Opinion | The G.O.P.’s ‘Women Problem’

So, it is important to remember that this is not something that Trump has wrought. It is just something that he has exploited. And as we always say, dialed up to 11. I mean, if you just want to go back to 2012 with the post-Romney kind of meltdown of the party worrying about the famous “autopsy,” there was this movement among Republican women — operatives, big fund-raisers and the electeds. They were trying to make the party more palatable to women, to lose the whole kind of anti-woman reputation that it had gotten when there were those episodes with Todd Akin talking about “real rape,” those sorts of things. So we’re talking about Elise Stefanik was trying to lead her party in a direction that would get more women into the game, whether you were fund-raisers. Mitt Romney’s old campaign manager started a consultancy that was aimed at this. I talked to tons of fund-raisers and operatives, and then Trump hit. And the party went from being OK with these women doing this, even when it made them a little uncomfortable, because it cuts against the whole idea that you shouldn’t worry about gender, that whole “we can’t even get near identity politics So how can we possibly be promoting a particular gender with a program.” It went from being mostly OK with that to just being like, “We don’t care anymore. We’re just going to go all in on this. It’s like, look at this guy. He’s basically the crudest and most vulgar, sexist creature on the planet. And people love him.” So at that point, you saw those gains in terms of women leaders having a little more backing for their plans to back to before square one. And now with this most recent election, with Trump just going all in on the misogyny and hypermasculinity, it’s like they’ve lost even more ground. But this has always been an issue for the party. They’ve had a “women problem” for decades. And they’ve tried to address it different ways. And with Trump, the way they’ve tried to address it is just smack, smack women down as hard as they can on some level.