"We really don’t have any idea what we’re doing, except we said, ‘We’ve got to go out and tell people what a great guy Donald Trump is,” Lara Trump said. | Getty Trump takes aim at Clinton's lead among women The GOP nominee fields an all-female team to boost his appeal in moderate Ohio.

BELLVILLE, Ohio — In the driveway of the Quality Inn hotel, between corn fields and a Burger King, two black SUVs appeared on a sunny Saturday afternoon to deposit six of Donald Trump’s most enthusiastic advocates.

The “Trump-Pence Women’s Empowerment Tour” had arrived.


Katrina Pierson, his often irreverent spokeswoman, emerged with Lara Trump, the candidate’s daughter-in-law, Omarosa Manigault, a reality TV star-turned-campaign director of African American outreach, Lynne Patton, a vice president at the Eric Trump Foundation, and YouTube stars Diamond and Silk.

“We are not politicians, we are civilians,” Lara Trump, the wife of Eric Trump, told a mostly female crowd lunching on cold cuts and potato salad in a fluorescent-lit room. “We really don’t have any idea what we’re doing, except we said, ‘We’ve got to go out and tell people what a great guy Donald Trump is.”

Great — and not a racist or misogynist.

That was the explicit message delivered by the women on the tour during their stop here in a small town between Columbus and Cleveland, one of several they’ve made across the state as the GOP nominee tries to shore up support with female voters, a group the polls show he is consistently losing to Hillary Clinton by double digits.

With the exception of Lara Trump, all of the surrogates on the tour Saturday were women of color.

“These are our two, obviously, black women who support Donald Trump,” Pierson said, introducing Lynette “Diamond” Hardaway and Rochelle "Silk" Richardson, video bloggers who have been among Trump’s most vocal supporters.

“They don’t exist,” she said sarcastically. “We figure if we take them with us, people can actually see them, they’ll know that black women who support Trump exist.”

Typically, Democrats fare better with female voters overall than do Republicans. But Trump, Ohio operatives say, is struggling with well-educated suburban women who do often vote Republican: These voters were comfortable with Mitt Romney, they helped George W. Bush win Ohio—but they’re not yet with Trump.

Their reluctance is driven in part, strategists say, by the insulting remarks Trump and people associated with his campaign have made about Muslims, Latinos and women, including Carly Fiorina and Megyn Kelly. Trump’s campaign has also earned support from white supremacists such as David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, whom Trump eventually disavowed, though critics felt he did so too slowly.

“The left has successfully branded Donald Trump as intolerant,” said Mark Weaver, a longtime Columbus, Ohio-based GOP consultant. “I’m not saying it’s true, I’m saying the branding has been successful. College-educated suburban women don’t like intolerance.”

On Friday and over the weekend, in stops from Cincinnati to Bellville, the Trump surrogates sought to signal that the candidate in fact welcomes not only women in leadership but women of all backgrounds.

“If you look at the make-up of our tour, we have a very diverse group here, the majority of ladies are African American,” Lara Trump said in an interview. “It speaks to who Donald Trump is, these are all women he’s touched in very different ways.”

But the effort overall strikes veteran political observers as more an attempt to reassure Republican-leaning women that Trump is an acceptable choice than to build a coalition that includes African-American voters.

“I’m sure he’d like to win more minority voters, he’s really struggling among African Americans,” said Mindy Finn, a longtime Republican operative who runs a women’s advocacy group and is not supporting Trump. “But for those white suburban moms, racial tolerance is something they value, diversity is something they value. Showing that he has a diverse set of supporters is an effort to beat back this notion he’s a racist. Whether that can be effective or not, I think it’s difficult. He has been his own worst enemy.”

There appeared to be only one African American woman in attendance out of several dozen people at the Bellville event—a crowd largely packed with supporters, not the fence-sitters the campaign needs to target. The African American woman, Stacey Polk, left impressed but unwilling to publicly commit to Trump yet, saying she needed to discuss her decision with her family first.

Finn questioned the ability of some of those surrogates in attendance Saturday to effectively make the case for Trump, referencing the racially divisive comments Pierson in particular has made.

She has referred to President Barack Obama as the “head Negro,” and used the term “pure breeds” in saying on Twitter that neither Obama nor Mitt Romney fell into that category. She has also said — on Facebook last fall — that “Islam preys on the weak.”

Asked to respond to criticism that her past undercuts her ability to advocate for Trump, she said many of those remarks came “on Twitter, yes, with trolls, not actual people.”

“I have a very strong record throughout my political career with women and women voters, being out there and engaging women through multiple campaigns, even through my own,” said Pierson, who ran an unsuccessful primary race for a Texas congressional seat. “The GOP in general has struggled with women, we cannot put this all on Donald Trump.”

But not all Republicans struggle with female voters. Here in Ohio, Sen. Rob Portman proves that the gender divide here is not driven just by partisanship: He’s a Republican up for reelection, and he is narrowly winning among women, one recent Quinnipiac poll shows, while Trump is trailing Clinton by double digits among the same voters.

Lara Trump, on leave from her role as an associate producer with CBS’s “Inside Edition,” said she and the other women on the tour can show a “softer” side of Trump. “We really are trying to demystify the man,” she said.

During the luncheon, she took on a conspiratorial, just-us-girls tone in an effort to connect with the women in attendance.

“My husband, probably in typical guy fashion—there are a lot of ladies here, maybe we can all share in this—did not tell me that I was going to meet Donald Trump the day that I met him,” she said. As she sat with the real estate mogul at the U.S. Open at the time, wondering what to say, “He turned to me and he said, ‘Would you like an ice cream? I’m going to get an ice cream.’”

The moment put her at ease, Lara Trump said: “Honestly, this family is so much more normal than they even should be, to tell you the truth.”

The women assembled on his behalf often sought to cast Trump as just a regular guy: He has to have his fast food, Pierson said, in a tone that was the vocal equivalent of an eye roll. He turns to “putty” when his grandchildren come into his office, Manigault said.

On a more serious note, Patton noted, Trump “couldn’t save his brother,” who died young, as an alcoholic. But he could relate to the struggles of small communities across Ohio that are grappling with devastating drug epidemics, she said. Patton said that she had personally faced addiction, but that the Trump family had been generous and supportive.

“One of the reasons why I came forward is because I constantly saw how emotionally affected they were by the false narrative that was being put out there about him being racist, misogynist, bigoted,” she said, going on to add, “As the daughter of a man born in Birmingham, Ala., there is no amount of money in the world that could make me stand before you and endorse a family I didn’t truly believe in.”

After Diamond and Silk led a call-and-response concerning getting on the “Trump Train” (“All aboard?” they asked. “Woo, woo!” the women responded, echoing a locomotive); after Manigault worked the crowd delivering hugs; after the women posed for big group pictures, they headed back in the direction of driveway.

It was time for the women on Trump’s train to roll on.