Donald Trump Isn’t Even the Worst Misogynist in the 2016 Race
Donald Trump is a well-documented sexist ass. Even many conservatives stopped disputing that fact in the wake of last week’s GOP debate, after which Donald Trump, angry that moderator Megyn Kelly was allowed to ask him actual questions, retweeted a guy who called her a “bimbo” and made an apparent reference to her menstrual blood. (Trump denies it was a period joke.)
A lot of Republicans, eager to run Trump out of the race, are making hay over this. But the truth of the matter is that while Trump has a big mouth, he is, policy-wise, one of the least anti-woman candidates in the 2016 Republican field. That isn’t saying much. Trump would like to ban abortion. He also says he would allow exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. He shouldn’t get any cookies for this – he’s turning a cold shoulder to millions of women who need abortions for financial or personal reasons. But that’s how bad things are on the right: acknowledging that women who have been raped deserve access to abortion makes Trump less radical than the people he’s running against for the Republican nomination.
Here is how pathetically low the bar has been set.
Mike Huckabee
Prior to last week’s debate, Huckabee started talking about how, if he was president, he would overrule the Supreme Court’s decision upholding abortions and instead force women, by fiat, to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. When Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi asked Huckabee if he would deploy federal troops to force the whims of his newly minted anti-choice dictatorship, Huckabee said, “We’ll see when I’m president.”
He then doubled down on his fantasies of an anti-choice coup during the debate, saying, “I think the next president ought to invoke the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the constitution now that we clearly know that that baby inside the mother’s womb is a person at the moment of conception.”
Someone might want to tell Huckabee that those amendments, which grant the right of due process and equal treatment, are there to protect the human rights of people, not fetuses.
Marco Rubio
While on CNN defending his decision to denounce rape and incest exceptions in proposed abortion bans, Rubio defended his unsourced allegation that “science” says life begins at conception. A fertilized human egg “can’t turn into a donkey,” he said. “Could it become a cat?” he asked, sarcastically.
He loved this idea so much that his campaign ran an ad featuring a picture of a cat with the line “Human life won’t become a cat.”
If you need an abortion because you can’t afford a baby, you’re in a bad relationship or you were raped, you’re out of luck in Marco Rubio’s America. But if you’re gestating a litter of kittens? He’s got you covered.