Former President Donald Trump is back on the campaign trail, offering up repeated attacks against Vice President Harris’s race, heritage and gender. President Biden’s former Domestic Policy Council Director Susan Rice spoke with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell to dissect his tactics.
“It’s all part of his strategy to denigrate and objectify the Vice President, as he does women of all sorts all the time. Donald Trump is incapable of respecting women, and it is not only in his DNA and how he has treated women at every stage of his life, personally and professionally, but it is at the root of his policy approach, Project 2025,” stated Rice.
“Donald Trump and JD Vance really want to take us back to a time when those rights and freedoms were denied, not just to women, but to the vast majority of Americans in this country,” Rice continued. “He approaches this by belittling and denigrating and objectifying his opponents, and in this case, using gender and sexualized terminology, sometimes uses racialized terminology, but it’s all to distract from the reality that he is running a campaign that is really retro, dangerous and self-serving.”
“It’s a tactic that’s meant to divide and to denigrate the fact that 10% of the American population, 33 million Americans Andrea are mixed race, have more than one racial background,” added Rice.
It’s almost a case of déjà vu given that Trump’s strategy against Harris is eerily reminiscent to his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. As The New York Times reported during their coverage of the election, “Mr. Trump’s advisers, meanwhile, say that the woman’s card attack serves to undermine Mrs. Clinton by sowing doubts about her qualifications — not just with men, but with white women, who have supported the Republican nominee in every election since 1996.”
At that time, Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway commented, “By taking gender head-on, Trump refuses to cede women voters and so-called women’s issues to Hillary just because she is a woman.”
“He is ‘Swiftboating’ her by throwing shade on what should be a strength,” continued Conway, who would go onto become a longtime aide for former President Trump.
How effective is this tactic? The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) examined the political consequences of objectifying female candidates. One 2009 study revealed that focusing on former vice-presidential candidate Sarah “Palin’s appearance reduced perceptions of her competence and humanness. Furthermore, those exposed to appearance-focused coverage of Palin were less likely to express intentions to vote for the McCain/Palin ticket than those who were not exposed to it.” Another found that people who viewed this type of commentary about women candidates were less likely to be viewed as credible and suitable for political office.
According to CAWP, this strategy “is an evergreen tactic that has been used to delegitimize and diminish them. But objectification does more than just delegitimize. In fact, objectification is a form of dehumanization.”