Former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin yesterday explained why Donald Trump — in light of what she described as his “creepy” promise to be a “protector” of women if he wins back the White House — may come to regret not picking a woman as his running mate. As reported by The Huffington Post and CNN.
The former president, who a jury in May found liable for the sexual abuse of writer E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s, at a rally yesterday said of women: “I want to be your protector as president, I have to be your protector. I hope you don’t make too much of it. I hope the fake news doesn’t go, ‘Oh, he wants to be their protector.’ Well, I am. As president, I have to be your protector.”
“I started laughing and thinking it was creepy,” Griffin told CNN’s Anderson Cooper of her immediate response.
But then “thinking more about it,” Griffin said, she felt it was “very infantilizing.”
“Talking about women as though we’re weak, we’re meek, we need a protector, we need a defender and we just sit around thinking about abortions all day, it just underscores a fundamental lack of understanding for why a demographic that represents half of the country is one that he is struggling so profoundly with,” she explained.
Griffin predicted of Trump: “If he loses this election [he] is going to look back and think that one of the worst decisions he made was not having a female on the ticket who actually knows how to speak to living, breathing, normal women about issues that matter to them.”
Instead, Trump chose Ohio Sen. JD Vance — who has drawn ire with his “childless cat ladies” comments, among many others.
“Yes, reproductive rights do matter, access to IVF, to the whole suite of care that women care about, whether it be abortion or so on,” said Griffin. “But economics and national security are also women’s issues, and just the way he is talking about them is not the way to sway voters in the middle.”
Watch Griffin’s commentary below.
Tony
"It underscores a fundamental lack of understanding for why a demographic that represents half of the country is one that he is struggling so profoundly with": @AlyssaFarah @DavidAxelrod @JamalSimmons @Mowers discuss Trump casting himself as a "protector" of women. pic.twitter.com/OHOQUOi64Y
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) September 25, 2024