The United States have elected a proud misogynist as president, a man who stood on stage at his final rally on Tuesday night and encouraged the crowd of thousands to call Nancy Pelosi a bitch.
Yes, that’s right: a bitch.
I apologise for using such a word in a family newspaper, or anywhere actually, but in the interests of journalism, it’s important to repeat what happened at Donald Trump‘s last rally of the 2024 campaign, which took place in Michigan, moments before the polls opened on Wednesday morning.
Describing the former House Speaker as ‘an evil, sick, crazy bi…’, Trump stopped just short of finishing the word that was on the tip of his tongue, and held up a finger, pretending to have caught himself.
‘Oh no,’ he said, with all the faux-contrition of a four-year-old who has just been caught with their hands in the sweetie jar. As the crowd began to laugh, Trump mouthed the word into his mic (a mic he stopped himself from performing fellatio on, as he had the day before, in front of crowds in Milwaukee). ‘It starts with a B, but I won’t say it,’ he added. ‘I want to say it.’
Donald Trump’s increasingly unhinged misogyny is something that should appal all of us, regardless of our personal politics
The crowd roared, and several attendees began to say the word he had so gallantly resisted uttering in full himself. ‘BITCH!’ shouted various people in the audience, and Trump stood there, surveying his kingdom.
It was a typically unedifying end to a presidential campaign that had seen the businessman describe his opponent Kamala Harris as ‘mentally impaired’ and ‘retarded’, and where he’d appeared to embrace a comment from a rallygoer that insinuated Harris was a prostitute.
Almost a week after a speaker at a New York event suggested that Harris was controlled by ‘pimp handlers’, Trump attended another rally where someone in the crowd shouted ‘she [Harris] worked on a corner’. Trump laughed at this, before pointing to the section of the crowd where the crude remark had originated.
‘This place is amazing,’ he said to cheers. ‘Just remember, it’s other people saying it. It’s not me.’
At other points over the past year, Trump has walked out on stage to the James Brown song It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World. He also described his former rival for the Republican presidential nomination Nikki Haley as a ‘birdbrain’ and suggested that Liz Cheney – a Republican politician but anti-Trump campaigner, and the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney – needed several guns trained at her face.
Then there was his chilling vow to ‘protect women, whether they like it or not’, with all its ghastly, sexist connotations of coercion. As one US commentator pointed out this week, ‘Mr Trump has used misogynistic language . . . and has fostered an environment at his rallies where speakers and attendees feel comfortable making the kind of gendered insults that, in another political era, would have been unthinkable to say in public’.
Indeed, it’s impossible to imagine any president from the past – Republican or Democratic – being as openly misogynistic as Trump.
Trump, pictured in a New York courtroom last year, was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records which prosecutors say was an effort to hide a potential sex scandal
While there’s been much talk of ‘liberal’ disappointment about the Trump result, it should be said here that the 78-year old’s increasingly unhinged misogyny is something that should appal all of us, regardless of our personal politics.
It was bad enough when, in 2016, the former Apprentice star swept to victory after being caught talking about how much he liked to ‘grab’ women ‘by the pussy’.
But in recent years a grand total of 26 women have come forward to accuse the president of sexual misconduct. Tasha Dixon, Karen Johnson, Melinda McGillivray, Jennifer Murphy, Natasha Stoynoff, Rachel Crooks, Samantha Holvey, Jessica Drake, Ninni Laaksonen, Summer Zervos, Amy Dorris, Jill Harth, Cassandra Searles, Bridget Sullivan, Karena Virginia, Cathy Heller, Temple Taggart, Mariah Billado, Lisa Boyne, Kristin Anderson, Jessica Leeds . . . these are the names of just some of the women who have accused the next president of everything from rape to non-consensual kissing and groping. And who could forget that just last year, a New York jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation against the writer E. Jean Carroll? The American electorate, it would seem.
This is shocking to say the least – and that shock has nothing to do with class or political persuasion. For in the US, 81 per cent of women will experience sexual harassment or assault in their lifetimes, while one in five will experience either ‘attempted or completed’ rape.
What a sad indictment, then, that sexual violence against women isn’t considered an important enough issue to swing a vote – certainly not as important as whether or not a woman should have autonomy over her own reproductive health, as Kamala Harris campaigned on.
The burning question, of course, is why so many women have voted for a man who seems to show such blatant disregard for them. Pictured, supporters celebrate Trump’s win in Florida
The burning question, of course, is why so many women have voted for a man who seems to show such blatant disregard for them. Is it for the same reason some victims of coercive control keep returning to abusive partners? Or perhaps it is because Trump campaigned on a platform essentially designed to whip up fear. To terrify women.
Speaking at a rally in North Carolina at the weekend, he appealed to the so-called ‘security moms’, as he frequently has, with stories of mothers whose children were killed by people who are in the US illegally.
(Security moms are women who believe the number-one priority of government is safety and national security. Isn’t it funny that dads never get generalised and turned into an epithet like this?)
‘I believe that women have to be protected,’ he told the rally. ‘Men have to be, children, everybody. But women have to be protected where they’re at home in suburbia. When you’re home in your house alone and you have this monster that got out of prison and he’s got, you know, six charges of murdering six different people, I think you’d rather have Trump.’
Has the rise of the ‘trad wife’ movement on social media, in which women focus only on mothering and performing household tasks, had an effect on this too? Undoubtedly.
Charlie Kirk, founder of the American conservative youth organisation Turning Point, has said that any man who votes against Trump is ‘not a man’.
Kirk, 31, has also said that wives who covertly vote for Harris ‘undermine their husbands’ – describing a man ‘who probably works his tail off to make sure that she can go and have a nice life . . .’ And you find yourself wondering if it’s 2024 or 1954, or even earlier.
Back in 2016, researchers picked apart the results of the US election that first returned Trump as president. Political scientists in North Carolina found that ‘female voters, like their male counterparts, were most powerfully influenced by the degree to which they held racially resentful and sexist attitudes . . . These attitudes reflect trepidation toward the loss of ‘traditional American family values’, including the preservation of separate spheres for men and women.
‘They also suggest that many women fear how ‘outsider’ groups may be altering the political landscape… an attitude primarily attributed to angry white men.’
And so here we are, eight years on, and the United States is a country that would still rather vote for a man found guilty of sexual misconduct than they would a woman.
As James Brown sang – in the 1960s – it really is a man’s world. Which makes it a depressing one for us all, surely.