Trump tells women that they ‘won’t think about abortion’
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Trump has been seeking to cast himself as a safeguard for women, posting similar comments on his social media platform.
PHOTO: REUTERS
PENNSYLVANIA - Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made an appeal on Sept 23 to women voters, claiming at a rally that he would protect them by making their communities safer and that they won’t “be thinking about abortion”.
“You will be protected, and I will be your protector,” said Trump, who polls have shown is struggling to cultivate support among women, for whom abortion rights remain a top issue.
Speaking in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where Vice-President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, has a slight edge in recent polls, Trump bristled at the notion that his struggles with women voters could cost him the election and suggested that his tough talk about immigration and economic proposals would resonate with them.
“I always thought women liked me,” Trump said in Indiana, Pennsylvania, about 88km east of Pittsburgh. “But the fake news keeps saying women don’t like me.”
Trump, who in 2023 was found liable of sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll and who has a history of making demeaning remarks about women, has been seeking to cast himself as a safeguard for women, posting similar comments on his social media platform.
“Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free,” he said during an extended riff at the rally.
“You will no longer be thinking about abortion,” he then asserted.
A spokeswoman for the Harris campaign, Ms Sarafina Chitika, said “women know better”.
“He tries to tell us what to think and what we care about,” Ms Chitika said. “We will vote like our lives depend on it this November.”
The former president has frequently bragged about his role in appointing Supreme Court justices who helped to overturn Roe v Wade.
On the night of Sept 23, Trump repeated that the court’s ruling returned authority to the states to determine their own limits on abortion, a move that he said many Americans had favoured for decades. “Everyone wanted abortion out of the federal government and into the states,” he said.
He also repeated a falsehood that he amplified during a debate against Ms Harris earlier in September, saying that Democrats had been demanding abortions in the ninth month of a pregnancy or “an execution of a baby after birth”.
A growing share of voters in swing states now say abortion is central to their decision this autumn, according to New York Times/Siena College polls earlier in September.
During the midterm elections in 2022, the first political cycle after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, abortion played a key role in many races.
Republicans underperformed their expectations for that year, with a so-called red wave failing to materialise. NYTIMES
