A.O.C. and the Jurassic Jerks

For the Cave Man President and his party, clubbing women is not a path to victory.

President Trump is oh so proud of having mastered the ability to intone, “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”

But the more pressing issue is whether he is a person who can master talking to women through a TV camera without sounding like a cave man.

We continually debate whether Trump is a madman, but there’s no doubt he’s a Mad Man. He’s a ring-a-ding-ding guy, stuck in a time warp redolent of Vegas with the Rat Pack in 1959, talking about how “broads” and “skirts” rate. He was in his element bro-ing out with Dave Portnoy in an interview for “Barstool Sports” that aired Friday.

Trump’s idea of wooing the women’s vote, which is decisive in this election, was to tweet out a New York Post story headlined “Joe Biden’s disastrous plans for America’s suburbs” with the directive: “The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article.”

Clearly, the 74-year-old president thinks that American women are in the kitchen, clutching their pearls à la June Cleaver, sheltered in the ’burbs in their gingham aprons, waiting for their big, brave breadwinners to come home after a hard day’s work manhandling their secretaries.

Trump believes that the coveted electoral cohort that used to be known as soccer moms are actually sucker moms, naïve enough to fall for his schtick that the unleashed forces of urban America are marching toward their manicured lawns.

How perfect that the pussy-grabbing president — whose personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, got in trouble over his boss’s porn-star payout — wants to protect the desperate housewives of America.

In a speech on drug prices on Friday, Trump took his strange brand of feminism for a spin, pausing while he talked about middlemen profiting in the Big Pharma arena, to say “and women, I guess.”

On the Bulwark, a conservative website, Sarah Longwell wrote about her three-years-worth of focus groups with women who voted for Trump in 2016.

She found that they chose Trump over Hillary Clinton because they did not like Clinton and because they felt that Bill Clinton’s bad behavior with women canceled out Trump’s bad behavior with women.

But the relationship with women voters has soured, not only because of his pugnacity and bullying, but because of his lack of compassion and competence dealing with the coronavirus and painful issues about race.

“They don’t see Trump as someone who can protect them from the chaos,’’ Longwell wrote. “They think he’s the source of it.”

And his party is on board with the antediluvian vibe. R-Misogyny. Even on the 100th anniversary of women getting the vote, Republicans can’t help themselves.

It feels strange to be typing something positive in a sentence with the word Cheney in it, but it was disturbing to see a bunch of MAGA bros in Congress beat up on Liz Cheney because, among other offenses to the cult of Trump, she defended Dr. Anthony Fauci and shaded Trump on his denial on the virus by tweeting a picture of her father in a mask with the hashtag, “realmenwearmasks.”

One Trump disciple in the House, Rep. Matt Gaetztweeted that “Liz Cheney has worked behind the scenes (and now in public) against @realDonald Trump and his agenda.” He added, “Liz Cheney should step down or be removed.”

Donald Jr. chimed in on Twitter, “We already have one Mitt Romney, we don’t need another.”

(Of course, while it feels strange to be typing something positive in a sentence with the word Trump in it, Don Jr. was right in his second point, “We also don’t need the endless wars she advocates for.” That point was echoed by the president on Twitter. I would never agree with a Cheney’s mindless hawkishness.)

As Republicans sniped, one Democrat soared.

Ted Yoho, a Florida Republican, tried to slap down Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A reporter overheard him muttering that the congresswoman was “a fucking bitch” as Yoho walked away after having an argument with her about crime and policing on the steps of the Capitol. (Yoho denies he said it.)

The youngest woman to ever serve in Congress is so full of natural political talent, burning so bright, that the 2020 field seems dull next to her luster. It was a remarkable moment on Capitol Hill, where for years super-achieving women have let such sexist remarks slide.

She went to the House floor Thursday and schooled Yoho the Yahoo and the retrograde crowd.

“Mr. Yoho mentioned that he has a wife and two daughters,” she said. “I am two years younger than Mr. Yoho’s youngest daughter. I am someone’s daughter, too.” She added, “I am here because I have to show my parents that I am their daughter, and that they did not raise me to accept abuse from men.”

Showing her skill in a generational dimension foreign to Congress until now, A.O.C. posted a video of herself on Instagram Stories strutting to the rap tune “Boss Bitch” by Doja Cat, her long hair whipping to the music, with the Capitol in the background. “I’m a bitch and a boss, Im’a shine like gloss.” She captioned it: “Shine on, fight for others, and let the haters stay mad.”

And that’s the way you make Paleolithic men understand that they are history.

A.O.C. and the Daughter Defense

Sorry, Ted Yoho. Having daughters doesn’t get you a sexism free pass.

Brett Kavanaugh invoked it. Mitch McConnell used it too. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have each talked about it, and this week, Representative Ted Yoho joined their ranks: he, too, is now a member of the having-a-daughter-makes-me-an-ally-to-women — or at the very least, should-excuse-my-bad-behavior — club.

