Donald Trump’s Misogyny Is About Power
Donald Trump’s supporters in search of apparel have no shortage of options. On Etsy, for example, they can choose from a variety of T-shirt designs, some with a crude message. “Say No to the Hoe,” a few say, featuring Vice-President Kamala Harris’s face inside a circle with a line drawn through it. “Jo and the Ho Gotta Go,” decrees another, out-of-date option, which True Patriot Supply also offers in multiple colors. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that many Trump supporters had taken to wearing “Joe and the Hoe” shirts at the former president’s rallies. That Trump’s supporters are misogynistic will come as no surprise to anyone on the left; much of Trump’s appeal is based in part on a backlash to progress, including progress for women.
The enduring misogyny of Trump became freshly apparent this week on Truth Social, his social-media site. Trump reposted an image of Harris and Hillary Clinton that bore the caption, “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently …” That wasn’t the first time he had amplified a sexual remark about Harris. Earlier in August, he reposted a video from the right-wing Dilley Meme Team that parodied an Alanis Morissette song. In it, a singer says Harris “spent her whole damn life down on her knees” while an image of her former partner, California politician Willie Brown, appears onscreen.
The Harris campaign did not dignify Trump’s latest post with a response, and that may be the right move. The vice-president doesn’t emphasize her gender on the campaign trail, in a sharp contrast with Clinton’s 2016 campaign; instead, she’s leaning more into her image as the law-and-order candidate and the clear alternative to the chaotic and criminal Trump. Even so, Harris can’t quite escape her gender. Trump is determined to make it count while inflaming his base in the process.
His sexist attacks on Harris aren’t a departure from his general oeuvre. Dozens of women have accused him of sexual harassment, and a jury found him liable in 2023 for the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll. Trump’s misogyny is not abstract but lived. Though he has elevated women like Kellyanne Conway or his daughter Ivanka when it suits him, that doesn’t translate to a commitment to equality. Quite the opposite. Trump surrounds himself with sycophants who pose no threat to him; the women he promotes know where they belong, and it’s in roles that are subservient to Trump. He professes nothing but hatred for women he can’t easily control.
In 2016, he repeatedly attacked Clinton’s gender, saying, “If Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote,” while questioning her “stamina” and criticizing her for “shouting.” She lost that election, but she had other weaknesses Trump was able to exploit, so it’s unclear how much Trump’s misogyny mattered in the end. He certainly appears to have paid a price for it in other ways. Suburban women helped propel Democrats to a successful midterm election in 2018, and later, ballot measures to protect abortion rights have won in one Republican-run state after another. When he takes credit for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, he does so seemingly heedless of the political danger he’s put himself in. By amplifying sexist conspiracy theories, Trump will likely alienate many women further. He may not care.
Trump does not invest much effort in persuading voters to join his team. His rhetoric is designed to mobilize the convinced, not to sway moderates and independents. The same tendency is visible in his selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate. Vance’s long-standing obsession with fertility, and his attacks on childless people, aren’t intended to appeal to persuadable women; they appeal, rather, to right-leaning men who fear they’ve lost ground as women advanced. Trump represents hierarchy, not equality, and that’s precisely what his base wants to see.
His crudeness, then, is just another selling point, a way for the base to score points against their political enemies. By attacking Harris’s gender, Trump demonstrates his own masculinity and makes himself seem more and more like the strongman that he — and his followers — believes the U.S. needs. Trump was the vehicle for a vengeance fantasy in 2016, and that remains true in 2024. To followers, his pursuit of raw power is a means to bully liberals and the left into submission. The former president tapped into the right’s simmering resentments over liberal feminism by defeating Clinton. He thus proved to his followers that he could be their longed-for champion, and now the base wants another victory. Harris lacks Clinton’s baggage and has yet to make some of Clinton’s mistakes as a candidate, but as a woman of color in power, she is still a figure to fear and despise. The sexual remarks that Trump reposted this month are a way for him and his followers to put the vice-president back in her place.
Trump’s misogyny riles up his base, that much is certain. It’s less clear whether his strategy, such as it is, can defeat Harris in a general election. She is not the candidate he wanted to run against. More formidable than Biden and perhaps Clinton, too, Harris in some ways represents the antithesis of the society the Trump circle would like to build. She is not a feminist icon, any more than Clinton was, but her path to power was only possible because of movements the right-wing has long sought to destroy. Calling her a ho (or hoe) is a way to diminish her. It may backfire in the end.