For women, a Harris loss is disappointing — but a Trump victory is devastating

For a moment, I actually let myself believe that America might allow a woman to be its next president.

That, of course, didn’t happen. Instead, the next president of the United States will be a man who has been found liable for sexual abuse and then used his platform to smear and defame the women who accuse him of it. Our first female vice president will be replaced with a man who believes a woman’s worth is tied to whether or not she bears children.

I wish I lived in a country where men like that don’t make it anywhere near public office. I wish I lived in a country that chooses a supremely qualified woman over a uniquely awful man. But this election was yet another reminder that I don’t.

In 2016, we mourned the fact that the most openly misogynistic candidate in modern history could actually win a presidential election. This is worse, because Donald Trump is worse now. Voters can no longer delude themselves into thinking a Trump presidency might not be as bad as we think. We know better now.

Trump managed to convince men — particularly younger ones — that he would be the president for them. He catered to the disaffected group of “bros” who are anxious about their economic and social status, increasingly frustrated by a world where they no longer enjoy absolute dominance. They’re experiencing wage stagnation, lower education rates and an epidemic of loneliness, and they’re being told that women and minorities are to blame. Media figures like Logan Paul and Joe Rogan were Trump’s surrogates, helping him reach a population that has historically been difficult to mobilize. And it worked: he prevailed despite a large gender gap, losing by double digits with most women but building a comfortable lead with men. If that’s a blueprint for future Republican candidates, it’s a frightening one.

I don’t believe that every Trump voter, or even most of them, hates women, or that their decision to vote directly against women’s freedoms was even a conscious one. But it is at least true that every Trump voter decided that the continued threat to reproductive freedom could be overlooked or that Trump’s own history of sexual assault wasn’t disqualifying.

Much like 2016, this election will not make our country safer, better or more prosperous for women. This was a choice between a candidate who would protect women’s lives and one who would put them in danger. We know that women have died as a result of actions taken in Trump’s first term. Abortion bans are deadly, and overturning Roe v. Wade has made a pregnant person’s survival dependent on the state they live in and the size of their bank account. Transgender women have suffered because Trump and his party have fought to limit their access to lifesaving gender-affirming care.

A second Trump presidency is likely to be even more dangerous and extreme than the first, for women and for everyone else. Trump and his allies have made it clear they’d much rather control women than protect them, and there doesn’t appear to be a whole lot that’s going to stop them from trying to do so. The right to birth control and IVF now feels far less secure. A national abortion ban is not out of the question.

There will be a time for hope and optimism, and there will be a time to look ahead and plan for a better future. Believe me, I know that responsibility for this outcome does not lie solely with those who voted for Trump. Like Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris was an imperfect candidate, nominated by a party that must now use this loss as an opportunity for critical self-reflection. Democrats must come to terms with the fact that their current political strategy is an insufficient anecdote to Trumpism, and that they currently have no answer to Trump’s ability to run up the numbers with young men.

I really wanted to believe that, after Tuesday, there would be little girls who would never know a world in which a woman couldn’t be president. What we got instead is the likely extension of a troubling arc in which those little girls have fewer rights than their mothers did. The way Trump ran his campaign suggests he will only continue to demean women as president. And his victory suggests that there’s a real appetite for it.