This column is being written early on Tuesday, hours before the US polls open, but I am “nauseously optimistic” about Kamala Harris, as Democrat campaigners like to put it.
The grounds for optimism have been there for a while. First the disproportionate numbers of women who registered to vote after the overturning of Roe v Wade – remember the midterm elections that exceeded Democratic hopes? Then the second influx after Harris’s declared candidacy, followed by the Trump campaign’s steady slide into darkness, as they gave up on the pretence of respecting women and focused on exciting the bile of young men.
On Sunday, a hunched, bored, low-energy Trump told a rally that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House at the end of his term – a hell of a confession from a man who has pleaded not guilty to charges of undertaking a “criminal scheme” to overturn the 2020 election results.
Whatever the outcome of the election, Trump’s legacy will take a generation to unravel. He will be described as unique. He isn’t. He is hardly the first world leader whose ego, popularity and demagoguery fattened in concert with a growing reputation for misogyny, money-grubbing, influence-buying and warping every kind of norm.
Here, in the enlightened EU, we had our own proto-Trump, Silvio Berlusconi, who 30 years ago began the first of four terms as prime minister of Italy though permanently entrenched in sleaze and sex scandals. He was a showman with a genius for victimisation, who demonised prosecutors as the judicial wing of his political opponents and used appeals and statutes of limitations to avoid punishment in multiple criminal trials over allegations of false accounting, bribing judges and illegal political party financing.
Objectors to the sexist “jokes”, conflicts of interest and vulgarity were lumped together as self-righteous leftie bores or humourless, freedom-hating communists, while a law passed by his own government granted him immunity from prosecution while he remained in office, in effect suspending his corruption trials. When he was convicted of tax fraud in 2012 and finally lost his parliamentary immunity, his four-year jail sentence was reduced to 10 months of community service (performed in a home for seniors). More importantly, he was disbarred from public office for six years. Anyone who hadn’t kept up might reasonably have assumed that that was the end of him and also a vision of Trump’s near future.
Nope. By the time he died in 2023 at the age of 86, with tangerine tan and pitch black hair, he was back in the Senate and his Forza Italia party was in coalition with Giorgia Meloni, who was not just the country’s first woman prime minister, but also the first with a past in a neo-fascist organisation. This, then, was Berlusconi’s legacy. Trump’s is a matter for the future.
On November 6th, 2016, when Trump’s election success was evident, my colleague Róisín Ingle called an emergency session of The Irish Times Women’s Podcast, an idea that seemed novel at the time. But the shock of those sitting around that table – which included several visiting Americans – still lingers. Our forebodings would materialise in full. Trump’s hateful, violent rhetoric against women wasn’t merely ramped up, it took human form in the Supreme Court stacked by his three choices.
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They will be remembered for seeding extreme cruelty and certain tragedy for women in their overturning of Roe v Wade and later for sensationally granting Trump (and other presidents) “absolute immunity” for some official acts conducted while president, effectively ensuring that the attempted coup case would not proceed before this election. Most of those judges will still be in place in our grandchildren’s adulthood.
Meanwhile, some of the commentators who chin-scratched about Kamala Harris’s laugh, lack of substance and choice of rallies over set-piece interviews in the early days have had to move on, reluctantly.
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Some still affect to find something suspiciously unknowable about a woman whose health and tax records are publicly available (unlike her opponent’s); a woman who has had her achievements, flaws and failures dissected to infinity; whose parentage, romantic relationships, marriage, parental status, relationship with stepchildren has been scrutinised and judged; a woman who indisputably won the single televised presidential debate (her opponent refused to do a second); who sat for interviews with Fox News and 60 Minutes among many; who delivered countless speeches; jousted with hecklers at hundreds of rallies while retaining her dignity, humour and optimism, and did it all in about a fifth of the time allocated to such campaigns – and in heels.
A woman at first accused of not revealing enough of herself was then told she was better off shutting her mouth. Does anyone detect a pattern, something of the old “Oh I just can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something I just don’t like about her” vibe?
Of all the campaign ads, the one that began with Post-its in women’s public toilets and was then boosted by a Julia Roberts video will stick in the mind. It assured women married to Trump-loving men that they could vote any way they wanted in the secrecy of the polling booth. What might have sounded infuriatingly patronising turned into a lively discussion that revealed much about MAGA luminaries, exemplified by Fox News anchor Jesse Watters – who cheated on his first wife to marry his 25-year-old employee Emma DiGiovine – yelling that, were DiGiovine to vote for Harris, it “violates the sanctity of our marriage ... the same thing as an affair ... repulsive”.
Last weekend’s marmalade-dropping Iowa poll run by Ann Selzer and showing Harris ahead was due almost entirely to women over 65 – yes, those derided boomers – favouring her by a more than 2-to-1 margin. As I write, there is a sense that something has stirred. The glass is shattering. Come what may, it’s a good day for a salute to the courage and persistence of women such as Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and the millions of other women on whose shoulders Kamala Harris’s extraordinary campaign was built.