There’s a diminishing but still very real chance that Donald Trump, dubious billionaire and owner of the World’s Most Confusing Tan, might become the leader of the free world.
Outside the US, the world has been watching with increasing alarm that this salesman, a blathering, bullish grin-machine in a wig, might soon have his hand on the big red nuclear button. Most right-minded people see Trump as an international threat to global stability, lacking the diplomacy and foreign affairs experience necessary to navigate such a volatile climate.
But what about closer to home? How will a Trump presidency affect us on a personal level? And effect will Trump have on women in particular?
Dating Madonna
During that odd period in the early 90s when he briefly pretended to be his own publicist in order to blow his own Trumpet – a strategy so bizarre and narcissistic that it’s difficult to even comprehend how to feel about it beyond deeply unsettled – one thing became apparent: the way he correlates sexual conquests with prestige. Women are a measure of success to him.
Over the course if the incomplete recording, in which Trump refers to himself as ‘John Miller’ and makes no effort whatsoever to alter his distinctive voice, he repeatedly name-drops famous women and gives hints about his own prowess with women. He implies that Madonna, then at the height of her career, wanted to date him, that he’d been pursued by Kim Basinger, and had had numerous affairs with actresses and celebrities.
Very Lucky Lady
It’s easy to pass this language off as simple bragging. But it isn’t. It’s more dangerous than that. Trump is by trade and by character an accumulator of physical things: buildings, money, property. People. Women. In order to inflate his own prestige in these weird conversations, women are literally commoditized and discussed in terms of his own value. After all, he says when he finally descends from On High and bestows his decision to marry one someone, “that will be a very lucky lady.”
Lucky, to be counted amongst his possessions, one assumes. This is the very heart of objectification. He is the man who owns the Miss Universe competition after all. Like a character from Pinter’s The Caretaker, one has the sense that Trump is a collector of sorts, but doesn’t understand his own motives.
Misogynistic Crudeness
Regarding his wife, Trump said in a 1991 interview with Esquire that you can fix any piece of bad press as long as you’re sleeping with an attractive woman: “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”
Maybe this can written off as misogynistic crudeness and disregarded as valueless. If you were being particularly generous, you might even put it down to the outdated social imperatives of a previous generation, or the simple self-aggrandizing of a moon-faced clown. But there are worse concerns yet.
In October 2015, at a Q&A where he was asked by a young woman about the gender pay gap, Trump replied “You’re going to make the same [as men] if you do as good a job”. This is a go-to Red Pill argument, and it implies immediately that right now, since there is a pay gap, women aren’t doing as good a job as their male counterparts. This is demonstrably untrue. What Trump said then, in effect, was women will have to work 20% harder than men to make the same money.
He simply doesn’t understand the problem refuses to accept there might be more context to it than he assumes. His attitude is a major oversimplification of a complex and ingrained issue: he believes that a dollar always represents the same value, and that all things are equal in all circumstances. They’re not. The pay gap exists because women are simply not valued as highly as men in the workplace despite evidence that women are at the very least equally valuable as employees. Trump has boasted in the past women in decision-making positions. That may well be true, but that does not equate to treating them equally.
Big Wet Mouth
One of Trump’s most valuable assets, and what’s so far prevented him from being exiled in disgrace, is the sheer volume of crazy that escapes his big, wet mouth. There’s so much of it that we’ve become over-saturated to the point of tuning it out. He’s like a lighthouse, except instead of light it’s a constant broadcast of randomly selected and increasingly offensive statements delivered at maximum volume. He’s a noisehouse.
Check out this simple comparison between the outgoing President’s views on feminism and Trump’s, with reference to their own daughters:
This isn’t just a stupid thing to say. It’s a reductionist attitude that simultaneously objectifies his own daughter and implies that she would qualify for him sexually. It’s disgusting not just for its incestuous overtones, but also because it demonstrates his feelings about all women: that we must all conform to his ideal of womanhood to have any social value. What kind of father could ever say such a morally corrupt thing?
This is all in the past. What can we learn from it to tell us what a Trump future might look like for women? Here’s 4 ways President Trump might influence American women’s lives.
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Reproductive Control
Trump is strongly pro-life, so it’s reasonable to assume there will be increasing pressure and sanctions on abortion clinics. But he’s not a conventional conservative, and he is clearly a man who likes sex. So his policies on your reproductive cycles might manifest in unusual ways, such as subsidies on contraceptives and family planning centers. He has already pledged to axe federal funding for Planned Parenthood if they don’t stop offering abortions. However, a more likely manifestation will be in sex education, where there will be pressure on schools to discuss the negative aspects of sex over the positive ones. Young adults will once again be scared of sex, rather than responsible with it.
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The Pay gap
We discussed it above, but it’s worth reiterating: Trump will not be working to address the gender pay gap. At all. He has pushed the issue back onto the very women it effects by simply telling them to work harder. We call bullshit.
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Everyday Sexism
In April 2016, Trump shared with his followers a tweet that said: “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” That is an unbelievably monstrous thing to say, and will normalize this kind of sexism in America when it’s said by the president.
Is this what we want for ourselves? Is this what every pro-Trump voter wants for us? It’s not acceptable. A country cannot be run on bluster and noise, sexual politics cannot be governed by someone so dangerously ignorant, and women cannot be regulated by such a sinister cartoon character like this leathery, rubber-faced manchild.
Rage against it.
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