speculation on what Trump might do to health agencies has centered on Kennedy and his priorities, such as chronic diseases and toxins in food and water. On Tuesday, Kennedy said Trump had promised him control of the public health agencies, as well as the Agriculture Department.
The Trump campaign walked back that statement, and several people involved in vetting candidates told me that Kennedy might be relegated to a smaller role than had been suggested.
But regardless of who ends up holding the reins, some dramatic shifts would be inevitable in a second Trump term.
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