The Protection Racket

 

 

By FINTAN O’TOOLE

The New York Review of Books

 

In October 2020, on the morning after Kamala Harris had debated then vice-president Mike Pence, Donald Trump would not say her name. Calling in to Fox Business from the White House, he referred to her as “this monster that was onstage with Mike Pence.” The choice of this term was not accidental—he repeated it for emphasis.

Even by Trump’s standards of vituperation, there is something strangely excessive about this verbal assault on a woman who posed little direct threat to his reelection. Typically, his insults are literal takedowns. The target is belittled (Mini Mike Bloomberg, Little Marco Rubio, Little Rocket Man Kim Jong-un) or rendered weak and infantile (Low Energy Jeb Bush, Low IQ Maxine Waters, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer). Even Trump’s opponent in that election, Joe Biden, was diminished to Sleepy Joe—Sleepy, of course, is also one of Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs.

Choosing to (as Shakespeare might have it) “be-monster” Harris meant going against this grain. Instead of cutting Harris down, he was talking her up, inflating her into a Medusa, a Scylla, a Grendel. And in the current campaign, he has returned to this magnification of her malevolence, making Harris a sourer of American lives. Trump increasingly conjoins the monster Harris with the monster alien immigrants who are, in the dark hallucination he wants to engender, streaming across the southern border to invade American homes and murder and rape their occupants. On September 29, at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, he told his followers that Harris “should be impeached and prosecuted for her actions. And these killers are stone-cold monsters and have so little heart. They have no heart.”

In a Truth Social post on September 27, based on a wild distortion of figures that in fact refer to a forty-year period (including Trump’s own years in office), he wrote that “Comrade Kamala Harris…allowed almost 14,000 MURDERERS to freely and openly roam our Country…. And people are dying every day because of her. SHE HAS GOT BLOOD ON HER HANDS!” For many of Trump’s biblically inclined followers, this surely evokes the Whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelation: “And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.”

Trump identifies Harris completely with her rampaging army of killers. In his telling she is them, their actions are hers, and together they create a monstrosity beyond his audience’s collective imagination: “These are rough, vicious, rougher than anything you can imagine.” Trump casts Harris in a horror movie that no moviemaker could ever put on screen: “If you wanted to do a movie, there’s no actor in Hollywood that could play the role. There’s nobody that could do it…. But it’s all because Kamala let these people in.” It seems unlikely that Trump has read Immanuel Kant, but here he is enacting Kant’s idea of the sublime as a mix of pleasure and displeasure “arising from the inadequacy of imagination.” He is both thrilling and terrifying his followers.

Trump fires at Harris the familiar missiles of sexist abuse: nasty, dumb, lying, crazy, “mentally disabled.” But there is something more visceral in his conjuring of a female fiend. It is dredged from the depths of a specifically political strain of misogyny: the horror of the woman ruler. It harks back to the sixteenth-century Scottish Presbyterian preacher John Knox and his The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women (1558), in which “regiment” means “rule” or “government”:

It is more than a monster in nature that a Woman shall reign and have empire above Man…. The Empire of a Woman is a thing repugnant to justice, and the destruction of every commonwealth where it is received.

In Women and Power (2017), the classicist Mary Beard reminds us that male Greek writers depicted females who assume authority as perverters of the natural order:

For the most part, they are portrayed as abusers rather than users of power. They take it illegitimately, in a way that leads to chaos, to the fracture of the state, to death and destruction. They are monstrous hybrids, who are not, in the Greek sense, women at all. And the unflinching logic of their stories is that they must be disempowered and put back in their place.

