Kamala Harris Crystallizes Trump’s View of Women:
They’re ‘Nasty’ or Housewives
As Ms. Harris joined the Democratic ticket, the
president wasted no time calling her “nasty” and praising the “suburban
housewife” he says will vote for him. His views are out of step with reality.
Katie Rogers
By Katie Rogers
Aug. 12, 2020
Updated
2:42 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON
— In the hours since Senator Kamala Harris joined the Democratic presidential
ticket, President Trump has responded by sorting women into two categories: the
good “suburban housewife” he believes will vote for him, and nasty women who
have not shown him or his political allies a sufficient amount of respect.
After
Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, announced on Tuesday
that Ms. Harris would be his running mate, Mr. Trump wasted no time sorting her
into the “nasty” camp, a category occupied by the last woman to run against him
on a Democratic ticket.
“She was
extraordinarily nasty to Brett Kavanaugh — Judge Kavanaugh then, now Justice
Kavanaugh,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris, using “nasty” or some version of the
word no fewer than four times as he referred to Senate confirmation hearings
held in 2018. At the time, Mr. Kavanaugh, angrily seeking to rebut emotional
testimony from Christine Blasey Ford, a professor who accused him of sexually
assaulting her at a party in 1982, found himself on the receiving end of questions
from Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor.
At one
point, Ms. Harris asked the Supreme Court nominee whether he could think of any
existing laws that govern the male body. Mr. Kavanaugh could not.
“She was
nasty to a level that was just a horrible thing,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday.
“And I won’t forget that soon.”
Race-based
attacks soon followed. On Wednesday morning, after his allies on Fox News had
spent the evening comparing Ms. Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian descent,
to racist tropes including “time-share salesmen” and “payday lenders,” Mr.
Trump crowed that the American “suburban housewife” — a racist euphemism for
white women wary of minorities moving into their neighborhoods — would be on his
side in November.
“They want
safety” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter, adding that they “are thrilled that I ended
the long running program where low income housing would invade their
neighborhood,” referring to an Obama-era effort that encouraged diversification
of American communities.
On matters
of race and gender, Mr. Trump has always believed that indulging his instincts
has elevated his political brand. But just as public attitudes on racism have
shifted, threatening to turn Mr. Trump and his embrace of the Confederacy into
a living relic, his views on American women — particularly the suburban ones —
are similarly anachronistic.
According to
data compiled by Lyman Stone, a research fellow at the Institute for Family
Studies who studies population, suburban stay-at-home wives make up only about
4 percent of the American population.
In a more
detailed look at the data, the Bureau of Labor reported in 2019 that the labor
force participation rate for women with children under the age of 6 was 66
percent. For mothers with children ages 6 to 17, the labor force participation
rate was 77 percent.
Pollsters,
referencing the president’s problem with alienating some supporters with his
comments on race and gender, have long said that Mr. Trump can’t afford to lose
the key group of largely white and largely suburban women who helped him win
the presidency in 2016. But in June, an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll showed
that 66 percent of suburban women disapproved of the job Mr. Trump is doing.
Celinda
Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster, said in an interview on Wednesday that the
picture has darkened even further for the president among white suburban women
as the coronavirus pandemic drags on, throwing more of them into uncertainty
over the economy and forcing them to choose between sending children back to
school or keeping them home.
“If he’s
relying on that group to save him, he better get a life jacket,” Ms. Lake said
of white suburban women. “They like safety, they like security, but they think
that Trump’s lack of a plan, poor leadership, of not listening to experts have
made things more dangerous for their families.”
She added:
“Even the white non-college-educated suburban woman are turning against him,
and these are some of the women who are put under the most pressure when it
comes to his mishandling” of the coronavirus response.
As Mr.
Trump insulted Ms. Harris on Tuesday, he peppered his usual misogynistic
“nasty” trope with more name-calling, referring to her as the “meanest, most
horrible, most disrespectful” member of the United States Senate.
With that,
Ms. Harris joins a group of women Mr. Trump feels have not been adequately
compliant.
He used the
“nasty” insult most infamously with his former Democratic rival for the
presidency, Hillary Clinton — “such a nasty woman,” he muttered from across the
stage as the two were engaged in a presidential debate. Senator Elizabeth
Warren of Massachusetts, a former Democratic presidential hopeful and vocal
critic, was deemed to have a “nasty mouth.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi? “She’s
a nasty, vindictive, horrible person.”
Even Meghan
Markle, the American-born Duchess of Sussex, was deemed “nasty” for not
supporting his 2016 candidacy.
“What can I
say?” Mr. Trump told a British tabloid last year, just ahead of a visit to the
United Kingdom, where he was hosted by the royal family. “I didn’t know that
she was nasty.”
That time,
in an Orwellian twist, Mr. Trump tried to walk back those comments, which were
caught on tape, by telling the public not to believe what they had just heard.
“I never
called Meghan Markle ‘nasty,’” Mr. Trump said on Twitter. “Made up by the Fake
News Media, and they got caught cold!”
Mr. Trump’s
attacks on Ms. Harris have been mild compared with name-calling and insults he
has used against other opponents, including Ms. Clinton and Ms. Warren. Mr.
Trump has instead at times treated the junior senator as a newcomer, even praising
Ms. Harris’s ability to draw large crowds.
“Too bad.
We will miss you Kamala!” Mr. Trump said on Twitter in December after she ended
her own presidential campaign.
“Don’t
worry, Mr. President, I’ll see you at your trial,” Ms. Harris retorted.
When Ms.
Harris’s role was announced Tuesday, both the president and his campaign seemed
uncoordinated and unclear about how best to attack her record effectively. But
uglier insults made by Mr. Trump’s closest allies may foreshadow what is to
come: Last year, Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. questioned on Twitter whether
Ms. Harris was Black enough to be addressing issues faced by Black Americans.
He
eventually deleted the tweet.
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