Trump is running a 1950s male dominance campaign

When former President Donald Trump proclaimed that he will “protect” women “whether the women like it or not,” he was not appealing to female voters. He was betting that enough male voters yearn to return to the male dominance era of the 1950s to elect him president.

Those were the days when a young woman was told that, if she wasn’t married or engaged by her early 20s, she risked becoming an “old maid” — or in Sen. JD Vance’s updated version, a “childless cat lady.”

In the 1950s, women went to college to get an MRS — a “Mrs.” degree. They were expected to produce large families and be “happy homemakers,” as in the 1950s sitcoms such as “Leave It to Beaver,” in which housewives cheerfully did their chores wearing heels and pearls. They were expected never to shut their husbands out of the bedroom. Advertisements used images of men physically abusing women to market products, such as a Chase and Sanborn coffee ad of a man spanking his wife with the caption, “if your husband ever finds out that you’re not store-testing for fresher coffee…”

Trump has a long history of abusing women, including the sexual abuse civil verdict he lost to E. Jean Carroll, and the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he boasted of sexually dominating women. Research suggests that 1950s-style triumphant manhood, which is what Trump revels in displaying, appeals to male voters with “fragile masculinity.” One finding was that support for Trump in 2016 was higher in regions with more online searches for “erectile dysfunction.”

Consider the MAGA world’s response to the Julia Roberts-narrated Harris-Walz campaign ad, where the actress says that the voting booth “is the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want. What happens in the booth stays in the booth.”

MAGA figures condemned the ad, but their male dominance-rooted responses showed that they are 75 years out of touch.

Fox News host Jesse Watters said that if he found out that his wife had voted for Harris, he would consider it “the same thing as having an affair.” Fundamentalist Christian pastor Dale Partridge insists that “in a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction.” Conservative activist and Trump supporter Charlie Kirk expressed outrage that a wife would secretly vote for Harris and then lie about it to her husband, “who probably works his tail off to make sure that she can go and have a nice life and provides for the family.”

A 2021 survey revealed that only 29 percent of Republicans thought life had changed for the better since the 1950s, even though that era was rife with racism and sexism. Trump thinks that he can rake in male votes with 1950s-themed political messaging that offers a vision of alpha males protecting — in other words, dominating — women.

“I will protect women at a level never seen before,” Trump told a rally in North Carolina in September. He argued that because abortion is now a state-by-state issue, women will “no longer be thinking about abortion” — but since that’s a fantasy, what Trump really means is “don’t worry, men will do the thinking for you.”

It’s Trump’s 1950s retro, male-dominance appeal to fragile masculinity versus Vice President Kamala Harris’s modern message: “How dare they tell a woman what she can or cannot do with her own body?”

We will soon learn which message was more effective.

Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia.”