 

It is notable that Trump did not resort to this mythic level of misogyny in his presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016. He painted her as weak, crooked, and deceitful—all golden oldies of antiwoman rhetoric. But he did not seek to construe her as the embodiment of a hellish vision of lethal femininity. Why does Harris, first as a vice-presidential and then as a presidential candidate, summon from the depths of Trump’s psyche these terrifying tropes? It is partly that Trump has become ever more disinhibited as he has grown older and ever more inclined to turn up the dial on outrage and provocation. Partly too that his overall vision has become even more apocalyptic—the Whore of Babylon, if she is not stopped, heralds the end of the world, and Trump warns that if Harris is elected America is “finished.”

But there is another, less obvious factor: public attitudes about the effects of gender on life in America have undergone remarkably rapid changes in the Trump era. In 2017, the year Trump took office (and also the year of the Me Too cascade of revelations about rape and sexual harassment), just 35 percent of survey respondents agreed that “men have it easier in the US today.” Now 47 percent endorse the same proposition. Especially striking is that this alteration in perception is bipartisan. The rise in the recognition of male privilege is extremely pronounced among Democrats: from 49 to 68 percent. But it is proportionally even greater among Republicans—it doubled from 16 to 32 percent. It seems that significant numbers of Trump voters came to see America as more of a man’s world while their own man was dominating US politics.

Yet the paradox is that this greater acknowledgment that women live at a disadvantage to men has been matched by another, equally dramatic shift. In 2020, 51 percent of Americans said the word “feminist” described their views either “very well” or “somewhat well.” Today just 35 percent say the same. Among Republican men, the figure is just 10 percent. What has happened, then, is an increase in acceptance of the reality that there is structural discrimination against half the population, combined with a shying away from the ideology that seeks to do something about it. It is in such contradictory states of mind that dark myths have most appeal.

Why has self-identification with feminism shrunk so significantly in such a short time? Almost certainly because of the way Trump has managed to polarize everything—including the notion that women have a right to equality and to control their own bodies. He has done this, oddly enough, by making an implicit acceptance of at least some sexual violence by men against women into a wedge issue. This is not an effect he intended. Rather it has arisen from the revelation in 2016 of the tape in which Trump boasted that he could “grab [women] by the pussy” and from the verdict of a Manhattan jury in 2023 that Trump sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll in 1995 or 1996. That judgment amounted to a finding that Trump is a rapist: as Lewis A. Kaplan, the judge in the civil trial, explained, “The jury’s finding of sexual abuse…necessarily implies that it found that Mr. Trump forcibly penetrated her vagina.”

This is a different kind of unimaginable—not a twisted fantasy but a physical reality too raw and visceral for many Americans to want to hold in their heads. In one case by his own admission and in the other by the verdict of a jury of his peers, Trump has given Americans images of himself forcibly grabbing and penetrating women’s genitalia. There could be no starker expression of male power, of the violent possession and domination of the female body. But in order to continue to follow Trump and to vote for him, it is necessary to do at least one of two things. The first is to deny the truth, even when at least part of it comes from Trump’s own mouth: slightly more than half (52 percent) of Trump voters say they do not believe he committed sexual assault. The second is to embrace cognitive dissonance: 5 percent say they believe he is a sex offender (but intend to vote for him anyway), while 42 percent say they are “not sure.”

To close up that fissure, the figure of the sex-predator president must be obliterated by the figure of the monstrous woman. There has to be a female violence (BLOOD ON HER HANDS!) even more terrifying than mere male sexual aggression. It is not enough for Trump the rapist to be opposed by a woman who is devious and weak and stupid. He must be up against what Barbara Creed called, in the title of her groundbreaking 1993 book on horror movies, “the monstrous-feminine”: “what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject.” Hillary Clinton was bad (and Trump did call her “the devil”)—but Harris is evil. She must be not merely disdained but dreaded and reviled beyond the limits of the imagination. “No person,” as Trump put it on Truth Social on October 11, “who has inflicted the violence and terror that Kamala Harris has inflicted on this community can EVER be allowed to become POTUS!”

