Much of the outrage about Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally has been focused on the comments made by Tony Hinchcliffe, a comedian, about Puerto Rico (“a floating island of garbage”) and Black people (who “carved watermelons”). Hinchcliffe has defended himself by saying these were just jokes taken out of context. Trump’s running mate JD Vance claimed to have not seen the humor in them, but said, “I think that we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America. I’m just — I’m so over it.”
OK. These were just “jokes” and anyone who was offended is just an oversensitive pearl-clutcher. I’d like, then, to focus on comments made by other Trump surrogates, and Trump himself, in the final weeks of his campaign. None of these people are comedians, and they are appallingly disrespectful to Kamala Harris, and to women generally.
“Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country,” said a businessman named Grant Cardone, implying both that Harris is a prostitute and that she’s an intellectual lightweight controlled by “handlers.” An ad from Elon Musk’s super PAC describes Harris as a “C-word” — “You heard that right. A big ole C- word.” The ad later reveals that the C-word is “Communist,” but as my colleague David Fahrenthold explains, “the setup is an obvious play on a far more vulgar term that begins with the same letter.” (The Bulwark reported that Hinchcliffe was going to use this word in his set, but even Trump’s team saw that as a bridge too far).
On Wednesday, Trump himself said: “I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.” This was part of a rambling monologue in which he referred back to comments made in September about women and abortion rights. In those previous remarks, he “cast himself as a ‘protector’ of women,” according to CNN, “and claimed that American women won’t be ‘thinking about abortion’ if he’s elected.” Trump also said this week that he plans to put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a man with no medical training, who believes in numerous conspiracy theories, and who has a questionable history with women of his own — to work on women’s health.
Part of Trump’s power has always been that he can be very funny — in a schoolyard bully kind of way. And as a result, he has created a context collapse. Call me old-fashioned, but there should be a difference between a roast and a political rally; in Trump world they are the same. As the Times critic at large Jason Zinoman notes, this is why Trump has gone on so many comedians’ podcasts: “For these comics, Trump’s insults are proof of his authenticity.”
This is why it is particularly difficult for feminists, who have long been dismissed as humorless nags, to effectively fight back against Trump. Sometimes I just want to scream into a pillow, “MULTIPLE WOMEN HAVE LODGED CREDIBLE ALLEGATIONS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT AGAINST THIS MAN,” but mine is not a very snappy retort. I probably just need to “stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America.”
Still, I think it was smart for Harris to avoid focusing her campaign on the fact that she could be the first female president. As Constance Grady argued in Vox, “Political observers have read Harris’s decision not to lean into her race and gender identity as savvy, mostly because of the trauma of what happened” to Hillary Clinton when she “went all-in on feminism.”
But Grady also explains that in the wake of Clinton’s loss, earnest feminism of the pink-hat-wearing variety became very deeply uncool. Rather than presumably rely on dour feminist disapproval, the thinking goes, it is much more popular and effective for America’s dad Tim Walz to insult Republicans by calling them “weird” and mock Elon Musk for “jumping around skipping ” like a buffoon at a Trump rally.
But whether or not it’s fashionable or funny to say so, this election is about the status of women in America. It’s about the right to control our own bodies. It’s about a right to complete health care in every state in the Union, not just in the ones led by Democrats. How many women like Josseli Barnica — a Texan who was miscarrying and died of an infection because she received delayed emergency care — need to perish before people realize our lives are on the line?
That is the defensive argument. But this election is also about the progress women have made financially and educationally over the past 50 years. There’s a reason JD Vance lashed out at “childless cat ladies” and not men who don’t get married or have children, and it’s because those men are not threatening to the status quo.
The New Yorker’s Katy Waldman quoted one of these aggrieved Trump supporters, who said, “Kamala and the Democrats hate men” — though I cannot recall a single hateful thing, even in jest, that Harris has ever said about men. The asymmetry of the standards that the two candidates are held to is glaring. It seems that, for some, the absence of insult comedy about women is seen as a put-down of men’s interests.
In a speech in front of 75,000 people near the White House on Tuesday, widely seen her closing remarks for her campaign, Harris made a case for women. “I believe in the fundamental freedom of Americans to make decisions about their own bodies and not have their government tell them what to do. I will fight to restore what Donald Trump and his hand-selected Supreme Court justices took away from the women of America,” she said. “One in three women in America lives in a state with a Trump abortion ban, many with no exceptions even for rape and incest. The idea that a woman who survives a crime of a violation to her body should not have the authority to make a decision about what happens to her body next, that is immoral.”
We need laws, not Donald Trump, to protect us and our bodies. If reminding people of that makes me a feminist killjoy, I wear the mantle proudly. If he wins again, despite everything we already know about him, the joke won’t be just on women. It will be on the entire world.
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