David Axelrod said former President Trump has taken a “patronizing” tone with his “like it or not” vow to protect women.
“He read that off a prompter, too. Who writes that?” the former adviser to President Obama said in a CNN appearance on “Anderson Cooper 360” on Thursday night.
During a Wednesday rally in Green Bay, Wis., Trump revealed that his advisers counseled him against calling himself a “protector” of women after using the term at a late September rally.
“They said, ‘Sir, I just think it’s inappropriate for you to say.’ I pay these guys a lot of money; can you believe it?” he said at the rally. “I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I’m going to protect them. I’m going to protect them from migrants coming in. I’m going to protect them from foreign countries that want to hit us with missiles and lots of other things.’”
Axelrod also referred to a previous interview between Trump and MSNBC reporter Chris Matthews from 2016, in which the GOP candidate said that women should be punished for illegal abortions.
“There is this patronizing tone to it, and that back then was shocking, but it seemed impossible,” Axelrod said. “But now what we’ve seen in the country, it suggests that he’s followed through on his belief about that.”
Vice President Harris’s campaign was quick to respond to Trump on Wednesday.
“Defining line of this campaign? Trump: ‘I’m gonna do it whether the women like it or not,'” campaign spokesperson James Singer posted on X shortly after the rally.
Harris responded to reporters Thursday.
“It actually is, I think, very offensive to women in terms of not understanding their agency, their authority, their right and their ability to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies,” she said. “And this is just the latest in a series of reveals by the former president on how he thinks about women and their agency.”
The former president has had less success than his Democratic counterparts in appealing to female voters during each of his campaigns, and polls have shown that he still trails Harris, who has rapidly consolidated support among female voters since she replaced President Biden atop the Democratic ticket.
But Trump has led Harris among male voters, setting up a significant gender gap ahead of Election Day.
