Other countries overcame this stereotypical thinking about female leaders, but there is still a thick strain of it in America.
Harris is running way behind where Joe Biden was in 2020 with both white and black men. It would sting if black men sunk the chance for the first black woman to become president, just as enough white women spurned Clinton in 2016 to tip the balance.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at a rally on Sunday.Credit: AP
It is sad that women had to be stripped of their basic right to control their bodies – and to be threatened with the loss of lifesaving medical care – for Kamala to even have a chance to get the votes of enough women to offset losing the votes of so many men.
Trump is running a hypermasculine campaign – with Chief Bro Elon Musk bizarrely bouncing up and down – that is breathtakingly offensive to women. Trump is exploiting the crisis among Gen Z men, a crisis driven by loneliness, COVID isolation, economic insecurity, a lack of purpose and a feeling that the modern world seems more accommodating to young women.
Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist, told Vanity Fair that straight, white, Christian males are tired of being painted as colonisers, noting, “They want to be part of a political movement that doesn’t hate them.”
Trump is a renowned predator and groper who has been found liable for sexual abuse. But he has the gall to cast Kamala as “retarded,” “lazy as hell” and a “bitch” and ask, “Does she drink? Is she on drugs?”
At a Trump rally in Georgia on Wednesday, Tucker Carlson gave a rant that became an instant classic of perversion.
In a shrill tone, he spun out a metaphor in which America is like a house where the children are misbehaving. The toddler is smearing feces on the wall; a 14-year-old is lighting a joint at the breakfast table.
“There has to be a point at which Dad comes home,” Carlson said ominously, to raucous applause. “Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home, and he’s pissed!”
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He’s most pissed at the 15-year-old daughter, who has flipped off her parents and stormed to her room. Playing the dad, Carlson intoned, “You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl. And you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.”
When Trump came out, some screamed, “Daddy’s home!” and, “Daddy Don!”
Somehow, Carlson was even creepier and more retrogressive than J.D. Vance, with his denunciations of “childless cat ladies” and his dissing of postmenopausal women.
Trump is phallocentric – always a sign of insecurity. At a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, he rhapsodised about Arnold Palmer’s anatomy.
“This is a guy that was all man,” Trump said, adding, “When he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s unbelievable.’”
Barack Obama punctured the MAGA macho myth at a rally with Harris on Thursday. Putting down people is not “real strength,” he said. Real strength is standing up for those who can’t stand up for themselves. “That’s what we should want in our daughters and our sons,” Obama said. “And that’s what I want to see in the president of the United States of America.”
Maureen Dowd is a columnist with The New York Times, where this article originally appeared.