Donald Trump is a well-documented liar. From crowd sizes and the outcome of the 2020 presidential election to the estimated 30,573 false or misleading claims the former president told while in office, trying to convince the American public that he has a plan to help them is Trump’s political bread and butter.
His falsehoods have been dangerous, inciting riots, bomb threats and foiled kidnapping plots. Others have felt more like performance art, like Trump’s comments about the alleged increase in the number of toilet flushes or assertion that windmills cause cancer.
Yet somehow, none of those lies and absurd statements have been as outlandish as Trump’s latest attempt to gaslight American women.
On Monday, at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Trump spoke directly to them, claiming that if elected president he will be their “protector:”
“You will no longer be in danger. … You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector.”
The man accused of sexual misconduct by at least 26 women and found liable for sexual abuse in a court of law went on to claim that if he is elected president, women “will no longer have anxiety from all the problems our country has today.” (Trump has denied all such claims of sexual misconduct.)
“You will be protected, and I will be your protector,” he reiterated. “Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion — that’s all they talk about, abortion — because we have done something nobody else could have done.”
This pronounced if perhaps ill-advised attempt to appeal to women is intentional. A recent 19th News/SurveyMonkey poll suggests female voters are the reason Vice President Kamala Harris holds a slight 3-point lead over Trump nationwide.
“I always thought that women liked me,” Trump told the Pennsylvania crowd. “I never thought I had a problem, but the fake news keeps saying women don’t like me. I don’t believe it.” (The lady doth protest too much, methinks.)
Another New York Times/Siena College poll conducted in August found that a growing number of voters in swing states consider abortion to be their key voting issue in November. Since June 2022, when Roe was overturned, abortion has been on the ballot in seven states — and people have voted to protect abortion access every single time.
Of course, as is often the case, Trump’s recent comments were also rooted in some truth. For example, Trump claimed that “women are less healthy” than they were four years ago. And in a post-Roe world, that is in some ways true. An estimated 25 million women live in a state without access to abortion care, thanks to our would-be “protector,” leaving women to bleed out in hospital parking lots, slip into comas due to preventable infections, and in the cases of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, die, all as a direct result of their states’ near-total abortion bans.
Trump claimed that women are “more stressed and depressed and unhappy, and are less optimistic and confident about their future than they were four years ago.” Trump claimed that women are “more stressed and depressed and unhappy, and are less optimistic and confident about their future than they were four years ago.” There is also some truth there. While Trump was busy pontificating on the effectiveness of injecting disinfectant to “clean the lungs” during the onset of the pandemic, women were experiencing an increase in depression, anxiety and burnout as they tried to work from home while facilitating virtual learning for their children. Over 170,000 of us have endured the stress of traveling out-of-state for abortion care. An estimated 5.6 million of us are living in a county with limited or no access to prenatal care. Many of us are choosing to travel significant distances so we can safely give birth in a state that will not force a physician to deny us a life-saving abortion if we experience a devastating pregnancy complication, trying to navigate a world where we have less reproductive rights than our mothers. So yes, many women are scared and tired and worried about their futures — at least in part because of Donald Trump, his party and their wildly unpopular policies. And while Trump is seemingly hellbent on trying to cast a spell over women voters, conjuring up lie after lie about how his policies will somehow make us healthier, safer and more free, he is not as powerful as the women past generations of sexist patriarchs burned at the stake. It’s not surprising that a man who chose the president of the He-Man Woman-Haters club as a running mate would cling to the misogynistic belief that women are innately helpless. It’s not a shock that instead of listening to women voters when they say, in overwhelming numbers, that they want access to abortion care, Trump continues to misdiagnose both the symptoms and the cure to our post-Roe health crises. What is shocking is that in spite of all of this, some women — predominantly white women — will continue to believe they need a “protector” to save them. What they really need is the freedom to protect and save themselves.
Danielle Campoamor
Danielle Campoamor is a freelance journalist who has been published in Teen Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, CNN Opinion, Playboy, Newsweek, BuzzFeed and Marie Claire, among others. 
