Donald Trump has a new strategy to win women over ahead of the 2024 presidential election campaign: hypnosis.
“Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free… you will no longer be thinking about abortion… I am your protector…”
All he needed was a clock hanging off a gold chain, swinging it in front of the faces of supporters at his rally in Pennsylvania, and I would have believed he was making a cameo appearance as a hypnotist on Penn & Teller.
Perhaps Trump is hoping to send women voters into a state of hypnosis, gently coercing them to write a tick next to his name come November 5.
But women voters are smarter than that. A survey from the Harvard Institute of Politics (IOP) found 70 per cent of young women would vote for Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Specifically on the issue of abortion, Harris holds a +31 lead over Trump.
The reason for the stark gender gap, most prominent amongst younger voters, is simple: women have not forgotten Trump’s legacy. His four decades in the public eye and four years in office has proved he is anything but a protector of women.
At least 25 women have accused the former US president of sexual harassment, sexual assault and/or rape since the 1970s. One of the most high profile accusations came from E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of sexual assault in the mid 1990s.
Whilst Trump has always denied the allegations, Carroll, who sued him for defamation over his denial, was awarded more than $83 million USD ($120.2 million AUD) in damages for continued defamatory statements he has made against her.
A civil court found Trump sexually assaulted a woman, and dozens of other women accuse him of far more. Yet he believes himself a “protector of women”.
Then there is his plan – or perhaps it’s more accurate to say his “concepts of a plan” – for women’s reproductive rights in the US.
During the debate with Kamala Harris earlier this month, Trump never gave a straight answer on his position on reinstating abortion rights in the US. In fairness, neither did Kamala Harris.
But while Harris told the real stories of women, who have been impacted by the overturning of Roe v Wade and the reduction of reproductive rights, Donald Trump told mistruth after mistruth – from claiming abortion regularly happens “in the ninth month” (in reality, less than a fraction of a percentage point of abortions happen after 21 weeks), to claiming the “execution” of babies after birth is a reality in the US (this was immediately fact-checked by Linsey Davis, the ABC Moderator of the debate).
Following the debate, Kamala Harris shared the story of Hadley from Midway, Kentucky. She was repeatedly sexually abused by her stepfather, who impregnated her at 12 years old.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she said, “but I had options. Because Donald Trump overturned Roe v Wade, girls and women have lost the right to choose. Donald Trump did this. He took away our freedom.”
Other women have also come out, independently sharing their harrowing experiences of navigating a healthcare system that fails to wholly give women the right to choose.
Women can never be “happy, healthy, confident and free” under these conditions. And women will never stop thinking about abortion.
Finally, the idea of Donald Trump as a “protector of women”, if not laughable, is eerily reminiscent of old, white, heteronormative stereotypes: that women are fragile, and need a man to save them.
Nia-Malika Henderson, an opinion columnist at Bloomberg, debunked Trump’s comments at his rally in Pennsylvania.
In the US, there are ads on ESPN, selling men supplements for testosterone. According to the companies that sell these products, men’s levels of testosterone are lower than they have ever been. This claim appears to come from a 2007 study, which could not identify the reason for the drop in testosterone.
But a study telling you you’re not as “manly” as your father, or grandfather? Now that’s a headline worth clicking on, and a supplement worth buying.
Nia-Malika Henderson said “in some ways”, Donald Trump is that testosterone supplement.
“You think about those bikers for Trump – their jackets and their tattoos – and there’s something that’s very homosocial about it,” Henderson said.
“They do not feel like some of them, that they have a place in the Democratic party, which they see as maybe too Black, maybe too gay, maybe too female, right?”
That is why Trump positions himself holding the role of the “traditional, great, White father, a protector of the very ‘fragile’ women”, Henderson said. And a portrayal like that might not appeal to all women, but it might very well appeal to men who also want to be that kind of man.
I know I am not alone in saying it would take hypnosis for me to believe a man like Donald Trump would “protect” women. But the prospect of voters falling under his spell is real, and something – or someone – needs to snap them out of it.