This is the most extreme example of Trump’s uncanny ability to turn the world upside down. Trump the rapist becomes the defender of women against the sexual violence unleashed by the monstrous-feminine: “You will be protected,” he told women in Pennsylvania on September 23, “and I will be your protector.” Trump has, from the beginning of his presidential campaign in June 2015, characterized Mexican migrants as sexual predators: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” But as the current campaign reaches its climax, he has made this claim more personal and intimate. He now routinely names a girl and two women murdered in the course of sexual assaults by undocumented immigrants: Jocelyn Nungaray, Laken Riley, and Rachel Morin. These vilely abused bodies are not peripheral to Trump’s campaign; they have become MAGA icons, quasi-religious female martyrs.

Democrats must understand that however grotesque this strategy may be, it is highly effective. It is a reminder of Trump’s boldness—instead of avoiding a subject (sexual predation) on which he ought to be vulnerable, he has absorbed it into his personal brand, not only as the savior of America but now specifically as the deliverer of women and girls. It gives women who might think twice about voting for a known rapist a way out: Harris, the mass rapist by proxy, is even worse. And it simultaneously endorses male self-pity. His rhetoric makes it possible to believe that “men have it easier” not because of the persistence of patriarchy but because all American women and girls are in imminent danger of being raped and murdered by dark-skinned strangers licensed by Harris. The violence perpetrated on American-born women by their own male compatriots is projected outward onto the evil woman who stands between Trump and his rightful place in power.

This message resonates with a deeper sense of male victimhood. As Trump transforms himself from predator to protector, his most ardent followers are men who transform the real privilege of their gender into the belief that it is they who suffer from a system rigged against masculinity. As the moral philosopher Kate Manne puts it in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2017), the structures of patriarchy

are often quite invisible to the people whose privileged social positions they serve to uphold and buttress. So dismantling them may feel not only like a comedown, but also an injustice, to the privileged. They will tend to feel flattened, rather than merely leveled, in the process.

Large majorities of male Trump voters agree with the propositions that “many women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist” (74 percent); “employers should not make special efforts to hire and promote qualified women” (70 percent); “when a man and woman get divorced, the court system will always treat the woman better” (77 percent); and “when women demand equality these days, they are actually seeking special favors” (62 percent). In a divided culture, all games are zero-sum—if women are gaining, men must be losing.

It has been more than a decade since the sociologist Michael Kimmel published his study Angry White Men, based on extensive interviews. As he puts it in the preface to the 2017 edition:

White men’s anger comes from the potent fusion of two sentiments—entitlement and a sense of victimization. The righteous indignation, the anti-Washington populism, is fueled by what I came to call “aggrieved entitlement”—that sense that those benefits to which you believed yourself entitled have been snatched away from you by unseen forces larger and more powerful.

Trump inflates Harris into the embodiment of these larger and more powerful forces—and “unseen” seems especially apt in the way it connects her to unfilmable and unimaginable horror. It helps, of course, that she is Black. Kimmel recalled appearing on a television talk show opposite three “angry white males” who felt they had been the victims of workplace discrimination:

The title of this particular show, no doubt to entice a potentially large audience, was “A Black Woman Stole My Job.” In my comments, I asked the men to consider just one word in the title of the show: the word my. What made them think the job was theirs? Why wasn’t the episode called “A Black Woman Got the Job” or “A Black Woman Got a Job”? Because these guys felt that those jobs were “theirs,” that they were entitled to them, and that when some “other” person—black, female—got the job, that person was really taking “their” job.

The election, then, is hypergendered. But you wouldn’t necessarily know this from the way Harris has conducted herself in its latter stages. One of the reasons her momentum has stalled is that the campaign seems uncertain about whether it should take part in this lurid psychodrama or ignore it in the hope that most Americans will find it just too weird.

