Opinion | The GOP’s attacks on Kamala Harris send an unmistakable message about how they see women

Fox News host Jesse Watters’ gross commentary about Kamala Harris highlighted the routinely sexist and sexualized things conservatives have said recently about the vice president. “She’s going to get paralyzed in the Situation Room while the generals have their way with her,” Watters said on air Tuesday. You could tell he knew he’d gone just a little too far with his rhetoric after his co-host, Jeanine Pirro (a staunch Trumper), reprimanded him and said, “I don’t like that.”

Watters denied that his remark was intended to suggest “anything of a sexual nature,” and he went on to say, “I’m sure my mother was probably go on MSNBC tonight and say ‘My son, Jesse Watters, made a joke about Kamala Harris being manhandled by generals in the situation room. … It is disgusting.’ I can see my mom doing that.” Watters often brings up his liberal mom as a way to temper criticism of his far-right discourse. But there’s something deeper at play here that we shouldn’t ignore.

Watters’ remarks are part of a pattern of misogynistic attacks against Harris and other women who displease Republicans. On Thursday, the leader of the Republican Party first shared, then deleted, a post that, as described by The Washington Post, “amplified a vulgar joke about Vice President Kamala Harris performing a sex act.” According to The Guardian, “The comment was an oblique reference to innuendo surrounding Harris’s former relationship with Willie Brown, the San Francisco mayor.” Donald Trump has made this misogynistic “joke” before, at one point reposting a video that included the line “She spent her whole damn life down on her knees.” Both attacks are abhorrent and misogynistic, but we shouldn’t be surprised; Trump has used this brand of attack on women since he entered the public arena. He has called Stormy Daniels, the adult film actor he paid for silence, “horseface.” And, of course, one of Trump’s favorite insults is calling women “nasty.”

Misogyny, like racism, is routinely used by Trump and many of his people. Perhaps even more noteworthy, though, is the simplistic tactic we’ve seen him use over and over again when he faces backlash or realizes he’s said something that is going to get him in trouble: He says he’s just joking and, with that claim, brushes it off.

In his current campaign, Trump proclaimed his plans to be a “dictator on day one” if elected in November. Pressed at times later, he has claimed he said it in jest. In 2016, he said at a news conference: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” alluding to Russian hackers who uncovered emails he claimed Hillary Clinton had deleted. Later Trump told special counsel Robert Mueller that those statements were said “in jest and sarcastically, as was apparent to any objective observer.” 

As far as jokes go, it strikes me that these things don’t seem very funny. Yet saying that something was said as a joke helps desensitize his audience to things that would otherwise seem very untoward and out of the mainstream — becoming a dictator, making light of a threat like Russian hacking, saying the elected vice president is in her position only because of her sexuality. It might all seem glaringly wrong, but if the right people — i.e. his base — believe the joke to be real, that may be enough for his supporters. 

Trump’s campaign, and, by extension the Republican Party are committed to a vision of women that’s profoundly stuck in the 1950s. His running mate, JD Vance, has repeated a plethora of misogynistic tropes, including calling Democratic women “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” And then there was the interview in 2020 when Vance agrees with a podcast host who says having grandmothers help raise children is “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female.” And then there were his attacks on a leader of the teachers union, who is a stepmother: “Randi Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teachers union in the country, she doesn’t have a single child. If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.” The message here is clear: Women are supposed to have babies; that’s our purpose. Women’s value is tied to reproduction, and anything perceived not to lead to that goal is viewed as useless or wrong.  

And all of this tracks if you look at most Republican policies being proposed right now. What doesn’t track is the claim by anyone in the party that they’re being less than serious about remarks about women or the roles they should play. Trump, for example, has recently disavowed policies that restrict abortion access, continues to flip-flop on the issue and has tried to vaguely claim his party would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.”

He has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, despite reports linking him and the platform in undeniable ways. The project is a receptacle of many of the GOP policy fantasies, including regulating IVF, using the Comstock Act to regulate the mailing of abortion pills and abolishing no-fault divorce.

These are policies that make it less safe to be a pregnant woman, less safe to be a married woman and less safe to be a woman generally. So don’t let the Republican rhetoric scare you, as distasteful as it may be — but when it comes to Republican policies, we should definitely be very scared.