How does that saying go? “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”?
A lot of women around the United States of America are feeling scorned today, the first full day of Donald J. Trump’s presidency.
They’re marching on Washington, D.C. They’re marching all across the country. Why, even in Amarillo, Texas — where the president earned about 80 percent of the total vote — women were to march at Ellwood Park.
Their protest? They dislike (a) the election of a man who actually admitted to mistreating women and (b) the defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who most pundits and prognosticators said would make history by becoming the first woman elected president of the United States.
I’m trying to process this collective march throughout the land.
On the one hand, I understand women’s anger, disappointment and pain. Trump campaigned for the presidency while hurling insults at many demographic groups — and that included women, who took personally his attacks on people such as former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly and actor/comedian Rosie O’Donnell.
But … get this: Exit polling showed that Trump garnered more than 50 percent of the female vote nationwide. Statistically, that might have spelled the difference between winning and losing for the Republican presidential nominee. By capturing a majority of the female vote, does the women’s march overstate the concern that marchers are expressing? I don’t know the answer to that question.
It does appear that the national divide now is split not just along urban and rural residents, among racial groups and among socio-economic groups. It now appears split along gender.
A lot of women are angry today as the realization of Trump’s inauguration as the 45th president is soaking into their consciousness. Not all of them, mind you. Indeed, I know several women here in the Texas Panhandle who voted for Trump — many of them with great trepidation; however, others did so with great enthusiasm.
My advice today to the president? Pay careful attention to what these women on the march are saying. He should not want to be on the receiving end of women’s rage if he scorns them yet again by ignoring their protests.
