One of the most consequential lies Trump ever told has become the foundation of his attempt to get and keep himself in power. The lie was that the 2020 election was stolen. It has become a pretense, a false pretense, to justify the suppression of the ability of those voters assumed to be in political opposition to Trump, including justifying threats to put armed ICE agents at polling places in the midterms. After 6 years of commissions, ninjas, special counsels, and his own DOJ-controlled administration using all the powers they have, they never found enough to even show probable cause or evidence to justify more digging to keep keepi the myth alive. A particular case in point: even Trump's administration could not come up with enough evidence, or even questionable evidence by pro-Trump biased researchers, to show that enough non-citizens voted to have changed any outcome. https://www.pbs.org/.../trump-says-these-documents-prove...
As the umpteenth woman comes forward to reveal Donald Trump raped her years ago, a vast yawn erupted from all but a few. So what else is new. What is not new is that Donald
Trump still has a nasty woman problem. Have you noticed how FOX and social
media favorable to Donald Trump have become obsessed with Rep.Alexandria
Ocasio- Cortez (AOC)? In his rally
announcing his second term, President Trump spent a significant amount of his
speech time, fixated on Hillary Clinton, much to the delight of his audience
who chanted “lock her up”. I pinched myself to make sure this was not in the
middle of the 2016 campaign. It was the third presidential debate in 2016 when Candidate Trump called Hillary Clinton a
"nasty woman". In June this year, he called House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi a “nasty, vindictive, horrible person”.
His name calling is not a problem
aimed at a few powerful women. It is a millstone around his re-election neck.
Trump supportive media often reports AOC’s
inflammatory words, usually with a visual image showing her angry. So much extensive hackle-raising coverage by
media must have explained why I had a strange conversation the other day. A
friend of mine, a dedicated Trump supporter and FOX fan, insisted to me that
AOC was running for president. I tried
to set her straight that AOC was not running for president. Oh yes, she is, my
friend responded. I changed the subject to gardening. Eventually, my friend would figure it out
herself when AOC never appeared on the Democratic candidate debate stage.
Why I
asked me, is there such an obsession with very outspoken women politicians by those in the Trump camp? Clinton’s ideology, mainstream old fashioned
Democrat, more middle of the road and AOC’s democratic socialism, a more
radical view expressed in blunt and inflammatory ways, were not the same,
either on issue positions or in style. AOC is much younger and more photogenic.
Trump is justified in fearing Pelosi because she indeed has the power, skills,
and official position to challenge him,
but not because she is “nasty”.
There had to be some reason that caused such a
devotion of time to promote fear and
loathing of women who were not running
for president in 2020. You would expect
Trump, as a candidate to spend even more
time to boasting of the great economy or his method of keeping America free of
immigrants. However, “Build the wall” is still a chant at Trump’s recent rally,
but even then AOC became the icon of wall opposition, too. Hope springs eternal, but Trump’s failure to
build it is countered by announced ICE mass deportations and the building of
more detention camps. Tongues on both sides of the aisle wagged at AOC’s
calling these camps "concentration camps". Granted, no one was being
marched off to Nazi ovens, but the image of such facilities is hard to erase.
Media coverage of unaccompanied migrant
children crammed into unsanitary facilities, lice infected and dirty, and
remaining there far past the few days they were supposed to be kept there may be a bargaining chip to force
Democrats to fund border security, but cruelty to so many so young is a turnoff
even to some women who profess to be Evangelical Christians. The Marist poll
found 62% of women said that Trump’s emergency declaration at the border made them less likely to vote for Trump in
2020.
I have my theories about this obsession with
AOC and Hillary Clinton, but from a political strategy, does it make sense or
not? One way it could make sense is to
consider it a method to paint
every single woman candidate with the same brush of an uppity, nasty woman to be feared as some radical force infecting the entire
Democratic field. More likely Donald
Trump is simply ginning up his base that already contains voters hostile to
women as a way to increase their enthusiasm and turnout. A study by a
Tuft University professor post-2016 as reported in the Washington Post
concluded that "Most voters with hostile sexist views were in the Republican
camp, ...; they had been moving Republican for many election cycles." The researcher found that other factors were more important in determining the 2016
outcome.
On the other hand, looking at the results of
the 2018 midterms and the failure of the GOP in attracting suburban women that
most attribute to flipping the House from red to blue, it makes no political sense as a strategy to continue vilifying women if
the GOP wants to expand its base. If the
GOP is to regain control of the House and keep control of the Senate and White
House in 2020, it certainly would not be helpful to continue to vilify women
candidates. The gender gap between the GOP and the Democratic party has always
been there, but a recent poll by PEW research late spring 2019, as reflected in
Trump’s job approval by gender showed there were real problems for Trump’s
re-election. PEW research found “..over his first two years in office, Trump’s
average approval rating was much higher among men (44%) than among women (31%). This 13 percentage point gender gap is wider
than for any of his recent predecessors, dating back to George H.W.Bush...
"
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FOX
and Trump favorable media have made much
of a Zogby poll was taken just after Trump declared a national emergency at the
border, that claimed to show suburban women “want the wall, buoying Trump after
fleeing in 2018”. The poll came under immediate fire for using a proven flawed
methodology. Recent NPR, PBS, and Marist
polls of suburban women of approval Trump’s national emergency declaration found only 31% of women
agreed. It is hard to believe this one the issue on immigration would offset Trump’s appointment of anti-choice Supreme
Courts justices and evidence on tapes and by witnesses of his sexual assault on
women.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/11/gender-gap-widens-in-views-of-governments-role-and-of-trump/
https://www.yahoo.com/news/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-2020-rally-092528081.html?ncid=facebook_yahoonewsf_akfmevaatca
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/suburban-women-want-the-wall-buoying-trump-after-fleeing-in-2018
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2019/02/12/feature/will-americans-vote-for-a-woman-obsessing-over-the-question-makes-it-less-likely/?utm_term=.4c126ceea16c
“To have clear evidence that Clinton’s gender
cost her the election, we would expect to find that the sexist Obama voters
from 2012 switched to Trump in 2016,” he tells me. “That is not what we found
in our study.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/29/most-americans-say-they-wont-vote-trump-next-year-will-they-vote-all/?utm_term=.e460de40cc2
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/02/25/no-trumps-national-emergency-declaration-hasnt-erased-trumps-problem-with-suburban-women/?utm_term=.c0ca41e3c6d9
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/02/25/no-trumps-national-emergency-declaration-hasnt-erased-trumps-problem-with-suburban-women/?utm_term=.c787d919ee81