Donald Trump has a habit of talking about women as objects that he's just certain is appealing to them, even when he's trying to flatter them. It's perhaps most obvious when he's trash talking women, which, truth be told, really brings him a thrill.
"AOC, that’s a real beauty, isn’t it?” Trump said during an appearance in Ohio last week. It was a twofer, using both 'that' and 'it' as pronouns to refer to a woman—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, in that case.
But objectification is clearly Trump's highest form of flattery too. Though his initial appeal to "The Suburban Housewives of America" last month drew attention for its distinctly anachronistic Leave It to Beaver flare, Trump really upped the ante Wednesday.
"The 'suburban housewife' will be voting for me," he tweeted in transparent desperation the morning after Joe Biden electrified the election by naming California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate. It wasn't just "the housewives"—plural—anymore. They had been reduced down to one lump sum of sameness—"the suburban housewife."
In some ways, it was more apt than Trump knows. As it happens, Trump’s turn of phrase of is microtargeting a slice of the electorate that amounts to almost no one in modern times, as David Jarman pointed out in his breakdown of the math.
But that's not how Trump meant it. He thinks he's targeting a big slice of the electorate that are all basically the same because they’re women—who as we all know have virtually no meaning or value until men define them. But the good news for “the suburban housewife” is that Trump provided clear marching orders for her in case she is overwhelmed and disoriented and doesn’t know what to do, because woman.
Naturally, Trump sprinkled a little racism on top of that Wednesday morning tweet. "They want safety & are thrilled that I ended the long running program where low income housing would invade their neighborhood," he wrote. In other words: Don’t worry, Trump won’t let people of color invade like Biden would. The 1930s are calling, and they want their housing policy back.
But guess what? No one's picking up what Trump's laying down.
As a white suburban mom from East Grand Rapids, Michigan, told MSNBC last week, Trump's completely out of touch with her reality. "We aren't suburban moms, we aren't 1950s housewives anymore," said Katey Morse, who voted for Trump in 2016 and can't wait to vote against him this November. Morse specifically took issue with the racist scare tactics of Trump's "law and order" message, calling the idea that suburban communities would suddenly be overrun with criminals "ludicrous."
Suburban flight from the GOP, particularly among women, has also played out in the polling, as I noted in my column last week. Not only are "suburbs" much more diverse than Trump understands (about 68% white, 14% Hispanic and 11% Black, according to a Pew Research Center study from 2018), but this cycle's polling suggests white college-educated voters have continued the Republican-to-Democratic party realignment that delivered huge victories for Democrats in 2018.
So let Trump keep talking to “the suburban housewife” he thinks he’s wooing because, like almost everything, she’s only a figment of his imagination.