A former White House aide to former president Donald Trump slammed his claim that he will be a protector of women as “creepy” and “very infantilizing.”
Trump on Monday issued a vague, eerie vow to the female half of the U.S. population that he would be their “protector.”
“I want to be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector,” Trump said at a rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, addressing female voters. “I hope you don’t make too much of it. I hope the fake news doesn’t go ‘oh, he wants to be their protector.’ Well, I am: as president, I have to be your protector.”
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Trump told women he would make them safe at the border, “on the sidewalks of your now-violent cities, in the suburbs where you are under migrant criminal siege… You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You’re not gonna be in danger.”
Alyssa Farah Griffin, Trump’s former White House communications director, told CNN Tuesday that her ex-boss’ off-the-wall rambling made her laugh out loud.
“I started laughing and thinking it was creepy, but thinking more about it, it’s very infantilizing,” she said in an appearance on Anderson Cooper 360°. “Talking about women as though we’re meek, we’re weak, we need a protector, we need a defender and we just sit around thinking about abortions all day just underscores a fundamental lack of understanding for why a demographic that represents half of the country is one that he struggles so profoundly with.”
At his rally, Trump appeared incapable of accepting that he’s getting shellacked in the polls by Vice President Kamala Harris among women voters. Harris has a 21 point lead among women nationally, according to an NBC News poll released Sunday. “I always thought women liked me, I never thought I had a problem, but the fake news keeps saying women don't like me, I don't believe it,” he told the crowd.
Farah Griffin said Trump and his GOP running mate JD Vance, whose own weird comments about women have left the Republican ticket repeatedly on the defensive, have fallen flat on the campaign trail with outreach to women.
“I think Donald Trump, if he loses this election, is going to look back and think that one of the worst decisions he made was not having a female on the ticket who actually knows how to speak to living, breathing, normal women about issues that matter to them,” she said.
Farah Griffin also addressed Trump’s weird claim at the rally that, under him, “women will be happy, healthy, confident and free” and no longer “thinking about abortion.”
“Reproductive rights do matter,” she said. “Access to IVF, to the whole suite of care that women care about, whether it be abortion or so on. But economics and national security are also women’s issues and the way he is talking about them is not the way to sway voters in the middle.”
