Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
We’re talking about all of this with Nicole Hemmer, who’s written good books on the history of the conservative movement and the right-wing media. We’re going to get into the right’s long history of misogyny politics. Nicole, thanks for coming on.
Sargent: All right, so everyone’s seen the ad that Vivek Ramaswamy’s running in the Ohio gubernatorial campaign. It features Democrat Amy Acton’s mother calling her a liar about her difficult past, but then it emerged that Amy Acton’s stepfather, i.e., her mother’s husband, apparently raped her. Ramaswamy, Trump, and JD Vance are all in on this now. Nicole, I just wanted to get your general thoughts on this whole thing.
One of the things that I think we’ve gotten very used to is that when something terrible happens, there might be an initial wave of Republican sort of aghastness and outrage, but then they, you know, kind of fall back into line. Trump pushes back and they end up back on the Trump train.
Sargent: Let’s listen to an exchange between Donald Trump and NBC reporter Monica Alba. If you listen closely, you’re going to hear in the crosstalk that the reporter says, do the sexual abuse allegations mean nothing to you, sir? And you’ll hear her say, they are very serious sexual abuse allegations. Listen.
Monica Alba (voiceover): Do the sexual abuse allegations … do the sexual abuse allegations make no difference?
Alba (voiceover): I’m with NBC, sir.
Alba (voiceover): But these are very serious sexual abuse allegations. They make no difference to you?
Sargent: So, Nicole, what that reporter was talking about there was the allegation that Amy Acton was raped, of course, and Trump was clearly set off by the pointed questions about the sex abuse allegations, didn’t you think?
And of course he doesn’t want to, right? A, because he never wants to. B, because he lives in this world of, like, plausible deniability. And C, actually, there isn’t anything that seems to trigger Donald Trump more than references to sexual abuse. Because he has his own past here, right?
Sargent: Right. And this is a case where the facts are ultra clear. Again, to the point where even a bunch of Republicans had to come out and condemn the ad. I think we should point out here, and maybe you could comment on this, we do know at this point that Trump is unusually triggered by young female reporters, particularly non-whites, don’t we?
So for a young female reporter to challenge him, for someone who’s not white to challenge him—all of those things, it’s both like that he doesn’t like to be challenged, and then also, how dare you? You don’t have the right to challenge me.
It’s all a bet that this type of politics can get out a certain type of voter that they don’t think they can get out any other way at this point, especially without Trump on the ballot. Can you talk a little bit about that? Do you think that’s what they’re up to?
All of the attacks on Hillary Clinton were not attacks about her policies, but they were attacks about her as a woman, right? Or the attacks on Michelle Obama for being a man, or Kamala Harris. This misogyny has been part of the bargain with Trump from the very beginning.
And so that MAGA voter, particularly that MAGA voter who is, like, the non-traditional voter, like the low-propensity voter, they think that misogyny is the tool for bringing them out. And not just for bringing out white men. That has been the key for drawing Black men and Latino men into their coalition. And so that’s been something that they have pressed on again and again, because it’s their way to sort of, like, a rainbow coalition on the right.
If you think about the inroads that they were making with young men in 2024, there was something special happening in the culture for them, I think. For MAGA in some very general sense, and for Trump in particular, they felt like they had unlocked some sort of magic power, I think. Some sort of magical, I don’t know, phenomenon of some kind. And I feel like they’re almost trying to recapture that a little bit.
Hemmer: Right, to recapture the magic of past moments of glory. And those past moments of glory have been so connected with misogyny. They’ve been so anti-woman. And that coalition has been just drenched in misogyny as a way of inspiring and bringing that out.
And you kind of get the sense that Trump just wants to skip past that. He thinks that he’s powerful enough at this point that he can just, like, skip past the part where everyone pretends to be sad about something he said, and then just sort of muscle his way forward and, like, get to the part where everybody celebrates him for being such an unconventional person.
His approval numbers are pretty weak. His support among Republicans is much weaker than we’ve seen, even among white working-class Republicans. It’s just not as strong as it was. So him trying to, like, call upon that old magic—no wonder he’s trying to mobilize that in this moment, because it’s been around elections that he’s largely been able to tap into that in the past.
Mary Katharine Ham (voiceover): I disagree with the president and Vance. As soon as I saw that ad, I thought, normal moms are going to watch this ad and go, a mom trashing her daughter straight to camera, they better have the goods. That’s actually what I thought when I first saw it. And it doesn’t appear that they do have the goods, because she has a really good response to it, which is, like, she had this very hard childhood.
