Trump leans on Melania as he struggles to connect with female voters
The president has a long history of disparaging remarks about women, as Republicans seek to reverse losses among a key voting bloc
Donald Trump has a complicated relationship with women. He was found liable for sexually abusing writer and journalist E. Jean Carroll. He was also convicted on 34 felony counts related to an effort to conceal accounting records showing payments made to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence. The U.S. president has, moreover, a long history of making disparaging remarks about women. And with less than three weeks to go before the midterms, a Reuters/Ipsos poll shows that a majority of women voters back the Democrats, while only 32% support Republicans.
Perhaps for that reason, the Republican president turned on Monday to his wife, Melania Trump, with whom he has a distant relationship, in an attempt to connect with women at a time when most polls indicate that his party is on the verge of losing control of Congress at the midterm elections.
As Trump and the Republican Party face declining support among female voters ahead of the November 3 elections, the first lady unveiled on Monday a new government initiative on women’s health. The initiative, which comes without funding or detailed implementation plans, consists of five broad goals that Melania Trump outlined at Monday’s event in the White House gardens alongside her husband. While she spoke from a lectern, he remained seated at a table, at times appearing distracted.
Melania Trump began by listing the priorities of the “First Lady’s Five Pillars of Women’s Health Innovation.”
“Start by directing research funding towards finding cures for diseases that affect women in a unique way,” she said. “Second, use super intelligence [the new name Trump has adopted for artificial intelligence] to enhance our understanding of female biology and speed up medical discoveries — all to the benefit of women.”
“Third, accelerate the process of getting promising therapies from laboratories to female patients, while still keeping strict safety standards,” she continued. “Fourth, ensure that medical breakthroughs are accessible and affordable to women, regardless of their financial circumstances. And fifth, replace generations of silence with open conversation, education, and compassion,” she concluded before Trump signed the executive order for the initiative.
Weak support among women
The event in the White House gardens, held on a chilly autumn morning and attended by neither journalists nor the public, only a small group of relatives of senior administration officials, had a distinctly electoral feel. Republicans are trailing in the polls, and Donald Trump needs to regain ground if he is to avoid losing control of both chambers of Congress.
Women are six percentage points more likely than men to strongly disapprove of the president, and 61% say they would prefer Democrats to control Congress, according to an Ipsos poll published by The Washington Post and ABC News.
Behind the administration’s latest effort to win over women lies the image of sexism that has dogged the president. Nearly all the Cabinet members Trump has fired have been women. They include former attorney general Pam Bondi, former homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, former director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and former labor secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer.
Last week, Trump also fired press secretary Katie Zacharia in a humiliating episode, after the 42-year-old lawyer had spent just five days in the job.
He has also begun proceedings against Lisa Cook, a governor at the Federal Reserve. And although Trump tried to remove Jerome Powell as Fed chair, he has never gone as far as he has with Cook, whom he has summoned to the White House for a hearing ahead of her dismissal.
Trump is well known for his combative relationship with the media, but he has often been particularly aggressive toward female reporters. He has insulted Kaitlan Collins, CNN’s star White House correspondent. Last November, he belittled another journalist, this time from Bloomberg News. When she asked him about his relationship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the president snapped aboard Air Force One en route to Mar-a-Lago: “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.” He has also lashed out at other journalists from ABC News and NBC News. With men, he is generally more restrained.
Many women have not forgotten the comments Trump made during his first presidential campaign in 2016, when he was still an unlikely candidate running against Hillary Clinton. At the time, a recording surfaced of a conversation between Trump and television host Billy Bush before the filming of Access Hollywood. In the tape, Trump can be heard boasting about trying to kiss and grope women without their consent. He also says: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” including “grab them by the pussy.” Trump later apologized, but he did not stop publicly humiliating some women.
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