An instance of this indecision was Barack Obama’s address to “the brothers” in Pittsburgh on October 10. He admonished Black men who are not supporting Harris: “Part of it makes me think…that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.” He specifically acknowledged that masculinity itself is at issue in the election, wondering whether some Black men are attracted to Trump’s bullying “because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down?” Yet Obama then went on not to discuss the madness of a rapist posing as the protector of women but to appeal to racial solidarity: Black men should support Harris because Black women “have been getting our backs this entire time.” The point, however, is that Black men who support Trump (like other men of any racial minority) do not do so as members of a racial group. They do it as men. Obama placed gender in the forefront of the argument but then could not quite keep it there.

As for Harris herself, her instinct is not to play the woman card—a phrase Hillary Clinton embraced in the 2016 race. (When Trump claimed “the only thing she has got going is the woman’s card,” Clinton’s campaign produced a pink card printed with the phrase “Deal me in.”) At the Democratic convention in Chicago in August, the difference between Clinton’s rhetoric and Harris’s was striking. Clinton wanted to define Harris as her successor in the fight for political equality, just as she herself was heir to the women she name-checked: Shirley Chisholm and Geraldine Ferraro. She framed her own loss to Trump in 2016 not as a defeat but as a stage on the way to ultimate victory: “Nearly 66 million Americans voted for a future where there are no ceilings on our dreams. And afterwards, we refused to give up on America.” She presented a narrative in which “every generation [of women] has carried the torch forward.”

But Harris did not accept Clinton’s proffered torch. Conspicuously absent from her acceptance speech was any explicit appeal to the obvious truth that it is long since time the US elected a female president. This refusal was color-coded. In 2016 Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination clad in white—the color sported by the early-twentieth-century American suffragists. On the night of Harris’s nomination, the delegate floor was dazzlingly white, as women wore the same color to make the same point. But when Harris appeared, she was in sober navy blue. “Listen,” she told CNN in August. “I am running because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender.” The combination of these two categories means, of course, that the glass ceiling Clinton sought to shatter is reinforced with an extra layer of prejudice.

Some of this reluctance is surely based on raw political calculation. Clinton’s explicit presentation of herself as a groundbreaking female candidate did not help her beat Trump. In the 2016 general election, as John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck write in their 2018 book Identity Crisis, “Women did not rally to Clinton’s candidacy, but men shifted to Trump—especially men with more sexist attitudes.” Clinton did beat Trump among women voters by twelve percentage points, but Obama had won women voters by thirteen and eleven points in 2008 and 2012. And she lost white men by an astonishing thirty-one points—a wider margin than any candidate since Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory over Walter Mondale in 1984. There were more men who voted against Clinton because she was a woman than women who voted for her on the same grounds. It is easy to see why, looking at those figures, Harris decided to play down her femininity. She feared that being too upfront about the historic prospect of a woman in the Oval Office would antagonize men without galvanizing women.

She has another, more personal reason for her hesitancy. Harris had to emerge as a public figure from an extremely gendered role—that of consort to the charismatic California politician Willie Brown. The two dated in the mid-1990s, before he became mayor of San Francisco, and that relationship has long been exploited by right-wing commentators. Brown explains in his autobiography, Basic Brown (2008), exactly what that position demanded:

Naturally, it’s not easy being the date of Willie Brown either! It’s hard to find a companion who can handle dating Willie Brown, because that often means being ignored. When I walk into a party or public dinner or other social gathering, instantly all the attention is focused on me. Everybody wants to BS with me. My poor date may not know anybody else in the room.

Harris knows, in ways that no male politician ever could, that a woman in public life has to navigate between this kind of invisibility and its opposite: extreme scrutiny of her appearance. In 2013 no less a figure than Obama himself, speaking at a Democratic Party fundraiser in San Francisco, remarked of Harris: “You have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough…. She also happens to be, by far, the best-looking attorney general in the country. It’s true! C’mon.” While Obama also had a habit of introducing a male officeholder as a “good-looking guy,” the obvious difference is that with Harris being beautiful becomes as much an accusation as a compliment. Her looks have long been both politicized and sexualized through the implication that she has succeeded only by being physically alluring to powerful men, that her function in the various offices she has held has been purely decorative. As J.D. Vance demanded of her at a rally in Michigan, “What has she done other than collect a check from her political offices?”

