Trump's getting desperate: Now he turns to failing Moms for Liberty | Salon.com
By: Amanda Marcotte
2 months until the election and the trump campaign finally realizes their lack of support among the largest US voting block...
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Donald Trump has a woman problem — and it's not just his pending court cases regarding his sexual assault of journalist E. Jean Carroll. Polling shows a growing divergence between male and female voters that could become the largest election gender gap in history. A new CBS poll found that 56% of women say they plan to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, while 54% of men say they're backing Trump. The problem for Trump is that women historically vote more than men and, the percentage of the electorate that is female grows more each presidential election cycle.
It's not hard to see why most women despise Trump, a man who bragged about sexually assaulting women on tape. On the policy front, of course, Trump is the single person most responsible for the overturn of Roe v. Wade. The published agenda for his second term, Project 2025, includes plans for a national abortion ban and restrictions on contraception. Not only does Trump not try to hide his misogyny, but his campaign makes it a selling point in a bid to win over bitter male voters. On Wednesday, Trump posted a sexually explicit comment about Harris to Truth Social, accusing her of selling sex because she dated other men before she met her husband. As Anderson Cooper noted on CNN, this is not "out of character" for Trump, who usually calls women "pigs," "dogs," and "nasty" for showing anything but submission to him.
Trump's campaign is in danger if he can't get at least a few skeptical women to vote for him. So on Friday, Trump is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the third annual Moms for Liberty summit in Washington, D.C. It's another sign that his campaign has run out of ideas to appeal to women. Moms for Liberty's fall from political grace has been as rapid as their rise to prominence. Associating with the group is more likely to hurt Trump with female voters than to help him.
Moms for Liberty was founded in January 2021. Initially, the group found success in helping Republicans claw back support from suburban women that had been lost during the Trump presidency. By channeling the frustrations parents felt over pandemic school closures, Moms for Liberty positioned itself as a moderate-seeming "parental rights" organization. In reality, the group was controlled by far-right activists with deep ties to Christian nationalism. When Moms for Liberty-linked school board members started taking actions like banning books and vilifying LGBTQ teachers, it provoked a nationwide backlash, with parents in affected communities coming together to kick Moms for Liberty members off their school boards.
It's safe to say the "Moms for Liberty" brand is toxic now. One of its founders, Bridget Ziegler, got caught up in a sex scandal when a woman she and her husband were meeting for threesomes accused her husband, Christian Ziegler, of rape. (The case was eventually dropped after police claimed insufficient evidence.) With the pandemic over, all the group had left, issue-wise, was their zeal for book banning, which is a wildly unpopular position. In addition, they're closely associated with Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, who has become something of a punchline after spending $160 million in the GOP presidential primary only to be handed a humiliating defeat by Trump.
"DeSantis and MfL appear to have lost their juice," journalist Kelly Weill wrote in her recent MomLeft newsletter. "In 2022, the group claimed to have elected approximately half of its 500-plus school board candidates," reaching an 80% success rate in Florida. In 2023, however, the group only won 35% of its races, and that's after dramatically scaling back the number of candidates they were running. This month, Moms for Liberty got another shellacking, as only 6 out of 23 candidates backed by DeSantis and Moms for Liberty in Florida even won a primary.
"Big losses across the state for candidates who advanced the group's agenda, including efforts to ban library books and restrict lessons about race, sex and gender, pointed to mounting dissatisfaction with an organization that had quickly gained sway with powerful Republicans amid the anti-mask, parental rights politics of the pandemic," reports the Tampa Bay Times.
Despite this, Politico reports, "Republicans show no signs of changing their strategy." Last year, Trump's speech before Moms for Liberty drew heavily on plans outlined in Project 2025 to gut public education altogether, starting with abolishing the Department of Education. This year, Moms for Liberty head Tiffany Justice said she hopes "to hear some more plans" regarding this, because "it's a little more complicated than just waving a magic wand and making it go away." Democrats no doubt agree they'd like to hear more about Trump's plan to end the Department of Education, as 64% of Americans oppose the idea.
That Trump and Republicans are sticking with Moms of Liberty suggests they're desperate. Polling shows that since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the nominee, there's been a major uptick in female support for the Democratic ticket. On Tuesday, Democratic research firm TargetSmart published a new report chronicling the surge of voter registrations since Harris joined the race, including a whopping 175% spike in registrations from Black women under 30.
Harris' appeal is a huge part of this, but it's also driven by women's outrage over Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. Vance can't seem to pull his nose out of women's uteruses. New quotes of Vance painting childless women as "miserable cat ladies" and "sociopathic" are released practically every day. Like Trump, he has a special zeal for attacking hardworking schoolteachers, claiming teachers who do not have biological children "disorient and really disturb" him.
In response, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, said, "It sure seems like Vance lacks an empathy gene—thank goodness he's not a teacher."
This rhetoric seems like it will only further alienate female voters, especially mothers who tend to have close relationships with local teachers and know they don't need to be parents to be skilled professionals. (For one thing, most start teaching full-time at age 22. That's five years younger than the average age of a first-time parent, and 12 years younger than when Vance had his first child.) It just reinforces the accusation of the Harris campaign that Vance is "weird" and out of touch with how normal Americans live.
But it's not like Trump and Vance have a lot of options for reaching out to female voters. Moms for Liberty's brand is failing and their views are unpopular, but they do have "Moms" in their name and female leaders for Trump to be photographed with. If you squint hard enough, that could look like Trump playing nice with women. Moms for Liberty doesn't offer much, but it's the best the Trump campaign can do.
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moms for liberty is a group of self-regulated suburban former sex workers...
Former?
I don't think it's cash being exchanged at the local maga swinger parties...
Look at that - Kamala is appealing to young black women according to the surge in voter registrations in women under 30 and there's also Taylor Swift fans to consider.
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I guess when you've responded to accusations of misogny by choosing an openly misogynistic running mate, your options for getting votes from women dwindle pretty quickly.
What a shame.
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The ones where they say 'We took away women's bodily autonomy, made pregnancy as life-threatening as it could possibly be in some states, reduced them to "binders of women", ignored issues like affordable childcare and healthcare (you know, those "kitchen table issues" we hear so much about), and really came down hard on "miserable childless cat ladies" and teachers who don't have children of their own being creepy. We just don't understand why women vote for the other side, especially when the other side's candidate is a woman about whom we keep making misogynistic comments. Where are we going wrong?'
Yeah, those are pretty amusing.
Maybe next time, we'll see open advocacy for burkhas and lashing women who leave the house without a male relative to escort them. After all, those precious women must be protected. Surely, those precious women will see how deeply they're being valued, right?
yeah, but too bad you didn't quote me for those unfamiliar with terms in the political vernacular for 16 years...
I have a grand niece that just graduated from college in May, and got a job for the new school year teaching 3rd graders in a public school in a Chicago suburb. She is 22 years old and has wanted to be a teacher since her early teen age years. She loves kids and will do a great job. She has no kids and who knows if she ever will? Nothing is a sure thing. JD Vance is a disgrace to this country.
Anyone who wants to ban books knows nothing about "liberty"
these are the same people that fly "fuck biden" flags, cheer their hero's blowjob retweets, and are too stupid to monitor what their kids are doing on their cellphones and the internet...