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The Independent UK
The Independent UK
National
Alex Woodward

Trump praises men for ‘allowing’ their wives to attend MAGA rallies without them

AFP via Getty Images

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While his polling with women begins to sink, Donald Trump praised his supporters’s husbands for “allowing” their wives to attend his campaign rallies without them.

“Somebody said, ‘Women don’t like Donald Trump,’” he said from a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania on August 30. “I said, ‘I think that’s wrong. I think they love me.’ I love them.”

He pointed to a group of women from North Carolina who have traveled to 227 rallies.

“They’re wealthy as hell. Look at them. They’ve got nothing but cash,” he added. “Their husbands are great. But they allow them to go all over the country.

The former president then recalled asking their husbands how they “put up” with their wives going on the road.

“How do you put up with this?” he said he remembered asking them at one point. “Your wives are traveling all over the place. Do you mind?”

“‘We trust our wives, sir,’” Trump recalled the men telling him. “We trust them implicitly.”

Donald Trump speaks to supporters in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on August 30. There, he praised men for allowing women to attend the rally alone. (AFP via Getty Images)

Trump said the women are “always perfectly coiffed.”

“They’re always perfectly coiffed, right? They’re beautiful,” he said.

Despite Trump’s claims that women “love” him, the gender gap is widening between Trump and his Democratic rival Kamala Harris, according to the latest polling from ABC News/Ipsos.

Within the week after the Democratic National Convention, Harris is leading by 13 points among women, at 54 percent to 41 percent. White women — a key demographic that helped carry Trump him to victory in 2016 — have gone from 13 points up for Trump to a virtual dead heat, with Trump up by 2 points, within the margin of error, according to poll results.

Separate polling from The New York Times/Siena College also finds that a growing share of women — up to 22 percent from 17 percent earlier this year — say that abortion rights is the biggest issue deciding their vote this year.

By wide margins, women trust Harris on abortion rights, according to the poll, while Trump and his running mate JD Vance are facing mounting scrutiny for their shifting public statements and history of support for anti-abortion measures, their endorsement of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade and Vance’s failure to support federal legislation to protect access to in vitro fertilization, while Trump now claims that his administration would do the same.

The former president’s latest rally comments also come as Vance continues to manage blowback from resurfaced remarks about childless adults that he has suggested should have lesser roles in society, while Trump — who is on tape bragging about grabbing women’s genitals and was found liable by a jury for sexual assault — has recently amplified explicit sexist attacks targeting his political rivals.

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