In an all-caps midnight rant on his failing social media platform, Truth [sic] Social, #NeverWasMyPresident DonOld John Trump promised a MAGAnificent paradise to the women of America should he be reinstalled in the Oval Office:
WOMEN ARE POORER THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS HEALTHY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS SAFE ON THE STREETS THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE MORE DEPRESSED AND UNHAPPY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, AND ARE LESS OPTIMISTIC AND CONFIDENT IN THE FUTURE THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO! I WILL FIX ALL OF THAT, AND FAST, AND AT LONG LAST THIS NATIONAL NIGHTMARE WILL BE OVER. WOMEN WILL BE HAPPY, HEALTHY, CONFIDENT AND FREE! YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION, BECAUSE IT IS NOW WHERE IT ALWAYS HAD TO BE, WITH THE STATES, AND A VOTE OF THE PEOPLE -- AND WITH POWERFUL EXCEPTIONS, LIKE THOSE THAT RONALD REAGAN INSISTED ON, FOR RAPE, INCEST, AND THE LIFE OF THE MOTHER -- BUT NOT ALLOWING FOR DEMOCRAT DEMANDED LATE TERM ABORTION IN THE 7TH, 8TH, OR 9TH MONTH, OR EVEN EXECUTION OF A BABY AFTER BIRTH. I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE. THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE. THEIR LIVES WILL BE HAPPY, BEAUTIFUL, AND GREAT AGAIN!
And all that we gals have to do to gain this
paradise is to accept DonOld as our personal savior and vote for
him in November.
I'll pass, thank you. I'm voting for Kamala and Tim.
Trump repeated his now-infamous Untruth Antisocial message nearly
verbatim at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina on Saturday
afternoon, September 21, 2024. Apparently it's going to become
part of his campaign shtick now. Good luck with that, you mango
misogynist. Your support among women is sagging even more than your... wherevers.
Its not just the lies; it's the
creepiness
Put aside for a moment the blatant and oft-repeated lies in DonOld's message
about Democrats "demanding" late term abortions and
infanticide. Those claims are so
ridiculous that only the truly stupid truly believe them. (But
remember, the truly stupid can and do vote too, so we have to
outvote them.)
Let's visit instead the outrageous whopper that abortion is
"now where it always had to be -- with the states, and a
vote of the people -- and with powerful exceptions...for rape,
incest, and the life of the mother..." There are so many
lies packed into that one sentence that it's going to take far
more than one sentence to unpack them.
- "Vote of the people?"
If you're talking about states with abortion bans or
draconian restrictions, that's bullshit. For example, the
states that had "trigger laws" to activate immediate abortion bans upon the
overturning of Roe didn't hold referendums. There was no
"vote of the people." The rethuglican
legislatures of the states in question passed those laws
and bans without input from voters. On the other hand, in
the time since Roe was overturned there have been cases
where "the people" have had a say when
they were allowed to do so -- and even in red states they
have voted for codification of reproductive freedom.
Since the demise of Roe, the voters in several states have handed
sweeping victories to abortion-rights supporters. And abortion rights will be on the state ballots in
10 states this November.
In states like my home state of Texas, however, the abortion issue never seems to get on the ballots, so "the people" here really don't have a say. (It should come as no surprise that Texas was one of those "trigger law" states.) The truth is that the majority of voters in every state, red or blue, support abortion rights that go beyond those "powerful exceptions" Trump mentioned (see next item) -- but the rethuglican-dominated political "leaders" stubbornly ignore this fact even though it has cost them politically.
Furthermore, the Christofascists who surround and support Trump, most notably the architects of the infamous Project 2025, are salivating over the prospect of new federal restrictions on abortion and other reproductive rights, in effect creating a national abortion ban (and possibly a national contraceptive ban). And Trump, who has made lame efforts to distance himself from Project 2025, has not actually said he would veto such bans were they to come across his desk. So much for "leaving it to the states!"
- "Powerful exceptions?"
That's rich. In several red states -- such as Texas -- rape and incest
exceptions to the abortion bans are not allowed.
If you want the sordid details, here is an interactive map from the Guttmacher
Institute that shows the
abortion policies of every state in the union.
Appropriately enough, the states with the greatest
restrictions are color-coded a deep orange.
