Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.
Trump is the least popular president in polling history; for most of his tenure, more than 50 percent of Americans have said they disapprove of the job he’s doing.
But it turns out Trump is especially unpopular among American women. According to a recent NPR/Marist poll, women disapprove of the job Trump is doing by a whopping 62 percent to 28 percent.
It’s not hard to see why.
Just for starters, Trump came into office haunted by more than a dozen credible allegations of sexual assault or harassment. So far, 19 women have come forward.
Trump was even caught on tape admitting to — and bragging about — committing routine acts of sexual assault against women.
If the Me Too movement had gotten off the ground before these revelations had come out, maybe the election would have gone differently. Then again, perhaps the outrage and injustice over an admitted serial predator being elected president is what helped Me Too get off the ground in the first place.
Either way, women were pissed about it — and they clearly haven’t forgotten.
Still, Trump being a predator also wasn’t enough for many women to withdraw their support. After all, a majority of white women voted for Trump, just as they have for almost every Republican nominee since the 1950s.
But that’s been changing, especially among white women who live in the suburbs.
Trump’s cruel policy of family separations — which included literally ripping infants from their mother’s breast and throwing toddlers in cages — sent his approval plummeting. (Approval ratings really shouldn’t be the most important factor when a U.S. president commits likely crimes against humanity, but that’s apparently where we are in the Trump era.)
The cruelty and callousness of Trump’s “zero tolerance” at the border was so brazen, so anti-family, and so inhumane, it became too much even for many women who had steadfastly supported Trump.
Meanwhile, Trump has also gone out of his way to support other accused sexual predators, like Roy Moore in Alabama.
And it’s been revealed that Trump paid hush money to two different women he had extra-marital affairs with. Trump isn’t even denying that he did this. The absolute best-case scenario for Trump is that those payments didn’t constitute a felony conspiracy to commit campaign finance violations with his former fixer, Michael Cohen, and that they “merely” showed him to be a liar and a philanderer.
And then there’s Brett Kavanaugh — an extremist Supreme Court nominee by any measure, whom Trump is still standing by even though Kavanaugh has been publicly accused of a violent attempted rape.
“If Republicans set out to smear a sexual assault survivor to steamroll Kavanaugh through, it will only further repel suburban women voters, who are already powering the November wave,” Brian Fallon, executive director of Demand Justice, a group that opposes the Kavanaugh nomination, told the Washington Post.
Republicans are also worried about how supporting Kavanaugh will look for Trump and the GOP.
Republican lobbyist and strategist Rick Hohlt told the Post, “With more women running for public office than ever before and the majority of them being Democrats, we could have a 1992 situation” — as in, another “Year of the Woman” where an unprecedented number of women get elected to office amid a backlash against sexism.
And if 2018 is indeed another Year of the Woman, Trump will only have himself to blame — not to mention the many Republicans who both enabled and perpetuated his misogyny.
Published with permission of The American Independent.