Donald Trump Is Trying To Soften His Image With Women Voters. It’s Going To Be Tough.

OAKS, Pa. — Even some of Donald Trump’s most die-hard female supporters wish he would sometimes just tone down his rhetoric.

“I just wish he would — God would help him — be careful with what he says. I think he should think a little more before he makes certain statements that upset people,” Joyce Cluley, 81, told HuffPost outside a Trump campaign stop in a suburb near Philadelphia on Tuesday.

And that’s to say nothing of all the other women that Trump is hoping to convince to vote for him over the next three weeks.

Female voters are one of Trump’s biggest electoral weaknesses; therefore, he is spending the precious final days of the campaign trying to repair his standing with women turned off by his years of ugly personal attacks and record repealing federal reproductive rights.

Fox News is scheduled to air a town hall Wednesday with Trump and an audience composed entirely of women, the campaign’s latest effort to address the wide gender gap in polls showing Trump lagging badly behind Harris among female voters. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 52% of female registered voters support Harris, while 43% support Trump.

It’s part of a push by both campaigns to shore up support from challenging constituencies in the deadlocked final stretch of the presidential race. The same day that Trump stopped in the Philadelphia suburbs, Harris stumped in Erie on the opposite end of the state at an event geared toward men. The vice president has released plans aimed at specifically courting Black men and is reportedly considering sitting down with comedian podcaster Joe Rogan, whose audience skews mostly male.

The former president, who was found liable by a jury for sexual abuse, has deployed a group of female surrogates, including South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) and Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law and chair of the Republican National Committee, and has proposed making the government or insurance companies cover the cost of in vitro fertilization. Trump is also casting himself as a “protector” of women without outlining any specific way he’d achieve such a status, beyond suggesting he would somehow free women from the desire to have an abortion.

“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger. … You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today,” Trump said last month at a rally in Pennsylvania. “You will be protected, and I will be your protector.”

“Women will be healthy, happy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion,” he added.

Harris, meanwhile, scoffed at Trump’s efforts to rewrite his record on reproductive issues, pointing to devastating consequences for women across the country since he appointed the Supreme Court justices who gave conservatives the majority to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion in 2022.

“There are now 20 states with Trump abortion bans, including bans that make no exceptions for rape or incest,” the Democratic nominee said on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast last week. “This is the same guy that said women should be punished for having abortions.”

In Georgia, for example, two women reportedly died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in the state, which passed a six-week abortion ban that is forcing women to leave the state for abortion services.

“There are too many women dying, literally just trying to bring babies into the world, especially Black women, three to four times the rate,” Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, said on a press call to preempt Trump’s town hall. “What we ought to be focused on doing is addressing that problem and not adding to it by the kind of national abortion ban that Donald Trump surely will bring into place.”

Warnock added at the end of the call: “We don’t need this serial sexual assaulter to protect women, women need to be protected from Donald Trump.”

Trump and other Republicans have sought to distance themselves from extreme anti-abortion policies following the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Trump disavowed Project 2025, the right-wing policy blueprint that includes a wish list of extreme anti-abortion proposals. Trump also suggested he won’t sign a national abortion ban from Congress if elected and won’t enforce an anti-obscenity law that abortion opponents want to use to criminalize sending abortion pills by mail.

Trump told Fox News on Sunday that a national abortion ban is “off the table,” but he left the door open to changing his mind, adding, “We’ll see what happens.”

Trump also has a long history of making disparaging and sexist comments about women, including bragging that “when you’re a star, you can do anything” to women on his infamous “Access Hollywood” interview and criticizing a Fox News anchor for having “blood coming out of her wherever.” More recently, he has turned his invective toward Harris, calling her “mentally disabled” and complaining about the “dumb women” hosts on ABC’s “The View.”

His running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance (R), hasn’t helped matters either, having repeatedly criticized “childless cat ladies,” including Harris, who he said are “miserable” with their lives.

Trump’s event near Philadelphia on Tuesday, which was initially billed by his campaign as a town hall but quickly turned into a strange listening concert — with the former president swaying and dancing on stage for nearly 40 minutes as he played his favorite music hits — drew many female supporters who said they didn’t mind his record on abortion. They wore pink shirts and hats emblazoned with the words “Women for Trump” and stood and posed for photos with his grinning likeness on a van outside the venue, a large expo hall.

“I think that we have bigger problems in this country right now than abortion. I think women are just making this a bigger issue — women, men — than it needs to be,” Sandy Alexander, a 61-year-old retiree from nearby Phoenixville, told HuffPost. “I mean, look, we’re here in Pennsylvania, you can get an abortion anytime you want.” (Abortion is only legal up to 24 weeks of pregnancy in Pennsylvania.)

Kim Statler, a 39-year-old neonatal intensive care unit nurse who works at an area hospital, said she agreed with Trump that abortion policy should be left up to the states. She insisted that women are “always going to be able to drive across the bridge to [New] Jersey and get an abortion. You’re always going to be able to drive to New York. You’re always going to be able to drive to Maryland.”

“I have no sympathies for that,” she added of women facing difficulties in getting abortion care.

But Tammy Solorio, 55, from Royersford, said she believed that Trump’s actions restricting abortion access would hurt him in the coming election.

“Women should have their own right to do whatever they choose. I don’t think that anybody should be able to say what you can and cannot do to your own body,” she told HuffPost.

“He has daughters, he should know what’s all about,” she added of the former president.

Nevertheless, Solorio said she was sticking behind Trump “because there’s so many other things that I agree with [him on],” including lower taxes and enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border.

At the same time, Harris has been trying to court male voters by rolling out proposals to create new mentorship and training programs, protect cryptocurrency assets, and create a health equity initiative focusing on diseases that disproportionately impact Black men, like diabetes and prostate cancer. Her campaign has also deployed Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), her running mate, to appeal to white men in rural areas.

Their outreach to men comes as voters view Harris as more likable and see her as having a stronger moral character, while they give Trump higher marks for being a “strong and decisive leader” who “can get things done,” according to a Gallup survey conducted this month.

“Women are not as strong as you think that we are,” Victoria Noey, a 69-year-old retiree from Norristown, told HuffPost on Tuesday as she waited to hear Trump speak in Pennsylvania. “I’m old-fashioned — my daughter would probably kick me in the head for saying that — I don’t know, I mean, there’s certain things that men are better off doing than women are, you know? Women are better off doing and taking care of families and, you know, doing all that stuff. And there are some men that do that, you know, which is great, let their wives work or whatever.”

“But things were so much simpler when I was a young girl,” Noey continued. “You have all of this like, back and forth and all this hatred. It’s sad, because this is supposed to be America, the land of the free, and I don’t feel free right now.”