Suddenly, Donald Trump looks enlightened about women.
Sure, he’s in a 1959 time warp, like some spray-tanned, comb-over swinger in a Vegas lounge, talking about skirts and broads.
Sure, he filled the Supreme Court with religious zealots ending women’s rights.
Sure, he has been held liable for sexual abuse, accused of groping and caught talking about his right to grab women. He cheated on his first wife with the woman who became his second wife and then had flings when he was married to his third wife. He betrayed Melania with a porn star while she was home nursing their son and humiliated her again when the Stormy Daniels case went to trial. (See: Why Melania did not give a convention speech.)
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Sure, his convention beatification was a dated homage to machismo, with Hulk Hogan tearing his shirt off and the UFC’s Dana White introducing Trump as a fighter.
And yet, somehow, Trump managed to choose a vice-presidential nominee whose views on women are even more draconian and mean-spirited than his own.
JD Vance, he of many names, is off to a thudding start. He went on Megyn Kelly’s podcast on Friday for cleanup on Aisle Feline. She sympathetically asked him about his 2021 rant to Tucker Carlson that top Democrats — Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — were “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too”.
[ JD Vance is part of a new generation of aristopopulists seeking regime changeOpens in new window ]
Vance explained to Kelly: “Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats.”
Ha. Ha. Ha. He’s the Republican Party’s biggest wit since that laugh riot Sarah Palin.
He doubled down on the substance of his earlier argument, that only women who are in a traditional marriage, using their uteruses in a way JD Vance deems proper, can have “a direct stake” in the United States.
I grew up in a family brimming with military uniforms, police uniforms, altar boy outfits, Girl Scout uniforms, Catholic school uniforms and presidential medals for bravery. We were religious and patriotic and unbelievably proud to be Americans.
And now comes this ridiculous faux-billy, tailoring his beliefs to match his ambition, telling me I have no stake in the United States?
Unless women are fulfilling their duties as breeders and helpmates, they’re not fully Americans? It’s an un-American stance that’s beneath contempt.
Phony. Vance has a lovely wife, Usha, the daughter of Indian immigrants, a star of Yale Law School and a litigator at a top law firm. She clerked for chief justice John Roberts at the Supreme Court and Brett Kavanaugh on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
Their marriage is clearly a modern one. He donned an Indian robe for one of their wedding ceremonies, which irked white supremacists supportive of Trump.
Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, said: “Do you really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”
Vance replied on Friday simply that he loves his wife. But on the campaign trail, he projects an archaic image nurtured by Heritage Foundation-Project 2025 fanatics and Vance’s fellow superconservative Catholics. You get the impression that they would love nothing more than to dispatch women back to the kitchen and bedroom, turning them into what Hilary Mantel called “breeding stock, collections of organs”.
Vance also said in a speech three years ago that parents should “absolutely” get a bigger say in how a democracy functions and more voting power; in different remarks, he said that childless Americans should pay higher taxes. Turns out, JD is as undemocratic as his running mate.
In 2022 Vance said he wanted abortion to be illegal nationally, though now he has amended his position to be more in line with Trump’s, giving states the power to decide. (Until they’re in the Oval Office, cave to the Christian right and get a national ban.)
Vance was so adamant on the issue when he was running for Senate that he said there should be a federal “response” to block women from travelling to other states to get abortions. He was worried that George Soros would send a jumbo jet to pick up “disproportionately black women” and take them to California to “go have abortions”.
Vance wrote the foreword for the upcoming book by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 wants to put on a full-court press to ban abortion and products like mifepristone and wants to restrict access to Plan B. This is the same wing of the party, cultural reactionaries, that targeted IVF treatments.
And last month Vance voted against a Democratic bill to protect IVF.
Trump chose Vance to stir up cultural resentment in rural areas and small towns against elites and cosmopolitan types. Down with Carrie Bradshaw!
As a cat-loving, cosmopolitan type myself, I do not want Trump and Vance making intimate decisions for American women or judging us or disparaging us for our lives — all nine of them.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times