Opinion | Kamala Harris Is Turning a Trump Tactic on Its Head

It’s a truism that female candidates for high office face obstacles that men don’t. Less acknowledged is that women face different obstacles each from the other. Individually and generationally, women confront their own particular impossible dilemmas.

Hillary Clinton’s dilemma was how to be forceful without coming off as fatally unfeminine, of seeming like a male impostor by virtue of being ambitious. Kamala Harris’s quandary is different. She’s not having to bat down accusations that her ambition makes her unwomanly, in part because she chose not to make breaking the glass ceiling a theme of her campaign. Her particular Achilles’ heel — pointed out by her opponent, who, whatever his manifest unfitness for the job, does have a talent for identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities — is contained in the word “protection.”

That’s the insinuation behind so many of the attacks on Ms. Harris’s presidential quest: How’s she going to protect voters who, knocked around by everything from contagion to inflation to war, feel unsafe and insecure? As much as the Harris campaign promotes “joy,” the national mood radiates fear — of exposure, threat, bodily harm. How’s a woman supposed to protect us from that? Protection is an area of American culture that is resolutely gendered. The problematic dynamics that traditionally govern protection of home and hearth also govern our politics, an arena in which, historically, women have been granted neither protector nor protected status.

In the public sphere, as in the personal, he who would dominate offers to protect. Forty-seven years ago, the feminist philosopher Susan Rae Peterson identified the syndrome of the “male protection racket,” asking, “Since the state fails them in its protective function, to whom can women turn for protection?” She explained that “women make agreements with husbands or fathers (in return for fidelity or chastity, respectively) to secure protection. From whom do these men protect women? From other men, it turns out.” She continued: “There is a striking parallel between this situation and tactics used by crime syndicates who sell protection as a racket. The buyer who refuses to buy the protective services of an agency because he needs no protection finds out soon that because he refuses to buy it, he very definitely needs protection. Women are in the same position.”

Or as Mae West putatively said: “Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can’t figure out what from.”

Donald Trump has it figured out. “Sadly, women are poorer than they were four years ago,” he told a Pennsylvania rally in late September. Also: “less healthy,” “less safe on the streets” and “more stressed and depressed and unhappy.” In a part of his speech aimed explicitly at female voters, he added, “I will fix all of that and fast, and at long last this nation, and national nightmare, will end.” Women, he promised, “will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger.” Why? “You will be protected, and I will be your protector.”

Mr. Trump is a master of the protection racket. He takes the old domestic savior scam national. He’s running a Halloween campaign, leaping from behind every podium to yell “Boo!” to scare his base, male and female both, with any hobgoblin he can conjure — migrants who are “vicious monsters,” who are “poisoning the blood of our country” and who will “rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill the people of the United States of America,” “radical left thugs” who “live like vermin” and “steal and cheat on elections,” Democratic governors who want to “execute” babies after they’re born, liberal schools conducting a “brutal operation” to change a child’s gender. Mr. Trump and his running mate have conjured childless women whose only companions are feline and illegal immigrants dining on felines. To save us from these monsters, Mr. Trump proposes himself.

His protection, of course, is as mythical as the threats he manufactures. Violent crime is near a 50-year low. Homicides fell nearly 12 percent from 2022 to 2023, the largest single-year drop in six decades, and rape declined by more than 9 percent. Women — and especially never-married women — have made significant economic gains since 2019. As for stress, as “The Daily Show” comedian Desi Lydic remarked after Mr. Trump’s speech, “I love how he’s acknowledging that we’re stressed out, as though he’s not the one stressing us out.” But that isn’t the point. The implicit point is: If this is a situation in which we need protection, would you trust Kamala Harris to protect you?

To understand why this is a loaded question, turn Ms. Lydic’s joke on its head. Can Ms. Harris protect Americans without stressing Americans out?

Many voters, especially men, perceive the prospect of being protected by a woman as a threat. In a society where men judge their worth by their ability to protect, being protected by a woman is seen as a disgrace, a stain on one’s honor.

I encountered this dynamic in the late 1990s when a book I wrote on men in crisis was reflexively denounced by male pundits, even before publication. “This woman is clearly on a mission,” declared one. “Find a soft place in the collective male self-esteem and drive at it until the lance runs red.” The “lance” in question? Supportive empathy. “I don’t want Susan Faludi’s pity,” a “Time” columnist began facetiously. “I want her tight little body.” The column was titled, “The Emasculation Proclamation.”

The messages were clear: You cannot defend us without unmanning us.

Women are allowed to play the protector in one arena: as mothers. The vice-presidential contender Sarah Palin famously tried to market herself as the “mama grizzly” candidate and said in 2010 in a speech to the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, “You thought pit bulls were tough. Well, you don’t want to mess with the mama grizzlies.” It’s no coincidence that at the same time that the Trump campaign is leaning on the “protector” theme, it’s disparaging Ms. Harris because she’s not a mother.

With his “I am your protector” speech, Mr. Trump was baiting Ms. Harris to cast herself as a protector, knowing he’d have her in a bind. He is a wizard at rope-a-dope, issuing an outrageous assertion in order to goad a response that will trap his opponent. He cast doubt on Ms. Harris’s racial credentials as an invitation for her to come out as an identity warrior. She didn’t take the bait. Now he’s floating protection as a theme, knowing how fraught its expression is for a female candidate. Again, Ms. Harris sidestepped the provocation. In an interview with MSNBC two days after Mr. Trump’s remarks, she responded: “I don’t think the women of America need him to say he’s going to protect them. The women of America need him to trust them.”

