Donald Trump has 99 problems, but female voters are the main one. Were it not for the Nineteenth Amendment, the price of Canadian real estate would be much higher than it is today: A recent NBC–Wall Street Journal poll found that Trump leads Hillary Clinton by 3 points among men, but loses to her by 23 points among women. That same poll showed 69 percent of women respondents expressing an unfavorable view of the Donald. Clearly then, fashioning a new, female-friendly message should be the top priority for the Trump campaign as it pivots to the general election.
“Without the woman’s card, Hillary would not even be a viable person to run for City Council positions,” the mogul informed Savannah Guthrie on the Today show Thursday morning. The comment echoed remarks Trump made after sweeping the Acela primaries Tuesday night, in which the he declared, “Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote.”
Trump has hammered this point relentlessly for the past 72 hours, playing the “woman’s card” card in every major interview. It appears to be his primary line of attack against his presumptive fall opponent: Trump’s apparent strategy for winning over women voters is to remind them of their “female privilege.”
“Mr. Trump, for you to say that if she were not a woman she would be getting 5 percent suggests the only thing she has going for her is that she was a woman, not that she was a former senator, former secretary of State, and lawyer,” Guthrie explained to the Republican front-runner. “Do you understand why people find that to be kind of a demeaning comment?”
“I find it to be a true comment,” Trump replied. “I think the only thing she has got going is she’s a woman. She has done a terrible job in so many different ways … She’s playing that card like I have never seen anybody play it before.”
Maybe Trump’s new team of veteran campaign strategists conducted exhaustive research into the attitudes of undecided female voters and discovered that they all long for a candidate with the balls to argue, “Women have an easier time attaining positions of power in America than men do.” Maybe what these voters want to hear most is that any success they have in life is due, at least in part, to the unearned advantage of their anatomy. Maybe they all checked “strongly agree” next to the statement “It is cool and good for a male presidential candidate with no experience in government to suggest a female former secretary of State lacks the credentials to run for City Council.”
Or maybe misogyny is Donald Trump’s core ideology, male supremacy his one unwavering conviction. Maybe fear of female power is so fundamental to his psyche, he literally cannot stop himself from whining about how he’s going to have to listen to Hillary’s “shouting” for the next five months. And maybe this is the reason he’s never going to be president.
We report, you decide.
