Former White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin said in an interview Tuesday that former President Trump’s messaging surrounding women is “very infantilizing” and emphasized its implications for this election cycle.
“I started laughing and thinking he was creepy, but then thinking more about it, it is very infantilizing, talking about women as though we’re weak, we’re meek, we need a protector, we need a defender, and we just sit around thinking about abortions all day,” Farah Griffin, who worked in the Trump administration, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
“It just underscores a fundamental lack of understanding for why a demographic that represents half of the country is one that he is struggling so profoundly with,” she added.
Farah Griffin said if Trump loses in November, she thinks that he will regret not having a female running mate.
“I think Donald Trump, if he loses this election, is going to look back and think that one of the worst decisions he made was not having a female on the ticket who actually knows how to speak to living, breathing, normal women about issues that matter to them,” she said.
Farah Griffin also mentioned reproductive rights, a top campaign issue for Vice President Harris, in particular.
“And I would just finally say, yes, reproductive rights do matter. Access to IVF [in vitro fertilization], to the whole suite of care that women care about, whether it be abortion or so on. But economics, national security are also women’s issues and just the way he is talking about them is not the way to sway voters in the middle,” Farah Griffin said.
When contacted for comment, Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump’s messaging speaks to fears and concerns that women have.
“President Trump is speaking directly to the fears and concerns women have about our miserable economy and wide-open border that’s allowing rapists, drug dealers, and killers to enter our country and take the lives of innocent women like Laken Riley and Rachel Morin. President Trump will take care of women by restoring law and order, reviving our economy, and keeping us out of World War III,” Leavitt said in an emailed statement.
Updated at 5 p.m.