‘Blame Women’—How the Trump Campaign Is Courting Voters...and Donors
With hours to go before voting begins, the Trump campaign is trying new tactics to establish a MAGA future—and many of those attack women.
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Much ink has been spilled about what Donald Trump is: A fascist? A puppet? A narcissist? An opportunist? Is he a hardline ideologue or a meandering megalomaniac?
One of the reasons it’s so hard to pin Trump down is because he says what he thinks out loud—and what he thinks is often fleeting, and self-contradictory. (Exhibit A (of many): His many changing stances on abortion.)
On the last Sunday in October, he said during a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City that the U.S. is now an “occupied country” because of immigration at the southern border. He repeated one of his favorite campaign trail terms—“the enemy within”—a conspiratorial term which he attaches to pretty much any American who disagrees with him publicly. And he called the media an “enemy of the people.”
When Actions Speak Louder Than Words
All of this is very much saying the quiet part out loud. But there are many, many behind the scenes who are quietly committed to establishing a MAGA future: People who criticized Trump heavily while he was in office but then fell into line; people who don’t like his behavior but see him as a vehicle for their agendas (Evangelical Christians in particular); people who don’t explicitly back the man himself, but who can’t bring themselves to back his opponent (see: the recent controversies at The Washington Post and The LA Times); even people who resigned from his first administration—but now want back in.
Take the DeVos family. If that name sounds familiar to you, it’s because Betsy DeVos served as the education secretary under Donald Trump. And although DeVos publicly criticized Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection, Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings show her family has made sizable donations to Elon Musk’s pro-Trump “America PAC” as recently as October. (You may also recall that this was the PAC that was sued by the Pennsylvania district attorney for its controversial $1 million voter giveaways.)
As education secretary, DeVos spent a lot of time rolling back back civil rights protections for vulnerable students—by either getting rid of a load of civil rights probes she inherited from the Obama era; or by making changes to existing rules that had protections for LGBT students and female students built in; or by giving more rights to students who were accused of sexual assault—and by pushing Christianity in schools. After her strident criticism about Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6—“There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me,” she wrote in her resignation letter—she later said she’d be open to serving in a second Trump administration, if he’d abolish the department of education entirely this time around.
(That may seem like a bizarre demand for someone who once headed up that very department, but DeVos is an ideologue who believes that decisions on education should be left up to individual states—or, even better, individual parents. Such demands play well with the far-right base, many of whom want to hear that the government won’t be making decisions about what their children are taught in classrooms. The reality is that the department of education actually doesn’t involve itself in curricula much at all—it instead concerns itself mostly with funding and infrastructure around education, including providing free school meals to children living below the poverty line—but MAGA Republicans are fond of these “culture wars” talking points.
The fact that DeVos distanced herself from Trump so clearly before making large financial donations to his cause a few years later is interesting, to say the least. But, like most people who orbit Trump, we can presume it all has something to do with enacting an agenda. Oil barons considering donating to the Trump campaign want environment legislation rolled back; Betsy DeVos wants to eliminate the department of education. We all have our pet projects.
Who else is aligning with Trump as a way to push through their plans?
Plenty of people connected with the Heritage Foundation—the conservative think tank that provided much of the thinking behind Project 2025—have made it clear they would like to see women bearing more children and doing so while they are younger, ideally staying out of the workplace so they can raise their vast progeny. They want those children to be sent to schools without curricula, where books that are not conservative enough are banned and religion is prioritized.
Other aims that Trump specifically has referenced include: mass deportations, an end to American citizenship by birth, prosecutions and punishments for those who oppose the Trump agenda, including Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. On Friday, Trump used a particularly violent and alarming rhetoric in reference to the former congresswoman, Liz Cheney.
We can presume this kind of dynamic would play out again and again in a second Trump administration.
The Woman Problem
On Tuesday, Nick Fuentes, a very MAGA, hardline Christian white supremacist tweeted: “If Trump loses, blame women.” He followed it up, on Thursday, with: “This election proves that women should not have the right to vote,” and, a few hours later: “Women are willing to destroy the economy, open the borders, and plunge the world into a nuclear war… As long as they get to have their abortions. Sick and cruel.”
Clearly, ardent Trump supporters have taken note of the widening gender gap in the polls and are worried that women—who turn up to vote more reliably than men—could swing it for Harris. The panic underlying these tweets is clear (and, if I may say so, more than a little satisfying).
But now there are other worries for the Trump campaign beyond women. Ever since last week’s New York City rally—when a comedian referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”—the Trump campaign has been on the defensive. A lot of that is because Trump made serious inroads with Hispanic voters in the past four years — and polls show Latino men in particular are continuing to move right. Swing states like Arizona and Florida are heavily populated with Latino voters, and Trump can’t afford to lose them at this critical moment. (The garbage controversy continued with a gaffe from Biden—who appeared to refer to Trump supporters as “garbage” in the aftermath—which was followed, rather bizarrely, with a garbage truck-driving stunt from The Donald himself. As the conversation about literal trash took up front pages, the real dumpster fire of American division continued to burn in the background. At a rally in Wisconsin, not long after hopping out of his garbage truck, Trump made a rambling overture to the women he still needs to win over: that he will “protect” them, “whether they like it or not.”
If Trump loses, blame women. That line is living rent-free in a lot of people’s heads this week, on both sides of the aisle. How you interpret it depends on whether you think a woman belongs in the home, discouraged from the workplace, and churning out children—or in the White House, leading the most powerful country in the world.
Emma Haslett
Naomi Cahn
Ruchi Kumar
