Is anyone else as creeped out by Trump’s sudden “friend of women” riff assuring us that we will be “happy, healthy, confident and free” and that we will “no longer be thinking about abortion.” and, “we want you to have your beautiful babies in this country. We want you to have your beautiful, perfect baby….we need them.” This is far more than, as Stephen Colbert put it, “upsetting.” This is cringing, skin crawling EEWWW. Does he think we’re stupid? When one sees this grab-them-by-the-pussy sex abuser try to project Big Brother benevolence toward women, it appears that the answer is yes. We’ve been told by JD Vance that Republicans will “create stories” and this, clearly, is just another fabrication to sucker us into voting for him even as he seeks to take away our choices, our self-determination, our independence. Trump and the MAGA conservatives he must appease see a threat by strong women who want to upend their society’s order, where the man is at the top and in charge. That creaky notion is being challenged by smart, powerful independent women who dare to disagree, who dare to see a different America, who dare to challenge the conservative, patriarchal “we know best” status quo. So Trump & Co must diminish these women. This is not limited to those in the opposing party. They even go after their own; Republican Senator Katie Britt’s rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address was delivered from her kitchen table, the tacit message; this is where women belong. Kamala Harris’ candidacy (pronounced KAH mah lah, her name deliberately mispronounced by Trump and Vance in childish, deliberate insult and denigration) is the height of what these conservatives fear: a shift in power, from those who seek to take power away from women, to those who would empower them. Trump’s words of rapprochement are disingenuous, and are glaringly inconsistent with his actions. Yet Trump thinks we’ll buy it. He thinks we’re stupid. That is his biggest mistake.