America’s fate is in the hands of its women 

Women play a big part in Donald Trump’s life. And he plays an outsize part in theirs. It’s a complicated, occasionally abusive, codependent relationship. Such is the power of this connection that it’s entirely possible that the women of America could tip his second bid for the White House either way. 

Trump will almost certainly face Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman of colour to run for the presidency. She looks like coasting to the Democratic nomination. The contest between (another) strong, spirited woman and a sexist male pushing 80, in a brittle, harshly polarised America, feels, somehow, fated.

Harris’s must galvanise voters that Hilary Clinton failed to win over in 2016, when she lost to Trump, in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania. She needs a better, sharper story than Clinton, who had baggage and took too much for granted. Women and their endangered rights could be Harris’s pathway to victory. 

Trump’s character, his age, his incoherent ramblings, his criminal convictions, are an obvious target. The contest is no longer between two very old men who should be enjoying their golden years on the fairway. But the meat and potatoes of her campaign must lie in the burning issue of women’s rights and abortion, a word President Joe Biden appears to have had difficulty with. 

Harris will inherit a sizeable war chest and donors are already loosening the purse strings. Expect her to deploy this money with the spare, deadly accuracy of a former top prosecutor. 

Nearly 89 million women in America are registered to vote. They make up the largest, and if properly marshalled, potentially the most influential demographic in the US. A sizeable majority (between 63% and 80% depending on the poll) are already furious at Trump’s anti-abortion policies. 

Which is hardly surprising. They will not have forgotten Trump calling for “some kind of punishment” for women having abortions, while promising to overturn  Roe vs Wade , which guaranteed women’s abortion rights, duly paving the way for this to happen in 2022. 

His running mate JD Vance, transformed from darling of the Left for his empathetic portrayal of the Appalachian poor in Hillbilly Elegy to raving culture warrior, wants a nationwide ban on abortion. He drove the wedge deeper this week by suggesting that childless adults are un-American because they don’t have children – they don’t “have a stake in our country”.  He bracketed Harris with Pete Buttigieg, the first married, openly gay US Cabinet member, and called women like her miserable “childless cat ladies”. That will go down well with the 80-plus million Americans who have never married, roughly half of whom are women. 

Trump is the archetypal alpha male with alpha male policies. The silverback who will bring peace in Ukraine in a day. The tough guy who flaunted his masculinity at the Republican convention like a rutting six-point Royal stag to the sound of James Brown’s “It’s a man’s world”. 

He has boasted that he can “do anything” with women. He has paid hush-money to a porn star with whom he had sex. Numerous women have alleged that he sexually abused them. 

Yet women, the right sort of women, are an indispensable part of his brand. At the Convention the glamorous women who form part of his court – his (mostly absent) wife Melania, his daughter Ivanka, his granddaughter Kai — lined up obediently on stage, all lip-gloss and perfect hair, like a Miss America pageant. 

After the tawdry events of the Stormy Daniels trial and his conviction for falsifying business records, this was the new Trump, the resurrected Trump, the sainted family man, spared by God from an assassin’s bullet, heading a revivalist movement to Make America Great Again. 

Trump is loathed and loved by women in equal measure. To his fans, bafflingly, he is the guardian of traditional family values. They dismiss his brazen, vulgar misogyny as mere locker talk. He gaslights them, like Sinclair Lewis’s fictional preacher Elmer Gantry, who sold religion to small-town America while manipulating local, state and national politicians. 

Women who see through Trump’s bluster despise him, not just for his predatory behaviour, but also for rolling back women’s rights during his first Presidency in health, employment and economic security. Trump1 came with a heavy price tag for women. Trump2 would be far worse.

America defies easy categorisation. But the growth of the far-Right is unmistakable. Like its soulmates in Europe, but even more so, it stands, by and large, on two pillars: the threat posed by immigrants and that posed by social change. In this predominantly white, nationalist, staunchly conservative world view, the pivotal (but supportive/subordinate) role of women is key to protecting their American way of life.

Trump’s strongly faith-based MAGA movement advocates “biblical womanhood”: women and men are equal in creation but distinct in function. Men serve as leaders of church and home; women are to support and submit to them. 

One American woman who, we can confidently predict, won’t be voting for the Republican ticket is the teacher Nicole Miller . She was rushed to hospital in Boise, Idaho, after waking up with heavy bleeding in her 20th week of pregnancy. By the afternoon, she was leaking amniotic fluid as well as blood.  The duty doctor told her that she had to leave the state to be treated.

Idaho is one of 14 states where terminating a pregnancy is now banned after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. Doctors who perform abortions face jail time. Ms Miller’s doctor said he couldn’t risk his career. She was flown on a small plane to Salt Lake City, Utah, where an abortion saved her life. 

Twenty-one states now ban abortion or restrict the procedure to between 6 and 18 weeks of gestation. Some, like Arizona, won’t even allow abortions for cases of rape or incest, driving women who can afford it out of state and those who can’t to unregistered backstreet practitioners or worse.

Overturning Roe v Wade could prove as consequential for women as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has been for black Americans. This is because, like the Civil Rights Act, it’s a decision that strikes at the heart of American women’s identity and their right to fair and equal treatment. 

Over recent years women have become integral to the outcome of elections in the US.  More of them vote than men and they do so more often than men. They are not of course homogenous. And Trump has taken great care to soften, even to disavow, the harsher edges of the far-Right’s gender policies. 

To a liberal, voting for Harris, especially if you’re a woman, might seem like a no-brainer. But many – perhaps enough – could vote for Trump: the evangelicals; those who’ve climbed the corporate ladder and pulled it up behind them; conservative Latino voters who are practising Catholics; or those who just like the idea of being looked after by a strong man. No shame in that. 

Americans faces a choice in November than could scarcely be starker. The choice is even starker for women. In 2020 more than 82 million women turned out, playing a crucial role in electing Biden and defeating Trump. Harris must hope they will do the same for her in 2024. 

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