Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post described Donald Trump and JD Vance as a ticket whose common bond is misogyny. They have done a first-rate job of portraying their disdain for the rights of women. Apparently, they think the role of women is to be barefoot and pregnant or in Trump’s case, willing and grateful recipients of his sexual escapades. In a recent interview on MSNBC, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota referred to Vance as “President of the He-Man Woman-Haters Club,” a reference to a 1994 comical film called The Little Rascals, where a group of pre-adolescent boys swear their eternal enmity towards women.

Rubin wrote

If you wanted to design a presidential ticket most likely to offend women voters, you would pick as the presidential nominee an adjudicated rapist, someone caught bragging about sexually assaulting women and who comes with a history of demeaning and insulting women. You would make it someone who mused about punishing women for having an abortion and who boasts about taking away women’s bodily integrity.

Then, for vice president, you would find someone who has implied women should stay in abusive relationships (he denies that’s what he meant but listen for yourself), wants to ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest, favors a “federal response” to prevent women from traveling to states where abortion is legal, accuses single women (“childless cat ladies”) of lacking a stake in America’s future, votes against protection for in vitro fertilization and wants higher taxes for childless people. (He later said he had not meant to offend cats.)

Well, that’s the MAGA Republican Party ticket of convicted felon and former president Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. Trump, having normalized overtly racist speech and demonization of immigrants during his campaigns and presidency, now seems bent on making misogyny acceptable, as well.

Indeed, the MAGA movement’s anti-woman outlook relies on a whole pseudo-academic underpinning to justify relegating women to the home as baby-making machines. “Vance, along with his New Right fellow-travelers, is about to introduce voters to a more conceptual take on sexism — one which many women, and indeed many men, might find even more alarming,” Laura K. Field wrote last week for Politico. Field detailed the right-wing groups that have concocted a philosophical framework to propound “a deep skepticism about modern feminism and gender equality”; its aim is “to roll back much of feminism’s gains.”

Their declaration for a “revival of faith, family, and fertility” comes straight from the fascism playbook, which historically has sought to domesticate women and put them under the thumb of their fathers and husbands. “Control over female bodies in the name of population growth is a throughline of authoritarianism, as are persecutions of LGBTQ+ individuals,” writes historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat. “In Europe and America, the century-long focus of the far right on demographic emergencies supposedly created by declines of White births and upticks in non-White immigration have created support for controls on female bodies.” She continues: “These controls are predicated on negating the personhood of women and consigning them to roles as vessels of population growth.”

From the “great replacement theory” to abortion bans, the Make America Great Again movement echoes past demographic freakouts and accompanying efforts to dominate women. As Ben-Ghiat puts it, the MAGA crew, like its intellectual ancestors, insists that for “White Christian civilization to continue, women must be deprived of reproductive rights and demeaned, disciplined, and criminalized if they resist.”

But you don’t have to rely on historians. Project 2025, which Vance has championed and many close Trump advisers put together, explicitly commits to restore the centrality of a male-headed, heterosexual family with children. (“Families composed of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.”) Running through every policy recommendation, the plan gives preference to the “traditional family,” (often called “healthy family”), deeming all other family units as “unnatural.”

Please open the link to finish reading the column.

How smart is it for two men to run for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency by promising to reduce the rights of women and restore them to their traditional role as baby-makers? Some women may like their ideas but most won’t, including a significant number of Republican and independent women. Women are half the population. Women vote.