Donald Trump’s commitment to preserving the suburban housewives’ way of life is nothing new but it is racist and ridiculous. Trump views this favorite demographic as a sea of slim white creatures wearing shirt-waist dresses and measuring sugar into a pitcher of homemade lemonade. Trump’s suburban housewife spends too much time gabbing on a landline with her best friend before finally checking her Bulova and exclaiming: “Marge! It’s almost 4:30! Bill’s going to be home in half an hour and I haven’t even started the stroganoff!”
Trump, whose affection for TV is literally the only thing we have in common, believes this is what suburban women are like. Her busy life revolves around picking up hubby’s shirts at the dry-cleaners, telling little Billy he will have to wait for dad to come home if he “needs help with that stinky old math!” and fretting about people of color moving into her neighborhood and looting her house.
Trump is mid-century but definitely not mid-century modern. In his ’50s sitcom mentality, suburban women are addressed by their martini-soaked husbands as “Daaahhhhling.”
Remember the nonsensical windmill rant of 2018? Sure, you do. Trump was picking a fight with wind for no apparent reason when he decided to riff on an imagined conversation between a suburban husband and wife.
“Daaaahhhhling,” he said playing the part of the man, apparently, “please turn off the TV; there is no wind.”
First of all, turn it off your own damn self. Second of all, does he really think that’s how people talk? Like Eva Gabor in “Green Acres”? I’m guessing that’s a yes.
Trump’s backward view of modern suburban women would be comical if it weren’t so utterly racist.
He is the grand white savior of the suburbs. There, there, housewife. I won’t let any affordable housing be built in your neighborhood and mess up your property values.
Trump thinks suburban women sit around sipping coffee in their pink peignoirs and matching mules most of the morning before heading off to the club for tuna salad on white bread with bestie Babs. He is their protector! And all he asks in return is a little loyalty come Election Day.
It’s a big ask, as it turns out.
Suburban women voters, many of whom voted for Trump in 2016 are telling pollsters, never again.
“But daaaallllings!” he must be shrieking inside his big orange noggin. “After all I’ve done for you!”
Children in cages, more than 20,000 documented lies and a horribly mishandled pandemic later…some 66 percent of suburban women polled say they disapprove of Trump’s performance in office. Turns out, ladies who lunch really don’t. But they do meet to distribute canvassing materials for Biden/Harris.
It must seem so unfair. All that pandering and fear mongering has been for naught. What next? The realization there really isn’t a suburban housewife and mom of two who can, a la “Bewitched,” wiggle her pretty nose and traverse time and space to change history?
Oh, if only.
Celia Rivenbark reminds you Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s mailing address is 806 Country Club Drive, Greensboro, N.C. 27408.