Essay: Why Trump Won

First published on November 08, 2024

Read also: Dear White Democrats

And: Feminism vs Genocide

And: Trump, Rape, and Racist Fuckery

If Black and people of colour were the only voters in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump would’ve lost in the largest defeat in presidential history. 

Instead, Donald Trump will become president of the United States again because of white people. 

White men and white women voters, in their majority, are the reason. White men and white women voters, in their majority and knowing who he is and what he represents, wanted Trump in the White House again. It is not Black voters, Hispanic/Latinx voters, Asians, Arabs or Muslims. It is white voters.

And as per tradition, white people–the vast majority of voters in the U.S.--spend the post-election weeks castigating, berating, and blaming Black and people of colour–the vast minority of voters in the U.S.--for letting them down.

Why?

Because it is easier to castigate, berate, and blame people who don’t look like you.

Why?

Because of white supremacy. A white supremacy that takes for granted that white men and white women in their majority always vote Republican and that it is incumbent on the rest of us to save the country from the consequences of that vote.

A white supremacy that Democrats like to think they’re immune from but which they share hardily with Republicans.

And as per tradition, white people–the vast majority of voters in the U.S.--spend the post-election weeks castigating, berating, and blaming Black and people of colour–the vast minority of voters in the U.S.--for letting them down.

As one think piece after another analyses which minority group shifted their vote in what direction, it is imperative to sit with these numbers: in the U.S., 71 percent of voters are white. Compare that to Hispanic/Latinx voters who comprise just 12 percent of the electorate and who are being tasked by white liberals with carrying Kamala Harris’ defeat to Trump.

Washington Post, using Edison Research Exit Polls.

If you are white and you’re looking for someone to blame: it is your grandfathers and grandmothers, fathers and mothers, husbands and boyfriends, aunts and uncles–people who look like you and who you least like to confront about their voting habits.

It is white women crying about their husbands’ voting - and doing nothing about it.  It is white people talking about a time when “nobody talked about politics with anybody, we all mind our own business” - when they’re referring to their 100% white cis het suburban neighborhoods, and hoping that everyone will come to their BBQ still, next 4th of July. (These are actual white women I know)

And at 37 percent of the electorate, white women are the largest voting bloc. And once again they did not disappoint the Republican party candidate, for whom they have consistently voted in their majority for the better part of seven decades.

Washington Post, using Edison Research Exit Polls.

How do they get away with it? How does the largest voting bloc in the country  consistently sell out so many of us who are hurt by the rot of Republican hate, all while their vitriol and finger pointing are dumped on minority groups? 

Answer: white supremacy.

It is harder to see Footsoldiers of the Patriarchy when they look like you.

In 2019, during a fellowship residency, a white woman - from California, no less - asked me “Don’t Muslim women who wear hijab realize they’re admitting they’re sex objects?” and just a few sentences later said - without a blink of irony - that her son’s girlfriend had voted for President Grab Them By the Pussy.

In the U.S. white women are afforded an innocence that is both a reward and a leash that ensures they work diligently on behalf of a patriarchy upon which their own livelihood depends. And which they must remember will hurt them because nothing protects you from patriarchy.

It is the kind of reward that allows you to be thrilled at the sight of far-away women rising up–as they did when they cheered for Iranian women during the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution–while ignoring that what those far-away women are rising up against is what white women need to rise up against right here in the U.S. but they don’t. 

Especially when those far-away women rising up are women whose plight is always used to shut you up. So successful has white supremacist patriarchy been at convincing white women that they’re lucky to live in the U.S. and not Saudi Arabia or Iran or Afghanistan, that so many white women did not pay enough attention to the theocracy that white supremacy was building right here at home. 

It was being built by white men who look like their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons, not the scary brown men with beards, right? And many more white women were quite happy to build the house for the white supremacist Christian patriarch. A willing army of white women helped destroy the federally protected right ao abortion and bring down Roe v Wade.

In the U.S. white women are afforded an innocence that is both a reward and a leash that ensures they work diligently on behalf of a patriarchy upon which their own livelihood depends. And which they must remember will hurt them because nothing protects you from patriarchy.

It is the kind of leash that ensures white women in the U.S. bemoan losing their bodily autonomy to government control and wanting to blame anyone but those who look like them for that loss, while ignoring the fact that their government is funding and arming a genocide in Gaza that is stripping the bodily autonomy – the very lives – of women who don’t look like them–Palestinian women–because it is happening far away and why should they care?

And this reward and leash is not solely owned by Republican white women. Whether liberal or conservative, white women so often fail at feminism while blaming everyone else for not being feminist enough.

Liberal or conservative, white women in the U.S. are more obsessed with Muslim women and whatever they think is oppressing Muslim women than they are at recognizing their own oppressions. They are more obsessed with what they think Brown Muslim men are doing to Brown Muslim women than they are at what their own menfolk are doing to them. Or what Black men and Latinos are not doing to save the rights of white women.

Whether liberal or conservative, white women so often fail at feminism while blaming everyone else for not being feminist enough.

A recurring theme of the 2024 election was that white women were scared of their husbands finding out who they’re voting for. America’s sweetheart herself–Julia Roberts–lent her voice to an ad encouraging white women to vote without fear of their husbands. This is the land of the free and the home of the brave? White women are scared of their husbands? That is not on us, those of us who are not white. That is on you, white people.

It is harder to see Footsoldiers of the Patriarchy when they look like you.

And that’s exactly why white women are so fluent at castigating, berating, and blaming everyone else. White supremacist patriarchy is their patriarchy. It looks and sounds just like them. It’s much easier to see Brown men and Black men as the danger. That is where white supremacist patriarchy always kept the attention -- always promised to save white women from - to be the protector of white women from. Whether they like it or not.

It is way past time for white women in the U.S. who have ever asked “How can I help Muslim women” and “Why do Muslim women submit to misogyny?” to start obsessing instead over their white sisters who benefit from white supremacist patriarchy and who don’t give a flying fuck how it hurts everyone else. 

I’ve had white women come to my events and ask how they can help Muslim women over there because it’s easier than actually doing something about women over here.

A recurring theme of the 2024 election was that white women were scared of their husbands finding out who they’re voting for. This is the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Fascism doesn't happen overnight. Theocracy is not built in a day. 

In the U.S. the theocrats are in office as a result of free and fair elections in which many white Americans signaled very clearly they wanted their favourite candidates’ white supremacist Christian zealotry.

Roe v Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court of the United States– a court stacked with Christian zealots. 

Roe v Wade was overturned because of very ordinary Christian zealots who voted for fellow very ordinary white Christian zealots who installed other Christian zealots on courts, including the highest court in the land. 

Roe v Wade was overturned as the biggest victory of a white Christian theocratic revolution. 

Where is the feminist revolution against theocrats in the U.S.? Where is the feminist revolution against fascism in the U.S.?

Where is the white feminist revolution against the white vote that consistently delivers a Republican victory?

Fuck theocracy everywhere.

Fuck fascism everywhere.

Fuck the patriarchy in every time zone and in every universe.

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her latest book is an anthology on menopause she edited called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.

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