Strikingly, Ms. Harris is, in fact, a formidable protector. Protection comes in two forms: symbolic and practical. The symbolic is performative. Those who crave it don’t actually want effective measures to alleviate a threat. They wish to rage against the threat, and they seek a protector in chief who validates their wrath. For them, war’s the point, not victory — outrage, not outcomes, as victim cultures on both the right and the left amply demonstrate.

Symbolic and practical protection aren’t two means to the same end but rather are at cross-purposes, antithetical. The first nurtures a cause for grievance that the second would instead remedy. A failure to remedy the grievance only fuels the fury that symbolic protection thrives on.

This is how recent Republican administrations have profited from their own incompetence. Their inability to provide real protection (from, say, Osama bin Laden) fed the public’s desire for a symbolic act (like the “defeat” of Saddam Hussein). George W. Bush’s failure at practical protection — to heed the multiple warnings that a catastrophic attack on American soil was in the works — allowed him to play to the hilt the role of symbolic protector. A political advocacy group backing Mr. Bush in 2004 against John Kerry, a decorated combat veteran, aired a multimillion-dollar TV spot in which a girl whose mother was killed on Sept. 11 declared of Mr. Bush, “He’s the most powerful man in the world, and all he wants to do is make sure I’m safe.” Mr. Trump has pulled a similar switcheroo on countless fronts, from trade to manufacturing to immigration to lost elections.

Ms. Harris isn’t looking to compete on the symbolic field. She’s not playacting a guardian stereotype of either gender. If Mr. Trump embodies the make-believe rescuer, the bombastic redeemer who speaks loudly while carrying a tiny stick, Ms. Harris is his levelheaded, no-nonsense opposite. Her record of public service and her utilitarian policy plans attest to workable fixes to actual dangers instead of the amplification of invented ones. She offers herself up as the calmly common-sensical civic warden.

“I promise you,” Ms. Harris said when she discussed her economic plans in late September, “I will be pragmatic in my approach.” Then she invoked the American president who least relied on virile display, whose protective power lay not in his pugilism but in his pragmatism. “I will engage in what Franklin Roosevelt called ‘bold, persistent experimentation,’” she said. “Because I believe we shouldn’t be constrained by ideology and, instead, should seek practical solutions to problems.”

One of Ms. Harris’s assets is her refusal to demonize, even as she confronts America’s real demons. Real protection involves situation-room restraint at moments when symbolic protection chooses a dangerous jingoism. Thus, the letter from more than 700 former national-security and military officials endorsing Ms. Harris because she “defends America’s democratic ideals” while her opponent “endangers” them. Instead of playing footsie with foreign dictators while indulging in “America First” chest thumping, she’s been part of the Biden administration’s quiet resolve to rein in malignant adversaries and rebuild alliances.

As president, Mr. Trump undermined Ukraine’s sovereignty to serve his own political fortunes; Ms. Harris traveled to Europe a week before Russia’s invasion to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky to deliver U.S. intelligence assessments and discuss battlefield preparations. As a senator, Ms. Harris reached across the aisle in 2018 to co-sponsor (with the Oklahoma Republican James Lankford and others from both parties) the Secure Elections Act to shield American voting systems against internal chaos and foreign interference. Mr. Trump opposed the bill; it never came to a vote.

On the domestic front, Ms. Harris has stressed an ambitious set of economic programs to defend the working and middle class: investing in new industries, small-business start-ups and new housing; generating apprenticeships and employee profit-sharing programs; providing substantial financial assistance for new parents and new homeowners; capping medical costs; subsidizing child and elder care. She’s offering tools instead of tirades. Her success in enacting these policies would depend on down-ballot success, but these are specific, tangible steps toward protecting the average American from harm and humiliation.

Time and time again, nations that have sought protection under a fantasy führer — or a real one — have reaped the whirlwind. This fall, I’m voting my fears, too, but what I fear most is the whirlwind. I’m voting my need for protection, as well. I want a Constitution protected from the paper shredders. I want democratic process and the rule of law protected from rioters and scammers. I want reasoned and stable governance, exemplified by a president whose lodestar is the well-being and security of her citizenry, not the bloodlust of his base. I want, most of all, the fate of my nation to be protected against the judgment that history’s gods level against strongman societies.

In 1977, Ms. Peterson observed that, under the laws of the state, women are like the “victimized, unwilling clients of an organized protection racket, because they cannot turn to each other, being unorganized themselves.” But women have been organizing and demanding the state afford them equal protection, protections that are now under renewed attack. Ms. Harris has made more than clear her commitment to countering that assault and restoring women’s rights and freedoms. With those rights and freedoms come others, and a chance to solve the real problems all Americans face, instead of fulminating against phantoms.

Ms. Harris has demonstrated her ability to stand up to America’s most poisonous huckster without being intimidated by or engaging with his scare campaigns. That’s not all she needs to do, but it’s important. Crucial to our nation’s future, she’s proving to be an effective protector against the protection racket itself.

Susan Faludi is a journalist and the author of “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women” and, most recently, “In the Darkroom.”

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