Republican consultant (voiceover): It is not a new phenomenon to use family members that have a problem against candidates in political ads. But if you do that, you better darn well know the whole story and know that it’s not sympathetic to the intended target. And of course, what we found out about this is it is, in the absolute worst possible way.
Lawrence Jones (voiceover): I thought this was just stupid. He’s already struggling in Ohio. I just don’t understand why he would do this.
Hemmer: I think that’s right. And I think that it points to the part of the reaction that I have found so surprising, is that there has been a real reluctance to criticize Trump. You know, normally the criticisms fall to people under Trump, like, he’s been advised inappropriately. Vance, who has been seen as, like, the next hope of the MAGA movement—there’s been some reluctance to criticize him as well.
They have by and large not been on board with the #MeToo movement. They’ve been very skeptical of claims about sexual abuse, whether it’s against Kavanaugh or against Trump, or even in the recent case of the Cornell 7.
It is absolutely a bridge too far for ordinary people who are seeing this. And I keep using the word repulsed and disgusted, but there’s something gut-level and emotional about people’s response to this that you can’t, like, MAGA your way out of.
Hemmer: Well, they have in the past. There’s a good reason why they believe that. And so I think perhaps they’re even surprised by the response to this.
It seems to me like Donald Trump and JD Vance are, again, to return to this idea of being in the 2024 headspace, somehow deciding that female voters just don’t really exist in this election.
And a midterm election is a different animal from the type of presidential election that their head is still in, I think. To return to a point you made earlier, I don’t understand why they don’t get this, right? A midterm electorate is going to be highly engaged. It’s going to have, you know, fewer young, sporadic voters, fewer of the young male type voters that they were relying on.
Hemmer: He just returns to what’s comfortable for him. And it’s part of the reason why the more establishment Republicans, the kinds of people who do know the difference between a midterm and a general election, are so wary about this particular incident.
And so trying to mobilize them—this is not going to get young men to the polls, especially at a moment when the economy is doing so poorly. Like, you’re not offering anything in this case. But Donald Trump doesn’t have, like, a wide range of tools in his tool belt. He has misogyny. And that’s kind of what he keeps returning to, because it’s one of the only things that he has, other than racism.
I think maybe part of what’s going on here is that the cultural moment that made 2024 possible is just gone. It’s not here anymore. And they don’t know that, I don’t think. That cultural moment was, there really was this kind of massive disaffection out there among young men, men more generally, you know—I don’t know, wokeness or whatever, whatever it is, but it was mostly, I think, probably economic in a lot of ways, and things just felt kind of adrift after the pandemic, maybe.
And now that he’s in the White House, he hasn’t delivered that empowerment, right? And so he’s got no real way to appeal to them anymore, I don’t think. Can you talk a little about the lapsing of the 2024 cultural moment?
What I would say is that we have not seen the end of the mobilizing of this idea of a crisis of men for reactionary politics. Like, that is going to be with us for a very long time. It has been part of U.S. politics for a very long time.
And that has been a strain of right-wing politics for a very long time. It will continue to be a strain of right-wing politics, particularly because this idea of the crisis of men is now so embedded in both conservative and, frankly, liberal politics as well. So I don’t think that that’s over.
They’re seeing Trump start wars that they’re worried that they’re going to have to fight in. And so that sort of imaginary version of Trump that has mobilized so many male voters, it has come into conflict with the reality of Trump. And they’re not going to go vote for Democrats, but they’re very unlikely to go vote at all this election.
And so he seems to be calculating that he can kind of maneuver his way around, I think, the broken promises that you’re talking about, by kind of leaking here and there that he was a skeptic of the war, but then also going full misogyny with this ad.
Hemmer: This is Vance’s only play, is to lean into the kind of cultural grievance, to lean into the I’m just one of the guys kind of politics, to lean into the Trumpian look-at-me-saying-the-things-that-I’m-not-supposed-to-say kind of politics, trying to play the tough guy against the beta male and the feminist and the women out there.
And they both have a problem with the core Trump base. In Vivek’s case, it’s because he’s Indian. And in Vance’s case, it’s because he’s married to an Indian woman. And so he’s got a problem with the racist base of the Trump coalition. And by the time Trump’s done with his presidency, that might be the only part of the MAGA coalition left.
Sargent: Nicole Hemmer, so awesome to talk to you. Folks, if you enjoyed this, check out Nicole’s books. They’re really good. One is called Partisans, another is called Messengers of the Right. Nicole, always a great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Hemmer: Lovely to chat with you, Greg.
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