Trump's dogwhistle to the Christian right is a permission slip to openly hate women

During his CNN "town hall" last week, Donald Trump offered a lip service denial that he had sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll in the 90s when asked about the recent court verdict affirming he did it. He soon shifted, however, to the message he really wanted to send: A winking admission that he did it.

"What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you're playing hanky panky in a dressing room?" he said, blaming Carroll for the assault as the audience laughed approvingly. He ranted about how she has a cat named "Vagina," implying that she's a slut who deserved to be raped.

When host Kaitlin Collins asked if it is good or bad if powerful men can sexually assault without consequence, Trump replied, "Fortunately," adding cheekily, "Or unfortunately for her."

The MAGA audience ate it up, making it clear that they agree with Trump that rape is a hilarious punishment to inflict on women for "crimes" like being independent or sexual.

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Sadly, however, this reaction will likely not make a dent in the Beltway wisdom that Christian conservatives dislike Trump's violent misogyny, and are merely overlooking it out of political expedience. Most of the people squealing in laughter at Trump's victim-blaming likely consider themselves "Christians." Sounds an awful lot like those "Christians" are just fine with sexual violence. Trump declared that Carroll deserved to be raped and bragged that he was entitled to do it. And they clapped.

Trump declared that Carroll deserved to be raped and bragged that he was entitled to do it. And they clapped.

No doubt, Christian conservatives have long claimed they are motivated not by misogyny, but by other, more noble concerns. They claim to oppose abortion rights because of "life" or, in more recent years, they have feigned interest in "protecting" women from the supposed "abortion industry." Similar efforts to stigmatize premarital sex or restrict access to contraception were marketed as "pro-woman," on the assumption that women are asexual creatures who must be shielded from the perverted ways of men. Feminists have long argued these religious right claims are lies, mere pretexts propped up to conceal the right's true interest, which is in preserving male dominance over women.

These days, it's not just Trump reclaiming his pride in the "grab 'em by the pussy remarks." Recently, the Christian right has been letting the "pro-woman" mask slip, sometimes all the way off, revealing the truth too many in the mainstream press would rather ignore: The Christian right is about misogyny. It was always about misogyny.

Last week, Democrats in Louisiana introduced a bill to add rape and incest exceptions to the state's abortion ban. Republicans didn't just kill the bill, they went out of their way to broadcast their contempt for the rape survivors who showed up to testify in favor of it. Audrey Wascome, who survived incest and rape in her childhood and adolescence, spoke to Jezebel about her experience as a witness:

Wascome told me in an interview after the hearing that it felt like an "openly hostile" environment. A man was standing near the witness table with a rosary, reciting Bible verses. Some Republican committee members got up and left in the middle of witness testimony. Other GOP legislators who did stay in the room "were just pretending that the witnesses weren't there," she said. "It was super disrespectful."

As Wascome detailed years of sexual abuse at the hands of her grandparents, she says one Republican was rolling their eyes at her.

In Texas, the lawyer who wrote the state's "bounty hunter" abortion ban, Republican activist and former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, has rolled out the first major test case of the law. What is remarkable is that the plaintiff is such a mustache-twirling villain, that you would almost think he was a fictional character. Marcus Silva is clearly angry that his ex-wife thought she had a right to leave him. To get his revenge, he is suing her two good friends because they helped her abort a pregnancy. Silva claims to believe he "lost" a child, but the countersuit filed by her friends tells a different story.

Instead, they allege, after Silva found the pills in his ex-wife's purse, he carefully returned them so that she would have the abortion. His reason? According to text messages submitted into evidence, he wanted blackmail material. They allege that he told her that if she didn't submit in "mind, body, and soul" to him, he would turn her over to the police. This fits a larger reported pattern, according to Moira Donegan and Mark Joseph Stern of Slate:

According to people who knew the couple, Brittni's husband, Marcus Silva, was mean and manipulative: When Brittni was at work (Silva was unemployed), he would accuse her of staying out for too long, of having an affair. When she was home, he would berate her, following her from room to room. He demanded to look through her phone, and when she refused, he would do so anyway. According to women who were there, in April 2022 Silva got extremely drunk at a work party for Brittni. In front of her co-workers, the witnesses say, he called her a slut, a whore, and an unfit mother. He told her she was worthless.

