In Monday’s edition of Wow These White Women Really Love Trump, we have The Guardian with a brief profile of a few members of Women for Trump, a group comprised of women who say things like, “My husband is an alpha male, and sometimes I get irritated with him, but I wouldn’t want to be married to anything else.” Same old, same old. Still, the piece offers something new or at least previously unknown to me: “Trumperware” parties.
The women of the Michigan chapter of Women for Trump throw themselves “Trumperware” parties where they show off bedazzled Trump gear and dish about Trump’s accomplishments. This is a rebrand of a familiar practice: white women have historically used domestic spaces and gendered social networks to do reactionary political organizing.
At these Trumperware parties, they say things like:
Maddock said she isn’t worried about race, as she “doesn’t like identity politics, and I don’t think Trump likes that either”. She added that Women for Trump exists to get more women involved regardless of their race.
And:
“The biggest questions I get are [about Trump’s tweeting] and the way he says things, and I tell them: ‘You don’t have to date him, you don’t have to marry him, you just have to want to get the country going in the right direction,’” Kurek said.
Okay.
Whereas the group served a largely ornamental function in the last election—white women wanted their racism served up with more feminine branding—Women for Trump are getting more organized and encouraging their members to run for office, whether it’s school board or a local council seat:
“The left is taking over your children and indoctrinating them with leftist ideas, so we need women like you to step up and run for the school board and take our schools back,” Maddock told the group. Next she put out the call for volunteers to monitor vote counts on election day.
“We have to protect the vote – you all know that the left works very hard to steal our votes,” Maddock said.
“We want people to step up, get out of their comfort zone, run for the school board, run for [local office], because that’s how you build your bench and get people to come into those positions. Then they’re more comfortable to run for the state positions,” the group’s co-founder Rosanne Ponkowski told the Guardian. It’s a frightening prospect, and we know what it looks like because we’ve already been there.
This time around, they’re calling it “Trumperware” parties.