Moreover, "the life of the mother" is clearly a secondary or even tertiary consideration in states such as Texas, where the primary consideration is whether the medical care provider and/or the medical facility could be criminally prosecuted for providing desperately needed care for a woman in crisis, even if she's bleeding out. Consider the story of Ryan Hamilton and his wife, to name just one horrifying example. Also consider the fact that pregnancy-related deaths rose by a whopping 56% in Texas after the state's 2021 abortion ban (which predated the overturning of Roe). Texas' maternal mortality rate far outstripped the 11% nationwide average in the same time period. Pro-life, my ass. - A related lie re Roe that Trump has spewed repeatedly on social media and during public appearances is that "everyone" always wanted Roe to be overturned. He made the mistake of repeating that utter codswallop during the September 10, 2024 presidential debate, and Madam Vice President (who, contrary to Trump's later boasts, absolutely wiped the floor with him that evening) addressed the lie in no uncertain terms with some true-to-life examples of people who definitely did NOT want Roe to go away. And earlier this year (April 2024), Factcheck.org addressed Trump's absurdly false claim that "all legal scholars, on both sides, wanted and in fact demanded [that Roe v. Wade] be ended."
The lies are bad enough, but Trump's extravagant all-caps pledge goes far beyond mere lies (which, after all, we're accustomed to from him): his promise to "protect women at a level never seen before" is downright creepy, given his long and sordid history with, and his general contempt for, females. A September 22, 2024 piece on the Mother Jones site said it very well:
All this is a bit rich coming from a man who was found liable for sexual assault; caught on tape bragging about committing sexual assault; found guilty of 34 felony counts for falsifying business records to hide that he paid off a porn star with whom he allegedly had sex while his wife, Melania, was tending to their four-month-old son; and who has a known history of making misogynistic attacks on women he finds threatening. And as for Trump’s claim that women will “no longer be thinking about abortion” if he’s reelected? That’s unlikely, given that he could very well enact a federal abortion ban, and given that abortion bans nationwide have unleashed a health care apocalypse and put vulnerable women in even greater danger.
Niece Mary Trump had a more concise response:
"So says the rapist."
Yeah, creepy.
Matter of fact, I haven't been so creeped out since one of this
little blog's most disgusting, sociopathic, (allegedly) predatory
subjects, fake-doc/cancer quack/fascist/conspiranoid peddler Leonard Coldwell, announced
back in 2013, via his former partner Peter Wink, that he and Wink were launching a personal
"coaching" program to help women get out of physically
or mentally abusive relationships. Talk
about the spider and the fly... Yeeesh! Well, Trump's pledge to
the women of America is, on a much larger and more dangerous
scale, also a spider-and-fly situation. Or maybe an
Independence Day alien-welcoming-party situation.
DonOld's pledge to American womanhood is also straight out of Margaret Atwood's famous dystopian
novel, The Handmaid's Tale. In
the fictional Gilead, they were all about "protecting"
women, who were no longer allowed any agency whatsoever, and were
even forbidden from reading.
If DonOld's powerful infrastructure of Christofascist allies have
their way, we'll have worse than Gilead in these here United
States. We'll have a Fourth Reich, bent on molding its own
version of the New Woman.
As for Trump's claims that women are poorer and
sicker and less safe and altogether more depressed and unhappy than they were
under his reign of glory, here's a big reality check.
In MAGA land, bitches and
ballots are a deadly mix
The real truth is that neither DonOld Trump, nor
rethuglican "leaders" in general, nor for that matter
the MAGA base of whiny white males, want women to have much or
any agency at all. Certainly it seems that in light of the
swelling tide of pissed-off women (many of whom Mango Man and
the Whiny Whites have declared to be out-and-out bitches -- and worse), they
don't want women voting -- even if they don't come right out and
say so. After all, most women tend to vote Democratic.
One of many current rethuglican strategies to suppress the female vote (and the votes of other groups more
likely to vote Democratic) is the SAVE Act. A September 19 piece on the New Republic site by journalist and talk show host Thom Hartmann outlines the
ways in which this proposed bill targets women. The alleged
purpose of the SAVE Act is to prevent "illegals" from
voting, but only fools are fooled by that.
...House Speaker Mike Johnson and former President Donald Trump were pushing the Safeguard American Eligibility, or SAVE, Act, demanding it be part of must-pass legislation to fund the federal government for another year (the funding runs out at the end of this month, and then the shutdown begins).
