Senator Raphael Warnock was the latest Democrat to criticize Donald Trump over his vow at a recent rally to “protect” women whether women “like it or not”, saying that women do not need a sexual predator protecting them.
Warnock made the comments on Sunday’s Meet the Press, where he was interviewed by NBC’s Kristen Welker. She questioned the Georgia Democrat about whether Kamala Harris should have spent the election keeping President Joe Biden, her former running mate, “at arm’s length”, as Welker asserted that Warnock himself had done in 2022.
The senator responded that Harris was focused on voters and her “to-do list” while pivoting to attack Trump.
“And on that [to-do] list, is protecting women and their right to choose,” Warnock said, referring to federal legal protections for abortion care services. “Donald Trump says he’s going to protect women, and then he goes on to say ‘I’ll protect women whether they want it or not.’”
“I don’t know about you, but as a man that sounds rather ominous coming from the mouth of a convicted sexual predator,” said Warnock.
Trump was found liable for the criminal sexual abuse of a woman, writer E Jean Carroll, in 2023. In January of this year, he was also found liable for defaming her.
He has also made other vulgar remarks about consensual sex with women, most notably the unearthed Access Hollywood tape which depicted him saying that as a famous person, he felt comfortable “grabbing” women by their genitals.
The ex-president took things a step further this past week at a rally. He has faced criticism throughout the 2024 campaign season for the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe vs Wade, which has endangered women through legal complications arising from state-level abortion bans that have prevented women from receiving life-saving treatments.
It has also thrown into jeopardy the future legality of IVF (in vitro fertilization) and other fertility treatments, with conservatives discussing a new legal push to extend “personhood” right to all stages of the human developmental cycle in the womb.
Trump’s response to that criticism has been to bluntly swipe at the most restrictive of his party’s abortion bans while claiming that he would not sign a national abortion ban into law; he has also dubbed himself, baselessly, the “father of IVF”.
One proposal from his campaign, which likely has little future with conservatives in Congress, is the passage of legislation that would force insurance agencies or the government to cover the cost of fertility treatments.
At his rally last week in Green Bay, Wisconsin, he unveiled his latest attempt to battle that criticism.
“I’m president, I want to protect the women of our country,” Trump told his fans. “I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not.”
He went on to add: “I’m going to protect them, I’m going to protect them from migrants coming in. I’m going to protect them from foreign countries that want to hit us with missiles and lots of other things.”
