“It’s really hard for a lot of conservative women to contemplate the idea of feminism because it’s been so owned by liberal democrats pushing very progressive policy ideas,” Amanda Carpenter, a CNN contributor and former communications aide to Sen. Ted Cruz, said in a Washington Post video released yesterday. But drastic times, apparently, call for drastic measures.
As a former communications aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and former senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), I can personally testify that Republican women have, for years, fended off accusations from the Democrats of the party’s allegedly anti-woman beliefs. What did we get for it? The nomination — by way of a largely older, male voting base — of a brazen and unapologetic misogynist.
Along with the rest of the world, the Republican party, Carpenter charged, had plenty of evidence of Trump’s chauvinism before the pussy recordings were released, and deliberately chose to ignore it in favor of the “Hillary Sucks, But Not Like Monica!” crowd. She compared Trump’s endorsers to “dead-eyed zombies who readily salute ‘Mr. Trump.,’” including her former boss (who, sadly, has struggled with the dead-eyed zombie look for some time)—“apparently, the pressure became too much to bear,” she said of Cruz’s flip flop.
“If the GOP has truly convinced itself that openly engaging in sexual assault fantasies is something normal that men do among one another, I have a suggestion,” Carpenter wrote. “Relocate the Republican National Committee headquarters into a men’s-only locker room. Eliminate all pretenses of wanting to let women in.”
Carpenter, like many “Never Trump” Republicans who reject Trumpian rhetoric but haven’t quite freed themselves of the idea that Hillary Clinton is a goblin from hell, said she plans to leave the top of the ticket blank.
Republican women are un-endorsing Trump twice as fast as men, and among the electorate, white college-educated women are abandoning the party in spades. But a note to Republican women who are suddenly flummoxed, despite years of “legitimate rape” and disintegrating women’s health care access and creepy Fox News segments, that the GOP hasn’t rushed to their defense: ya been conned, ladies. The Republican party was never for you.
