Trump Wants to Recruit Women Voters, Starting in King of Prussia

President Donald Trump (Wikimedia Commons).

Donald Trump wants more women to vote for him.

Yes, this past weekend the president did in fact tell four freshman lawmakers — Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, all women of color — to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested” countries they came from (for three of the four, that country would be … the United States), drawing a sharp outcry from legislators, officials and voters alike … many of them women. But neither the pushback to his words, nor the backlash against similarly xenophobic statements made in the past, nor even Trump’s many controversies surrounding women, will stop his campaign from attempting to win over women this week, starting at a King of Prussia casino.

The campaign’s new national push for support — Women for Trump — kicked off inside the Valley Forge Casino Resort on Tuesday. Leading the charge is Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.

Speaking with the Dom Giordano Program on Monday, Lara said she and other organizers plan to “just talk about why women love Donald Trump.”

“The reality is that whenever you listen to the mainstream media, they say women would not vote for Donald Trump, and I knew that wasn’t true … Donald Trump has been great for women, and we’re just out there to remind everybody to get in gear, let’s mobilize, let’s empower women all across this country to get out and support our president,” Lara said.

.@GOPChairwoman opens #WomenforTrump rally in KoP: "The difference between our party and Democrats is we treat women as the whole voter. Women care about health care, we care about education we care about our military. And yes, we do care about the unborn." @KYWNewsradio pic.twitter.com/WG3sqt7wr7

— Jim Melwert (@JMelwert) July 16, 2019

The problem? Women didn’t exactly come out in droves for Trump in 2016, and polls show their continued low approval rating for the president. Of course, as Trump’s recent comments exemplify, Lara could easily be referring to a specific group of women: white women.

Trump secured votes from only 39 percent of women who voted in the 2016 election, while Hillary Clinton received votes from 54 percent, according to a PEW Research Center examination of validated voter turnout data. But when you look specifically at white women voters, the majority supported Trump: 47 percent as opposed to the 45 percent who voted for Clinton. (An even higher percentage of non-college-educated white women voted for Trump, according to exit polls.) Meanwhile, 98 percent of black women and 67 percent of Hispanic women who voted chose Clinton.

Here in Pennsylvania, a battleground state, at least 56 percent of non-college-educated white women who voted in 2016 supported Trump, according to exit polls. The Women for Trump campaign could be aiming to re-secure that block of voters — as well as college-educated white women who helped elect the president in 2016 — in 2020. Hence Lara’s decision to start the push in KOP, an educated, majority white Pennsylvania community.

“Pennsylvania is such an important state,” Lara said on the Dom Giordano Program. “We wanted to do something big, we wanted to do something in a key state. Where better than in Pa.?”

Pennsylvania’s Republican U.S. senator, Pat Toomey, called Trump’s tweets regarding the Democratic Congresswomen “wrong.” He characteristically stopped short of calling them racist or xenophobic, though, as other lawmakers have (including Republican U.S. Rep. Will Hurd), stating instead that Republicans should “defeat” the lawmakers “on the merits, not on the basis of their ancestry.”

U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean, meanwhile, whose district includes KOP, chose not to walk a middle ground.

“While it may no longer surprise us, this ignorant, racist attack on my colleagues should still shock us to our core,” Dean said in a tweet on Sunday. “This man is unfit to lead.”