Women For Trump Want to Know: 'If He Hated Women So Much, How Could He Be Married 3 Times?'
Politics
On Thursday at 4 p.m., a ten-yard stretch outside of Trump Tower in Manhattan felt like the stands of a high school football game, if the stakes were much higher, the stands were metal barricades, the coaches were police, and one team’s fans chanted “Lock-her-up!”
I was curious to see who would respond to the mysteriously under-advertised graphic posted Wednesday on the Facebook page for “Women for Trump New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut,” faction operating under the larger “Women For Trump” coalition. When I arrived, I found 50 or so women, many between ages 50 and 70 and identifying as working or retired suburban mothers, holding purple “Women for Trump” signs. Many of them hadn’t heard of Wednesday’s anti-Trump “Pussy Power” protests; they’d just come to show that moms and women outside the city have political opinions too.
All at once, everybody lost their minds; Donald Trump had arrived, and we knew it from a swarm of SWAT guys and police officers clearing a corridor to the entrance of Trump Tower. His presence was genial and larger-than-life—he pumped his fist, waved, and before we knew it, he had disappeared into his property. The crowd stood in place for minutes after, cheering in the hopes that he might come back to the sidewalk for an encore. But he never did, so people broke for cigarettes and TV interviews.
“We’re here to support our guy,” said Bette, 57, a blonde Long Island Air Force veteran wearing a navy t-shirt, tortoise shell sunglasses and holding a handmade sign: “I AM IN A PURRR-FECT MOOD TO VOTE FOR TRUMP. MEOW!”
She tossed her cigarette and I asked her why “Women for Trump” specifically, rather than “People for Trump.” “He’s under attack by all these frickin’ feminazis,” she said. “These women who are all over the media don’t represent us; I know plenty of supporters in suburbia who are married, single, mothers, gay women.” She added that suburban women are invisible, partly because they’re working, and the problems are the same everywhere– the kids still live at home, their friends work three jobs, and the vets are stranded. (Bette inserts a story about a 70-year-old man in Northport who committed suicide after he couldn’t get care at the VA. “Yup,” she said. “Blew his brains out in the parking lot.”)
Anyway, all this about “guy talk” is overblown, Bette continued. “My sister is the biggest prude in the world, and you know what she said? He’s a frickin’ man, who cares? All men talk like that. At least for us, outside the city.”
That was the consensus among the women I spoke with—he’s a guy, like any other. “In my day, we would call it ‘putting the moves’ on you,” said Susan Gurney, 61, a former CUNY Hunter mathematics professor who paired the iconic red baseball cap with a tweed jacket and pencil skirt. (She tells me she knows she doesn’t fit the “profile” the media paints of the uneducated Trump supporter.)
“I don’t believe this story about the woman on the plane,” she said, referring to the Jessica Leeds’s accusation the Trump kissed and groped her for 15 minutes on a first class flight (which has devolved into a nit-picky debate about whether a 1979 airplane armrests would have made groping physically possible).
“To be kissed for 15 minutes is not a terrifying situation—you can press the button for a flight attendant or say ‘I don’t feel like kissing you,’ and he’ll stop. 15 minutes is a long time to be kissed and not say anything.” She looked at her watch. “See? One, two, three…”