President Donald Trump is known to long for the 1950s—when women were expected to be subservient and quiet and presidents could just deport people en masse. Now, he’s plucked a campaign message straight from his favorite era by telling “suburban housewives” he’ll protect them from an entirely imaginary “invasion” of poor people led by Sen. Cory Booker, the sole Black male Democrat in the Senate. In a tweet sent the morning after Joe Biden confirmed Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate, making her the first Black woman to be picked for the job, Trump wrote: “The ‘suburban housewife’ will be voting for me. They want safety & are thrilled that I ended the long running program where low income housing would invade their neighborhood. Biden would reinstall it, in a bigger form, with Corey Booker in charge!” It’s not clear what Trump is basing his assertion on—a recent polling average showed that women favor Biden over Trump by 23 percentage points. The president recently rescinded an Obama-era rule that he falsely claimed forced the construction of low-income housing in suburban areas.
