Cleveland
Among the 24 women supporting Donald Trump on the convention stage this week, 3 are also named Trump. The rest of the pack has included a pro golfer, a soap opera actress and the founder of a scammy mail-order dietary supplement company. Judging by the polls, Trump is as hard a sell to the fairer sex at large as he is to high-profile convention speakers within it.
The nominee’s unfavorability is significantly higher among women than men. Gallup has it at 70 percent. There are wives all over the country repulsed by their husbands’ preferred candidate’s cretinous character. So what are women for Trump doing to change this?
Hours before her planned convention speech Thursday, Tennessee congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, headlining the Atlantic‘s “Pathways to Power” luncheon for women in politics, said Cruz and anti-Trump conservatives are breaking up the Republican family, and “they do themselves a disservice.” It’s women, she said, who “probably have a stronger attachment to the word unity,” because women keep their families together. Republican women ought to use their mothering skills to keep the party together, in other words. When close to half of all married couples end up divorced—their children, if they have them, better off with two homes at peace instead of one always at war—the logic of this “ought to” is, like the candidate, a tough sell. (Later, Blackburn said, “Leadership is an action word. It is a verb, it is a verb.” Actually, it’s not.)
“We will have true equality when there are as many stupid women in Congress as there are stupid men,” said Barbara Wallace, a scholar of women in American government. By then the luncheon had taken a nonpartisan tack. She attributed the line to Eleanor Roosevelt, although it seems more like something Eleanor’s sassy socialite cousin Alice Roosevelt Longworth would have said. “He looks as though he’s been weaned on a pickle,” Longworth said of Calvin Coolidge, according to the Washington Post, just days before his reelection.
One hardly has to wonder what sort of words Eleanor Roosevelt would have for Donald Trump. But, particularly here in her adoptive home of Ohio, it’s a sweet escape to imagine what Alice Longworth might say about the women picking up after him.