In August Trump went further and suggested that Harris traded sexual favors for political advancement, reposting on Truth Social photographs of her and Hillary Clinton that were captioned: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…” His constant references to her as “really DUMB” have this same sexual overtone—if she has risen so far with so little intelligence, there can be only one explanation. It is not accidental that for Trump supporters, the image of the Whore of Babylon is made literal. Among the ghost prompts still offered by Amazon’s search bar are “Joe and the Hoe gotta go flag,” “Joe and the Hoe gotta go yard sign,” and “Joe and Hoe gotta go hat.” Since Biden’s decision to step aside, the T-shirts and trucker hats sold on websites now leave him out of it: “Say No to the Hoe.” It is easy to understand why Harris prefers to stay as far away as possible from this vileness.

An unfortunate side effect of her unwillingness to be more explicit about the importance of gender in the election, however, is that she ends up trying to compete on macho terms. She plays the Pistol-Packin’ Mama, talking about owning a Glock, firing it at a range, and being ready to use it in earnest: “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.” And this gun talk is magnified in her repeated evocation of the American military’s lethality: “As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”—a formulation she used in both her acceptance speech and her debate with Trump. There is something too transparently performative about this posturing. It undercuts Harris’s messaging on gun violence in the US (surely an electoral asset) and patently evades all serious moral and political questions about the use and abuse of American military power.

Yet she has other instincts—and her own version of mythological female power. In 2003, in her first television interview as a candidate for district attorney in San Francisco, Harris, according to her biographer Dan Morain,

spoke of her admiration for the Hindu goddess Kali, a mythological warrior who protects innocents by slaying evil. In a classic depiction, Kali holds the decapitated head of a demon, has a necklace of severed heads, and wears a skirt of bloody arms.

She seems capable of having fun with the very myth of the killer woman that Trump seeks to use against her.

Harris has spoken eloquently of how she decided to become a prosecutor because her best friend in high school confided that her stepfather was being sexually abusive. At the beginning of her presidential campaign, Harris did indeed present herself as a ferocious protector of women and children: “As a young courtroom prosecutor in Oakland, California, I stood up for women and children against predators who abused them,” she said in her acceptance speech. In her first speech after Biden announced his decision not to run, she explicitly targeted Trump the rapist, saying that she had gone after “predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.” She added, simply, that “Donald Trump was found liable by a jury for committing sexual abuse.”

These words carry the electrical charge of brutal clarity. It is a truth that should not be normalized. His former White House adviser Kellyanne Conway has remarked accurately that “I think people have very thick shock absorbers when it comes to Donald Trump.” A critical part of Harris’s job is to disable those shock absorbers, to make enough wavering voters feel the full force of the reality that predation is his way of life. She can’t do that while giving him free rein to run what must surely be the most wildly misogynistic campaign ever staged in a democracy. Kali has to find a way to behead the real monster.

In 2008, when the allegedly un-American views of his pastor were being used by the right to stir racial animosities, Obama confronted the attack head-on by making a thoughtful, reflective, but combative and unyielding speech about race in America. Harris has a great deal to say on that subject—but also on the real experience of being a woman in the US. The Trump campaign has sought to disembody her, both by turning her into a she-devil and, with slightly more subtlety, by suggesting that she is childless and therefore, as Republican Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders puts it, “doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.” Here Trump’s way of talking her up as an unnatural and existential threat is combined with the accusation that this Black woman is being uppity. Harris is, in this telling, a creature unconnected to real family life. But she shows in her demeanor that she is in fact comfortable in her own body and in her own skin. She needs to express that defiant comfort more directly in her words, to say once and for all why keeping women humble is not an acceptable agenda.

—October 24, 2024