Power

Trump Dismisses Criticism Because He Knows ‘What Women Want’

The appearance was Trump’s first scheduled interview since Sunday night’s debate.

“What women want is they want secure borders,” claimed Trump. “They want safety. They want law and order. They want … a police department that’s allowed to do its job.” Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump dismissed criticism of his recent comments about women and said he is “not sure” if he believes the polls showing how poorly he is performing with women voters, given that he knows “what women want.”

Appearing on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor on Tuesday, the business mogul attempted to defend himself from criticism in the aftermath of recently unearthed footage from 2005 where he discussed kissing and groping women seemingly without their consent. The appearance was Trump’s first scheduled interview since Sunday night’s debate.

Host Bill O’Reillywho himself has faced multiple allegations that he has sexually harassed womenquestioned the candidate about how his comments would affect his performance with women voters whom he is currently “behind with.” In response, Trump tried to invalidate both criticism of his comments and the polls. 

“Well, first of all, locker-room talk, and most people have heard it before,” said Trump, dismissing those who have criticized his now-notorious comments.  

In the time since his 2005 comments were uncovered, Trump’s claim that the conversation was no more than “locker-room talk” was roundly criticized for failing to acknowledge that what he described fits the description of a sexual assault. After the footage came to light, many women took to social media using the hashtag #NotOkay to share their own assaults, some of which resembled the behavior described by Trump in the tape.

Both athletes and coaches have also called out Trump’s excuse, explaining that such remarks have no place in the locker room either.

“It’s not normal. And even if it were normal, it’s not right,” tweeted Jacob Tamme, who plays for the Atlanta Falcons, in response.

On the O’Reilly Factor, Trump went on to claim that he “had a lot of women come up to me and [say], boy, I’ve heard that and I’ve heard a lot worse than that over my life.”  

When it came to the polls, Trump again refused to accept the truth, telling the host, “I’m not sure I believe it.”

Explaining that his campaign was focused on the issues women really cared about, Trump noted that he had a child-care plan before launching into a list of other issues he claimed were important to women.

“What women want is they want secure borders,” claimed Trump. “They want safety. They want law and order. They want … a police department that’s allowed to do its job.”

“They want a lot of things that everybody else wants,” he went on.

A recent overview of new polling published by statistical analysis site FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver explained that the “gender split” among voters in the presidential election is so stark that “if Trump loses the election, it will be because women voted against him.”

Though the reverse is also true—that is to say, Trump is leading among male voters—looking at 12 recent polls, Silver found that “on average, Clinton leads Trump by 15 percentage points among women while trailing him by 5 points among men.”

According to Silver, these polls may not yet even fully reflect the effect that Trump’s comments from 2005 will have on voters.

And as Greg Sargent explained in an opinion piece for the Washington Post, polling also seemingly doesn’t support that women voters think Trump knows what they want.

A recent CNN poll found that “women think Clinton, rather than Trump, would better handle immigration by 55-39; would better handle terrorism by 49-44; would better handle the Islamic State by 53-39; and would better handle the criminal justice system by 51-43,” Sargent noted.