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Summary
Donald Trump has contested as the United States President thrice. The only time he won was when he contested against women. As a sitting president, he lost against Joe Biden. However, he won against Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris while out of office.
About 50 years ago, American women were not allowed to vote or contest presidential elections. A lot has changed since the women in the United States fought for their right to vote. However, male privilege remained. The recent #USAElection2024 exemplifies this male privilege. For example, the only time Donald Trump lost an election was against a male opponent.
In 2015, towards the end of Barack Obama’s first administration, Donald Trump emerged as a fierce critic of Obama’s administration. He questioned the obvious and alleged the impossible, including that Obama was not born in America. Not many took him seriously.
However, as the 2016 campaign trail began, the Democrats chose Hillary Clinton, a woman of extraordinary accomplishments, style, dignity, and outspokenness. In ordinary circumstances, Hillary Clinton would be a formidable opponent who could defeat any political opponent, regardless of their credentials. She was a former First Lady and Secretary of State during Barack Obama’s tenure and a New York senator for eight years.
But she was a woman. Transfer her records to a male, realistically a white male contestant, and imagine Hillary Clinton losing to Donald Trump, who, until that point, had no political experience. Could you imagine it? In fact, Trump’s career as a TV Reality ‘star,’ though he was a billionaire who made lots of money by evading taxes, was mildly successful.
But Trump will leverage the accumulated years of women being regarded as second citizens – one that’s created grains of inextinguishable sentiments that cry ‘women are below men’ – and campaign vigorously on that bias to gain votes from men, particularly white men.
Donald Trump, for want of a more befitting word, speaks, in both words and action, to male ego – that sentiment that made some parents ask their sons ‘why did you let a girl take the first position.’
In many ways, it’s subtle – name-calling, either ‘crooked’ for Hillary or ‘bitch’ or ‘demonic Jezebel’ for Harris. At other times, he invokes that unspeakable sentiment loudly to portray himself as a better candidate by virtue of being a ‘dominant male.”
In 2015, during an interview with Rolling Stone, Donald Trump discredited the credibility of his key rival in the primary election, Carly Fiorina, for nothing other than being a woman.
“Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president? I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not supposed to say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?”
His belittling of women goes deeper, vocally echoing his belief that women exist for men’s pleasure.
“If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband, what makes her think she can satisfy America #MakeAmericaGreatAgain,” Trump tweeted in April 2015. He later deleted the post.
However, since then, he has made more derogatory comments about women.
In an unreleased recording made by “Access Hollywood,” later published by Washington Post and NBC News in October 2016, he said:
“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” He adds seconds later: “Grab them by the p—-. You can do anything.”
Here are more of his comments that degrade women:
- “A person who’s flat-chested is very hard to be a 10, OK?” – 2005
- “It doesn’t really matter what (the media) write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” – 1999
- “I saw a woman who was totally beautiful. She was angry that so many men were calling her. ‘How dare they call me! It’s terrible! They’re all looking at my breasts.’ So she had a major breast reduction. The good news: Nobody calls her anymore — nobody even looks — and not only that, it was a terrible job.” (2008)
He was totally unhinged during his presidential contest with Hillary, making derogatory comments and evoking admiration from men who felt threatened by a woman’s presidency.
Unsurprisingly, he won, thanks in part to the men’s vote.
Although Hillary won the popular vote by nearly 3 million, exit polls showed that the former Reality TV star won 52% of men’s votes, particularly those who were 45 years old and older.
In the 2020 presidential election, he tried for the White House again, contesting against a white man, Joe Biden. This time, he lost in both popular and electoral votes. However, four years after Americans voted him out of the White House when he contested against a woman, Kamala Harris, he won again!
His campaign strategy was similar to the one he used in 2016. He echoed familiar biases against women, repeatedly calling Kamala Harris, the Vice President, a former US prosecutor, and Senator, a bitch– a sexist slur often used to describe defiant women.
According to Donald Trump, because Harris is a woman, he believes she’d be “like a play toy” to world leaders.
“She’ll be so easy for them. … They look at her and say, ‘We can’t believe we got so lucky.’ They’re going to walk all over her.”
He added, “I don’t want to say why, but a lot of people understand it.”
Trump further uses words like nasty, crazy, and disrespectful, terms dominant men often use to describe women who challenge their male ego to describe Kamala Harris. He even asked if Kamala was truly a Black woman.
Unsurprisingly, Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance, also shares similar sentiments. Vance referred to childless women politicians as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
The duo propelled gender hate across their campaign trail and won America’s votes. On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump will be sworn in as America’s 47th President, but the failure of US citizens to elect its first female president might have set equality fights back decades.
Just as recently as 64 years ago, no country had a female President or Prime Minister until Sirimavo Bandaranaike became Prime Minister of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1960 after her husband’s assassination. Much has changed since.
By 1990, only 16 countries had been led by women. Change accelerated, and by 2024, 175 women have led as heads of state or government across 87 countries.
However, most women leaders are in parliamentary systems and are not directly elected.
According to UN Women Adviser Julie Ballington, only Honduras and Mexico have elected women heads of state in presidential systems since 2020. Seven women achieved this in semi-presidential systems, where power is shared. In parliamentary and semi-presidential systems combined, 27 women have become heads of government. This shows barriers rooted in bias and stereotypes that women face in political systems.
Editor’s note: This story was first published by Neusroom.
