Column: Women deserve better than this

On Friday, I headed to Donald Trump’s rally in Greensboro. I still can’t quite nail down what, exactly, I expected to find. Perhaps a half-full amphitheater of men?

If you’ve ever read any of my columns, you well know that Trump is not my candidate. You’d be right to be suspicious when I headed straight to his rally the week after this round of reported assaults on women broke, substantiating Trump’s own claims about his own harassment.

But worry not, I wanted to attend so I could write this column (convenient excuse for a secret supporter, right?). I wanted to go to see if a single woman showed up in that amphitheater genuinely excited to vote for this man. To answer, “Why would women still vote for Donald Trump?” I asked the women who plan to do so.

Once there, Trump’s speech itself was largely what I expected and had seen in media outlets. What I didn’t quite expect was his misogyny’s dizzying lack of center.

It was hard to keep up; he attacked two of his sexual assault accusers for not being attractive enough to assault. He objectified his own competitor for president, Secretary Hilary Clinton, yelling, “Believe me, I wasn’t impressed” in reference to her body. The attacks’ only common denominator was Donald Trump’s core tenet that women are … less.

There were some vague and almost nice-sounding promises of tax cuts and jobs. He also asserted that The New York Times was biased, and said about shareholder Carlos Slim, “He’s from Mexico,” in low, drawn-out syllables.

He also stated, during his rant against the accusers that, “In just about all cases, it’s nonsense, it’s false.”

Note: “just about all.”

After the rally, I talked for quite a while with two young women wearing “Make America Great Again” hats. When I told them that I was searching for the young woman’s argument for Trump, they lit up. Both cited the appeal of lower taxes for small business owners, gun ownership and an opposition to abortion as their main reasons for voting for Trump. Other than noting “that he’s not a politician,” they expressed little about him; they seemed largely to want to vote for a conservative ticket.

Then we talked about him as a human being. That got a little tougher. Regarding the recording of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women, one said that “those are words, those are men,” with a resigned shrug. The other followed up: “There are a lot of men who have said this.”

The women staunchly asserted that the sexual assault allegations weren’t true — that they simply couldn’t be. When I pressed them on if they would vote for him if they were, they were in agreement that they would be deeply disappointed, but he wouldn’t lose their vote.

“If it’s true …” they had trailed off. The phrase hung in the air like Kellyanne Conway’s now-famous “unless.”

We were wrapping up when one mentioned that they both sat in a VIP section, pointing to her red wristband. As I pressed them for more information, they said that a young man from the Trump campaign — “I just met the guy,” the first said — emailed them to offer the tickets for seats in the highly visible position of the arena.

A man that none of us knew approached us and joined the conversation, talking over me. He told me to write down his words: “You know why they got red wristbands? Because they’re young, pretty girls.”

The two ~women~ (certainly adults) laughed along, possibly a little nervously.

And that moment felt like the tension, the core of the anxiousness, around all these women's answers to: “Would you still support Trump?” I thought of all of these women, seeking conservative values, let down by their party. Nervously laughing along with this horror of a presidential campaign.

Women — like most human beings — are complicated, coming from varied experiences, identities, races, backgrounds and convictions. I don’t expect all people who identify as female to register with the same party.

Debate over these complicated political issues can only happen for women when both parties respects their equal human rights to not be harmed, assaulted or harassed. That’s kind of a basic prerequisite to civil debate.

Yet as I write, many Republican leaders vehemently defend or refuse to pull their endorsement of Donald Trump, a man who continually denies and violates women’s bodily autonomy and the right to be respected outside of their sex appeal.

I didn’t come away from that rally on Friday with a single good answer for why women should still vote for Trump. But I did come away with an understanding that all women, and particularly conservative women, have been let down by the Republican party and denied equal treatment this week.

Women deserve to have more than one political party that respects our autonomy — that respects our humanity.