“Having been married for 45 years with two daughters, I’m very cognizant of language,” Representative Yoho said in a speech on the House floor this week, denying that he called Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman Congresswoman from New York, a “fucking bitch” after a confrontation on the steps of the Capitol.

Mr. Yoho later expressed regret for the “abrupt manner of the conversation,” in which he told Ms. Ocasio-Cortez that her statements about poverty and crime in New York City were “disgusting.” But, he noted, “I cannot apologize for my passion or for loving my God, my family and my country.”

On Thursday, in a speech on the House floor that has since gone viral — in which she read the vulgarity into the Congressional record — Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said, “I am someone’s daughter too.” She said she’d planned to ignore the insults — it’s “just another day” as a woman, she said — but changed her mind after Mr. Yoho decided to bring his wife and daughters into the fray.

Our culture is full of platitudes about fathers and daughters: the Hallmark card, the weeping dad at the wedding. But invoking daughters and wives to deflect criticism is a particular kind of political trope — and one that’s been used throughout history to “excuse a host of bad behavior,” said the historian Barbara Berg.

The love a man has for the female members of his family, particularly his offspring, is presumed to have special power — to humanize the other half of the population, to allow him to imagine the world his daughter will inhabit. Sometimes, in fact, this happens. Other times, the Daughter Excuse comes across mostly as cynical ploy.

“As if familial affiliation alone equals enlightened attitudes towards women,” said Susan Douglas, a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan. “It’s like claiming ‘I have a Black friend‚’ as if that makes you anti-racist.”

There is social science that’s shown there is something to being the father of a daughter.

In a study called “The First-Daughter Effect,” Elizabeth Sharrow, an associate professor of public policy and history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her colleagues, determined that fathering daughters — and firstborn daughters, in particular — indeed played a role in making men’s attitudes toward gender equality more progressive, particularly when it came to policies like equal pay or sexual harassment protocols. The researchers also determined that those dads of firstborn daughters were, in 2016, more likely to support Hillary Clinton or a fictional female congressional candidate delivering a similar pitch.

“Our argument is not that it is genetics or biology, but that it is proximity,” said Dr. Sharrow. In other words: The daughters help the fathers see the problems they may have previously dismissed.

Witness basketball star Stephen Curry, who has written about how “the idea of women’s equality has become a little more personal for me, lately, and a little more real,” since having a daughter.

Or Dick Cheney, whose views on same-sex marriage shifted earlier than many might have expected because of his daughter, who is gay.

And yet.

Daughters influencing fathers’ views for the better is far different from fathers using their daughters as “shields and excuses for poor behavior,” as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez described Mr. Yoho in her speech.

It’s also different from fathers using them as “props,” as Dr. Berg puts it, to emphasize their alignment with women’s causes — or, by contrast, their disgust over behaviors perceived to be in opposition to them.

Consider Justice Kavanaugh, who — during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee about allegations of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford — spoke repeatedly of his daughters (as well as his wife and mother) and noted that coaching his daughter’s basketball team was what he loved “more than anything I’ve ever done in my whole life” — as if loving coaching and allegedly treating women badly as a teenager are mutually exclusive.

“Men have often pointed to their relationships with and love for some women — especially wives and daughters — to combat claims that they have mistreated other women,” said Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “We have seen this both inside and outside of politics, especially when men are subject to accusations of sexual harassment and assault.”

In the wake of the 2016 reports on comments made by Donald Trump on the now-infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, a host of fathers-of-daughters came out to condemn the behavior. Mr. McConnell noted that “as the father of three daughters” he believed that Mr. Trump “needs to apologize directly to women and girls everywhere,” while Mitt Romney said that the comments “demean our wives and daughters.” (It is perhaps worth noting that Mr. Trump, too, has daughters.)

Similarly, in response to revelations of sexual misconduct by Harvey Weinstein, both Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, who had worked with the disgraced Hollywood producer, expressed their disgust on behalf of their female offspring. We “need to do better at protecting our friends, sisters, co-workers and daughters,” Mr. Affleck said on Twitter, while Mr. Damon explained that “as the father of four daughters, this is the kind of sexual predation that keeps me up at night.”

Women, too, have at times invoked men’s daughters — and other female relatives — in trying to appeal to some men. When asked about Mr. Yoho’s behavior, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: “What’s so funny is, you’d say to them, ‘Do you not have a daughter? Do you not have a mother? Do you not have a sister? Do you not have a wife? What makes you think that you can be so’ — and this is the word I use for them — ‘condescending, in addition to being disrespectful?’”

The caveat, of course, is the qualification. “Qualifying your outrage against misogyny as due to your role as a father or husband implies that, absent those roles, you would be either unaware of or unconcerned,” said Dr. Dittmar.

Or as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez put it: “Having a daughter does not make a man decent. Having a wife does not make a decent man. Treating people with dignity and respect makes a decent man.” Why should daughters still have to be a prerequisite to respect?

Who Stopped the Republican Health Bill?

33 Republicans who would not budge from their decisions to vote “no” on the health care bill were key to causing its collapse. They can be divided into three broad categories:

15 Hard-liners

10 Moderates

Other Republicans