By taking up this suit, Mitchell is revealing the real purpose of the Texas abortion ban. It's not about "life" or "protecting women." It's about cementing male control over women, even when such men are horrible and abusive.

The distinctions between the Christian right and the more overtly caveman-style of sexism have collapsed completely.

Silva sounds a lot like the right-wing pundit Steven Crowder, who recorded a show lamenting the existence of no-fault divorce laws after a video of him emotionally abusing his ex-wife was leaked to the press. Most in the mainstream press know Crowder as a "shock jock," leading them to miss how he has also always explicitly been a Christian conservative broadcaster, as well. His show features "light-hearted" Bible reading segments, in an attempt to make religion seem cool. His early fame owed a lot to his claims to have been a virgin on his wedding night, holding out the "success" of his marriage as evidence that this is the only "right way" to marry. (Oops!)

Crowder is just part of a larger Trump-era shift, where the distinctions between the Christian right and the more overtly caveman-style of sexism have collapsed completely. The whole tapdance about chivalry and "respect" for women has given way to the Trumpian style — but with a couple of Bible verses attached.

Lila Rose was perhaps the epitome of the pre-Trump era of the anti-abortion movement. The founder of the anti-choice group Live Action has always held herself out as a model of chastity and feminine virtue. She claimed to oppose abortion because it supposedly "harms" women. Her pseudo-feminism was always an inch deep, but that was enough to fool some centrist pundits and to allow Republicans to preen about how they're the "real" advocates for women. She frequently tweeted sanctimonious stuff like this:

Last week, however, Rose went on a gleefully misogynistic and porn-y podcast called "Whatever," which exists for the sole purpose of portraying women as sexually objectified bimbos.

Here's the artwork that was used to advertise the episode she appeared on:

Here's how Vice journalist Magdalene Taylor described "Whatever": "But as the Whatever podcast demonstrates, all you really need for a hit show is a carefully curated selection of 30-second clips where you frame women as hopelessly dumb creatures and blast them off without context on Twitter." Host Brian Atlas has made a career out of being a jerk to women, and justifying it by implying they're all dumb bitches who have it coming anyway, Taylor explains.

The distinction between "men's rights" and the Christian right's anti-abortion movement is collapsing.

"Whatever" has its DNA in the so-called "men's rights" movement, which used to be a secular anti-feminist movement that focused on male outrage over rape laws, women's right to divorce, and other social changes that make it much harder to abuse women and get away with it. Notably, "men's rights" activists mostly ignored abortion, outside of complaining that they didn't have a right to "paper abortions," their term for cutting off child support to punish a woman for leaving them. But, as these examples show, the distinction between "men's rights" and the Christian right's anti-abortion movement is collapsing.

For example, a recent article at Fox News is titled "'Disenfranchised grief': The quiet pain of men who experience abortion." Which, as one can guess, is mostly about putting a sympathetic gloss on a deeply ugly desire of men to claim women's bodies as property.

"I had no say in either decision," Greg Mayo, a man who runs a "men's rights" anti-abortion group, complained to Fox. The article goes on to note, "In the study, nearly half of men, or 45 percent, said they did not have a voice or choice in their partner's abortion decision and almost three out of five men, 57 percent, said they did not make the decision." The clear implication is that it's a travesty that the person with the uterus decided what was done with it. Clearly, the authors feel the man who impregnated her should have the final word over her body.

This is, of course, what has always been at the heart of the anti-abortion movement: A belief that women are men's property. But that is widely viewed as a deplorable opinion. For one thing, if you believe men are entitled to force childbirth on women, then it's not much of a leap to argue that they also have a right to lock women up in the house, block them from having jobs, hit them, or hit them, or rape them. So the anti-choice movement has played games for decades, pretending their motive is anything but the misogyny it is. But when the leader of the GOP uses the word "fortunately" to describe a man's privilege to rape, that sends a signal to his followers. The Christian right base is listening and is done pretending they don't also hate women.