Trump’s ‘woman card’ comment proves he’ll use anything he can against Clinton – which Democrats may use to their advantage in securing female voters

As Donald Trump marched closer to the Republican nomination on Tuesday, the brash billionaire left little doubt that a general election contest against Hillary Clinton would be nothing short of a cage fight.

Coming only a few days after his campaign’s insistence that the American public would soon see a softer, more measured Trump, the Republican frontrunner took a swipe at Clinton over what he said was her use of the “woman’s card”. It was not the first time Trump had gone after Clinton on the basis of her gender, but was nonetheless emblematic of the no holds barred approach that has defined his candidacy.



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And as he stares down the barrel at a potential general election contest with Clinton, one theme is clear: from Clinton’s use of a private email server to her integrity to her womanhood, everything is in play. The end result, at least from Trump’s vantage point, could be the nastiest presidential campaign in modern history.

Trump first accused Clinton of playing the “woman card” in remarks from his New York City headquarters on Tuesday night, after sweeping primaries held in five states.

“I think the only card she has is the woman’s card,” Trump said. “She has nothing else going. Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she would get 5% of the vote.”

Clinton seized on the comments almost immediately, quoting Trump in her own rally on Tuesday in Philadelphia following victories in four of the five Democratic primaries.

“If fighting for women’s healthcare and paid family leave and equal pay is ‘playing the woman card,’ then deal me in!” she exclaimed, reviving a line she has often deployed on the stump while hitting back at Republican attacks more broadly.

While it’s unlikely that Clinton will be drawn into a vicious war of words with Trump, her quick retort underscored the perils of a Republican nominee who cannot be tamed. Democrats are eager to use Trump’s repeated outbursts against him, from the ad wars to the campaign trail, and for Clinton they also serve as ammunition to rally core constituencies around her candidacy.

Republicans have struggled to bring female voters into their fold, and Democrats have already woven several of Trump’s controversial moments – from statements about Clinton to his tussle with Fox News host Megyn Kelly to comments on abortion – into the “war on women” narrative they have used effectively against the GOP in recent election cycles.

In 2012, Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama among single women by a staggering 36 points. Where Romney fared better, as has been the trend among Republican presidential candidates, was among married women, whose vote he secured over Obama by 7 points.

“Trump will be the least popular nominee with women voters since they achieved suffrage,” said Tim Miller, an advisor to, Our Principles PAC, a Super Pac formed to stop Trump from securing the Republican nomination.

It’s not simply Trump’s gendered language that would do untold damage leading up to November, but also his inclination to dredge up the Clintons’ personal past. In December, the former reality TV star resurrected the Monica Lewinsky scandal and likened Bill Clinton to a sexual predator.

“There certainly was a lot of abuse of women, you look at whether it’s Monica Lewinsky or Paula Jones, or any of them, and that certainly will be fair game,” Trump told NBC.

Rick Wilson, a Republican media strategist and one of the faces of the “Never Trump” movement trying to block his candidacy, said the party gleaned from focus groups conducted back in 1999 that there was little to be gained and much to be lost by invoking the Clintons’ marriage.

“We learned a long time ago that while that line feeds the base, it’s absolutely poisonous with women voters and independents,” Wilson said. “It didn’t work then. It won’t work now.”

Indeed, polling has shown that Clinton’s favorability soared when her marriage was the subject of national scrutiny in the late 1990s.

Trump has routinely declared that no line of attack will be off limits in his campaign and signaled on Wednesday he had no intention of backing down in the wake of his latest firestorm.

In a series of interviews across the cable news networks, the real estate mogul doubled down on his “gender card” assertion while claiming that Clinton’s response to him amounted to shouting.

“I haven’t quite recovered, it’s early in the morning, from her shouting that message,” Trump said on MSNBC.

In a separate appearance on CNN, he added: “I think if she were a man, and she was the way she is, she would get virtually no votes.”

Clinton, for her part, has not shied away from attacking Trump in her own campaign speeches. But her criticisms have focused not on the personal but on his extreme rhetoric, most notably toward immigrants and Muslims. A staple for Clinton on the stump has been to condemn Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the US or his suggestions that he would deport the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the country.

“When you run for president you should tell people what you want to do. You shouldn’t make promises that you can’t keep,” Clinton said in a town hall this week. “You shouldn’t just rant and rave with the Trump-like demagoguery.”

According to most publicly available polling, Clinton would handily defeat Trump in a general election. With party elites desperately seeking to thwart his candidacy, Trump’s sharp pivot to personal attacks takes them further into already unchartered territory.