Trump’s Win Isn’t The End of Women’s Rights in Michigan, or Anywhere
One of my favorite recent “Saturday Night Live” scenes featured comedian John Mulaney as a know-it-all liberal guest on a fictional game show. Peeved that no one is taking his virtue-signaling seriously, Mulaney’s character goes on a rant about the 2024 election, warning that if Donald Trump wins, “We are going to be living in a real life Handmaid’s Tale.”
The other fictional guest on the game show tries to step in and tell Mulaney his caricature of the election is “a bit of an oversimplification.” After all, “The Handmaid’s Tale” depicts a dystopian society in which women are stripped entirely of their rights and used as sex slaves by a religious elite. No one seriously believes women in the U.S. face similar abuse, and if they do, they should really see a therapist.
But Mulaney’s character was undeterred. “If you’d read that book, you’d see that we’re basically halfway there,” he tells her.
Then the kicker. He was speaking to the book’s author, Margaret Atwood.
The skit demonstrated a prescient point: Those who fall into the trap of political hyperbole and fearmongering almost always have no idea what they’re talking about.
The reactions to Trump’s win last week prove as much. Many young adults I grew up with in Michigan have gone apocalyptic after seeing the Great Lakes State flip red. The only explanation for the results, according to their frantic social media posts this week, is that Michiganders, and everyone else across the country who voted for Trump, just hate women. Oh, and they’re racist.
“I think sexism and racism played a large part,” Detroit political consultant Mario Morrow Sr. said. “The Republicans, in my opinion, felt they didn’t feel comfortable with a woman, No. 1, and a black woman, No. 2, being the commander in chief.”
I find this sentiment revolting, but can understand why brainwashed voters might feel this way. After all, they’ve just spent the past year or so being told by the highest levels of the Democratic Party that this election represents an existential moment for women’s rights. On Election Day, for example, Transportation Secretary and new Michigan resident, Pete Buttigieg, reminded Democratic voters gathered in Detroit that the choice between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris boiled down to whether “a woman [gets to make] her own healthcare decisions.”
By healthcare, Buttigieg means access to abortion, the legality of which was enshrined into the Michigan state constitution by the state’s voters in 2022. Apparently, this needs to be said over and over again: Abortion is not at risk in Michigan.
Nor is at risk federally, since Trump made it clear repeatedly that he has no interest in splitting the GOP in two by trying to jam through a national abortion ban.
Trump’s middle-of-the-road approach to abortion could be part of the reason why so many women turned out to vote for him. Or it could just be that women, especially those in Michigan, where gas prices have increased by more than $1 a gallon since Harris took office as vice president, and where grocery prices have increased by as much as 15% in some parts of the state, care about other things more.
Indeed, for all the talk from Buttigieg and the Harris campaign about the coming female revolt, Trump ended up improving his standing among female voters by two points, compared with his last run in 2020. Among Gen Z women, Trump gained seven points, compared with his 2020 performance.
It might be comforting to dismiss all of these women as uninformed, self-defeating pawns, and, like Mulaney’s character, reject any argument to the contrary. But eventually, that bubble is going to burst.
Those who have been trapped inside will be lucky if reality has as kindly a face as Margaret Atwood.
Kaylee McGhee White is the Restoring America editor for the Washington Examiner, a Tony Blankley fellow for the Steamboat Institute, and a senior fellow for the Independent Women’s Forum. She grew up in Metro Detroit and graduated from Hillsdale College. Follow her on X @KayleeDMcGhee.