Editorial: If Donald Trump was a Woman

Lily Reavis, Editor-in-Chief

Consider the presidential candidacy of an impetuous, rich, over-suntanned female real estate agent. She’s filed for bankruptcy six different times and has never held a political position before. She’s currently on her third marriage, and she has five children split between her spouses. Welcome to the world of Donna Trump.

Her sexual encounters have been prolific, at least according to her frequent and vulgar recounts. Often, she is asked about her beliefs on sexual assault – and accused of committing the crime – but the subject is hardly pursued. She has a tendency to refer to men, including her husbands and children, as “pigs”, “slobs”, “dogs” etc. She once went as far as to crack an incest gag referring to her son, Ivan.

Instead of listening to her opponent during debates, she constantly interrupts them. In the last debate of the season, she went as far as to call her opponent a “nasty man.”

Without even looking into her political stances, one can tell that Donna’s candidacy would be regarded as a joke to the public. She would be knocked out of the race at the first chance, if she even collected enough signatures to appear on the first-draft ballot.

This presidential race has been filled with conversations about gender, though most (if not all) of it has been aimed at Hillary Clinton. While the prospect of the first woman president is exciting, that’s not what the conversation has centered on.

In November 2015, Trump accused Clinton of playing the “woman card.” He said, “Well, I think the only card she has is the woman’s card. She’s got nothing else going on. And frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the women’s vote. And the beautiful thing is that women don’t like her, OK?”

Clinton has focused on her gender during the election, coining the hashtag “I’mWithHer” and continuously fighting for women’s rights. However, the “woman card” isn’t viable. Not only is it a false concept, it is based out of sexist and stereotyping American history that has never before seen a female presidential nominee of a major political party.

Furthermore, Trump’s assertion that women “don’t like” Clinton is absurd and factually incorrect. Recent polls prove that this election may be the most gender-divided in American history. Women favor Clinton by roughly 13%, while men lean to Trump by 12%.

Audio of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women was leaked with only one month remaining in his campaign. While this incident originally caught media’s attention, it was ultimately dismissed without much conversation. According to New York Magazine, there are currently 21 assault charges against Trump, though this has hardly been discussed during the race. One of the charges, for raping a 13-year-old girl, was dropped on November 4, after the victim claimed her life was being threatened.

Meanwhile, Clinton has been answering the same questions about emails since the beginning of her campaign. The case was reopened by the FBI at the end of October, causing question about the Bureau’s presidential bid. Donna Trump would be questioned ruthlessly about her sexual assault accusations, as evidenced by Clinton’s emails, and media attention would be much more focused on them.

Even without this negative media attention, Trump has continually blamed the media for losing polls against Clinton. Although the tweet has since been deleted, he called for the cancelling of SNL based on their presidential race parodies earlier this year.

The presidential race will end tomorrow, and current polls have Clinton up by 2.9%.

If Trump were a woman, would people still vote for her? And if not, then why are people voting for him in the first place? It’s clear that he is more bigoted than Republican, which means that people are so intent on having a man for president that they are willing to risk future American growth. This man has engaged in behavior so ignorant and reckless that it would never be tolerated from a woman or an individual belonging to a minority. American sexism and racism has nearly caused the biggest disaster that the country has ever faced, and the progression that women have made in the past fifty years is set to be quickly eroded. Donna Trump would never be virtually tied in the polls one day before the election, and the fact that Donald is speaks dramatically to the American voice.