Member Newsletter
“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared … You will be protected, and I will be your protector … Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free …You will no longer be thinking about abortion.” You’ve probably heard some combination of these lines and others more than once by now. Donald Trump first posted them on social media sites and then added them to the scripted part of his speech at a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday night. They’ve been greeted with a mix of consternation and mockery. I don’t want to speak for women. But I think it’s safe to say that any woman who has some meaningful investment in abortion rights and reproductive rights generally would find these words some mix of chilling, infuriating, bizarre and absurd. As I read them they essentially say, Only I can be and I will be your total protector. In fact, you will be so totally protected that you will cease to be who you are. Especially coming from a man known to be a serial predator and court-adjudicated rapist — “rape” being the ordinary word, according to the judge in the case, for the acts Trump was found to have committed — these words seem to describe less being protected than engulfed.
Perhaps most simply the words are, as a number of observers have put it, creepy.
So who is the audience exactly? Who was he talking to? WTF, as one might say? I’m not sure I can answer that question precisely. In a way, the question brings us back to that endless one of whether Trump’s actions are best understood as strategy or acting out. We can’t forget that Trump’s campaign brain trust, the strategists and speech-writers, are made up of people who are, in Tim Walz’s phrasing, just weird. It’s guys like Stephen Miller, incel-adjacent misogynists who’ve built a whole political micro-culture around grievance, provocation and rage. But there’s part of this that is much more familiar and really essential to Trump’s whole political program and style.
We’ve spoken a lot over recent years about the concept and practice of words as aggression. We’ve talked about it as essential to Big Lie talk. Do people really believe this stuff? When Trump says up is down and all his supporters dutifully chime in insisting that yes, up is definitely down, what’s going on here exactly? Again, do people really believe this stuff? Are we really saying the thing we all saw happen didn’t happen? The confusion or befuddlement comes, I think, from being a bit over-literal about what words and willed belief are really about. You believe certain things or say you believe certain things not as a matter of considered analysis of the relevant facts but as an act of assertion and aggression. In this mode the difference between what you believe and what you say you believe becomes muddled or secondary, perhaps meaningless at some level. Because this is speech or belief as aggression, self-assertion, at some level even identity. You’ll see that this feature of belief or willed-belief as assertion and aggression is a ubiquitous through-line on the right today.
At some basic level, modern American political culture is structured around differing models of the world built around empiricism, structured frameworks of rules and limits on the one hand and the centrality of power and dominance on the other. What we’re describing here is that same bifurcation played out in the medium of speech and argument. This is what makes so much of the conversations about press failures, fact checking, media bubbles, and so forth if not wrong then somehow besides the point.
These abortion comments are part of that same thing. When someone keeps saying the same thing over and over to you after you’ve disagreed with it or rejected it, that’s not persuasion or argument. It’s an assertion of power, an effort to overwhelm, an expression of dominance. It’s hardly surprising from someone with a decades-long record of predatory sexual behavior, including multiple rape accusations. It’s all part of the same mindset and behavior. Really they’re one and the same. It’s why our politics are so gendered and why gendered polarization is so deeply embedded in our politics today.