Trump’s childish displays throughout his campaign are all too familiar to women everywhere. We’ve seen those outbursts, interruptions, challenges to our qualifications, and condescending looks of superiority. We’ve seen them our entire lives in the office, in the classroom, even in the playground.
He’s taken his Trumpisms to new levels since losing the first presidential debate. His latest tweet, “Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a US citizen so she could use her in the debate?” is just another example of how Trump reacts when he is not getting his way.
When Trump felt the debate slipping from his small hands, he resorted to questioning Hillary’s qualifications. As a woman, I have experienced the same: a male colleague who constantly questioned my promotions at work; a classmate in the sixth grade who thought I didn’t belong in honors classes because of my gender and race and; strange men on twitter who ask if my skills in the bedroom made me a VP at Goldman Sachs. In my just-published memoir, My (Underground) American Dream, I detail my climb on Wall Street and the struggles to navigate a world ruled by men—a world in which a man asking for a promotion is confidence and a woman doing the same is aggressive.
Trump asks what has Hillary has done in the last 30 years? Let me lay it out for him: Hillary graduated from Yale Law School, defended children’s rights as an attorney for the Children’s Defense Fund, improved Arkansas’s education system, worked on a bi-partisan bill to give 8 million children health insurance, and has been a Senator and Secretary of State. I literally ran out of breath listing out loud Hillary’s resume; she has the most impressive resume of anyone, ever to run President.
But it doesn’t matter how much Hillary has accomplished, because an ill-qualified man can still stand next to her, interrupt her and question her abilities all while being seen as confident. It doesn’t matter how much she has accomplished because after the debate Trump can still bring up her husband’s indiscretions as though they were her own. Enough is Enough. We live in 2016, a time when the dream of a woman president is almost a reality. Our daughters can grow up in culture that does not accept this kind of behavior from a man. But it is up to us to stand up to Trump.
The debate rules were clear, do not interrupt your opponent, wait your turn. But Trump constantly interrupted Hillary Clinton. When Clinton or even the moderator, Lester Holt, tried to interrupt him, he reminded them, “I am talking.”
Trump is the embodiment of our sexist, macho, American culture. If his calling women slobs, miss piggy, miss housekeeping didn’t convince you that he is a misogynist, his debate performance certainly should.
Standing up to Trump at the ballot in November is standing up to every sleazy boss that has looked at us with lustful eyes. It is standing up to every colleague or classmate that has suggested we excelled because of our bodies and not our brain. It is standing up to the bully at the playground who pushed us and told us we ran like girls. We will certainly run like girls on November 8th, when we cast our vote at the polls and say enough is enough.