Trump, on his failing social media site, ranted Tuesday that Republicans must get “every ounce” of the SAVE Act passed or shut down the government “in any way, shape, or form.” He said it was necessary because Democrats are “registering Illegal Voters by the TENS OF THOUSANDS, as we speak,” adding the vicious lie that “they will be voting in the 2024 Presidential Election.”
Hartmann explains why mass voting by illegal migrants is not and never has been a thing in the United States, and then zeroes in on the reasons that so many female US citizens would be harmed by the SAVE Act.
The SAVE Act is a proposed federal law, so, first off, it would put a future president (say, Trump) in charge of enforcing it, taking that power away from the states. Millions of voter registrations in any states the president decides are problematic could be removed until those voters “cure” their registrations, and state authorities would have no say in it.
And what will the law require citizens who want to vote do? Lacking a passport or other proof of citizenship with their married names, they must produce both a birth certificate (with the seal of the state where it was issued; no copies allowed) and a current form of identification—both with the exact same name on them. That could instantly disqualify about 90 percent of all married women without passports or other proof that matches their birth certificates or proof of a legal name change.
For women in that situation, they can still register to vote if they can prove that they went to court to change their name when they got married, but most women just start using their new married name without ever going through all those formalities (although a few states recognize marriage as a legal name change).
Hartmann goes on to cite a a 2014 report, issued by the National Organization for Women (NOW), that explains the ways in which strict voter ID laws, which are almost exclusively sponsored and supported by republicans, result in voter suppression of several groups, including women. Though more than ten years old, the NOW report is still pertinent today.
Voter ID laws have a disproportionately negative effect on women. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, one third of all women have citizenship documents that do not identically match their current names primarily because of name changes at marriage. Roughly 90 percent of women who marry adopt their husband’s last name. That means that roughly 90 percent of married female voters have a different name on their ID than the one on their birth certificate. An estimated 34 percent of women could be turned away from the polls unless they have precisely the right documents...
...A related problem is that the U.S. Patriot Act requires women’s names on certain official government documents to be the same. Thanks to the Department of Homeland Security and the ever-tightening regulations on identification requirements, today a woman with a hyphenated name on one form of ID and just a maiden name on another is grounds for suspicion. Patriot Act guidelines specifically require identical forms of identification, which for many women, imposes a significant challenge.
I can't emphasize strongly enough how deeply
hypocritical this is, considering the facxt that traditionally,
rethuglicans are all for "small government" and
"letting the states decide." As I've noted previously on this blog, and as I indicated above regarding reproductive
rights, they're for small government and states' rights, unless
massive government overreach serves their authoritarian,
Christofascist agendas.
I know I'm over-stating the obvious again, as I so often do on
this Whirled, but... DonOld Trump does not have anyone's best
interests at heart except his own and those of his closest
allies. He certainly does not have the best interests of women at heart, despite the fact that he still has a devoted following
of females, from the scary-looking blond blowfish-mouthed
hangers-on who pose with him at Mar-a-Lago to the overstuffed,
proudly ignorant Trump-merch-clad loudmouths at his rallies.
Cheeto Jeezus isn't going to save them, and he's not going to
save you and me, and he's not going to save the country, and he
is a serious danger to democracy not only in the United States
but all over the globe.
So please, please, please, if you're eligible to vote in the
November election, register if you haven't
already, and Vote Blue from the top on down the ballot.
Before you leave...
This has been, through what is no apparent fault of her own
(excluding, perhaps karmic matters that are quite beyond her
ability to comprehend), a nightmare of a year for the ruler of
this Whirled. Money, alas, cannot make the nightmare go away, but
it can make it easier to bear. Now more than ever, donations are
urgently needed and profoundly appreciated. Here are some ways to
do it:
- New: Venmo --
username @Connie-Schmidt-42. Here is a direct link
to the Venmo page.
New: PayPal -- Here is a direct link to Cosmic Connie's PayPal page.
Old but still good: You can click on the "Donate" icon that currently appears on the right-hand side of every page of this blog on the Web version. There's also a donation link at the end of many of my older blog posts. In the case of both the icon and the links on the older posts, this is also a PayPal link, but it references the email account of Cosmic Connie's husband, RevRon -- which is cool, because it all ultimately goes to the same place.
NOTE: If you are donating by PayPal,
please specify that your contribution is a gift, which it is (as
opposed to a conventional purchase, for which PayPal deducts a
percentage for their fee).
Whether you can donate or not, thank you for visiting
this Whirled.