Donald Trump had a great Tuesday last week as he trounced his two remaining rivals in five primaries, gobbling up a bunch of delegates. How best to celebrate? How to look like a real winner, one with class, one who will appeal to this November’s general election voters – including a whole lot of women?
Why, go out of your way to demean Hillary Clinton’s professional accomplishments and, by implication, women of achievement everywhere!
“If Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote,” said the self-proclaimed “presumptive” Republican nominee for president. “The only thing she’s got going is the woman’s card.” And, he added nastily, “the beautiful thing is, women don’t like her.”
Take that, Hillary! And did she ever.
“If fighting for women’s health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal me in!” You’d almost think she’d been expecting Trump’s idiotic statement.
And the reality TV star reacted as expected, whining to his fans on Morning Joe that “I haven’t quite recovered from Clinton shouting her message.”
Oh, Donald. Hillary didn’t shout her message. She roared it! Maybe you were too busy with the New York ’70s club scene to remember the rousing Helen Reddy anthem, but Hillary and her troops sure do.
“I am woman, hear me roar in numbers too big to ignore. . . . I am strong. I am invincible. I am woman!”
By Thursday, Team Hillary had sent an email blast across the land touting a stylish pink Official Hillary for America Woman Card, available for a one buck donation to the campaign, perfect for decorating the fridge. Trump gave the Clinton campaign a gift.
What I can’t figure out is why Trump, whose unfavorability rating among voting-age women is already around 70 percent, felt compelled to trash Clinton’s hard-earned credentials, particularly since he himself has none – except a propensity to make and to lose money. Maybe for some perverse reason he decided to shoot for a negativity rating of 80 percent with the ladies?
And despite his turning his own moment of triumph into a target for ridicule by the country’s commentators and comedians, he felt compelled later in the week to double down, insisting that if she were a man she couldn’t even win a local race.
“The primary thing that she has going is that she’s a woman and she’s playing that card like I have never seen anybody play it before,” he told the Today show.
You’d think Clinton was paying Donald.
Hillary Clinton can more than take care of herself. For more than 25 years, she has done battle with adversaries a lot tougher than Trump, however much he might think of himself as a fierce warrior. He is actually an overgrown and incredibly rich schoolyard bully whose own skin – as we’ve seen during this campaign, when he is seriously challenged – is tissue-paper thin.
And Trump’s lengthy record on women is just a Google click away, laying out in excruciating detail his horrific misogyny. He has spent his life insulting, belittling, sexualizing and stereotyping women.
Early in the campaign, Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly famously confronted the hotel mogul on his referring to woman he dislikes as “‘pigs’, ‘dogs’, ‘slobs’, and ‘disgusting animals.’” He was outraged, of course. And subsequently he retweeted posts referring to her as “a bimbo” and implied that her question was prompted by her menstruation cycle.
It’s little wonder so many women dislike him so intensely.
But all this fuss prompts me to ask a fairly fundamental question about this affair. What, exactly, is a woman card? It clearly is not an issue that will go away, not if Trump and (likely) the Republicans have anything to say about it. So what are they talking about?
If the charge is that Hillary Clinton is a woman, well, yes she is! And she has never denied it. She is a wife, too, and a mother – as are many women in these great United States and, indeed, the world. Are we supposed to find this alarming? Uh, why?
Is it, as she says, because she wants attention paid to issues like women’s health care and paid family leave and equal pay? They are, yes, issues of particular interest to – and in some cases unique to – women, who are (even in our enlightened and egalitarian age) still the chief housekeepers, child tenders and caregivers in most American families. But they should also be of interest to men, since virtually all men have women in their lives. They have mothers and grandmothers, sisters, daughters, granddaughters.
Would they like their daughters or their granddaughters to be mocked or belittled by Trump? Or – worse – “cherished” by him, as he likes to say?
What does “playing the woman card” mean? Does it mean that Hillary Clinton shouldn’t call attention to her womanhood? She’s already decked out in pants suits, for heaven’s sake! Should she mute their tone – no more red or blue or yellow, just serious, somber gray and black?
And if there’s a woman card, is there a man card? Is Trump playing the man card? Which would make the man card a pretty awful thing, considering Trump’s nauseating opinions of women over the years.
If a candidate touts his prowess at such things as duck hunting, if he poses astride motorcycles, if he celebrates his skill at target shooting, is he playing the man card? And should he be honored for that? Even though women also hunt ducks and ride motorcycles and enjoy target shooting?
Or would a man card really mean Trump’s belief that only men – preferably white men and, especially, 70-ish white men with bizarre hair and a history of multiple marriages and multiple bankruptcies – are really qualified to be president?
And whatever card it is that Trump is playing, do we really want such a person to be the face of America to the world? I’m betting a whole lot of women will not want that.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)