Standing at his final rally of the 2024 campaign, former President Donald Trump in the first minutes after midnight on Election Day used a crude sexist remark to attack Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker who is one of his long-standing political rivals.

“She’s a bad person,” Trump said at the Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “Evil. She’s an evil, sick, crazy — ” He made an exaggerated face, his mouth open wide to draw attention to the next syllable: “Bi—”

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Then he held up a finger dramatically, feigning that he’d caught himself. “Oh, no,” he said. As the crowd of thousands began laughing, Trump mouthed the word into the microphone. “It starts with a B, but I won’t say it,” Trump added. “I want to say it.”

As the crowd roared even louder, some of the attendees began to supply the word he’d barely omitted, shouting, “Bitch!”

In the closing days of the race, Trump has made direct appeals to women as he stares down a gender gap in the polls that has concerned him and his team. He has tamped down mentioning his role in appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, an issue that polls show to be a top concern to female voters.

Yet at the same time, Trump has used misogynistic language to refer to Vice President Kamala Harris and has fostered an environment at his rallies where speakers and attendees feel comfortable making the kind of gendered insults that, in another political era, would have been unthinkable to say in public.

Trump has argued that Harris, who would be the first female president if she wins, lacks the stamina and intelligence to lead the country. He appeared to embrace a remark shouted by a rallygoer that insinuated Harris was a prostitute. And he voiced some approval of an audience member’s idea to put Harris in the ring with boxer Mike Tyson.

In Reading, Pennsylvania, Trump was telling an off-topic aside Monday about Tyson when a man in the crowd used it as an opportunity to demean Harris. “Oh, he says, ‘Put Mike in the ring with Kamala,’” Trump said. “That will be interesting.” The crowd cheered.

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He used violent imagery as he denounced Liz Cheney, the Republican former Congress member who has become an outspoken Harris surrogate, as a coward. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK?” Trump said last week during an interview with Tucker Carlson. “Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

And even as Trump has said that his advisers have told him to stop saying he would protect women, he went a step further last week by saying he would protect them “whether the women like it or not.”

The Harris campaign cast those remarks as paternalistic and sexist. “He simply does not respect the freedom of women or the intelligence of women to know what’s in their own best interest and make decisions accordingly,” Harris said at a rally in Phoenix. “But we trust women.”

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s remarks have opened the door for his allies to express their own crude, sexist views, including at his campaign events. At his rally in Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27, one speaker likened Harris to a prostitute being directed by “pimp handlers.” Another called Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 opponent, a “sick son of a bitch.”

Elon Musk’s pro-Trump super political action committee ran an ad that dances around one of the most vulgar insults for women in the English language. The ad opened with “Kamala Harris is a C Word.” It eventually revealed the word to be communist. Musk is one of Trump’s most vocal and high-profile surrogates, and the former president lauds him at length during his rallies.

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Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, responded to President Joe Biden’s remark that appeared to insult Trump supporters as “garbage” by using a similar description of Harris. “We’re going to take out the trash, and the trash’s name is Kamala Harris,” he told a rally crowd in Atlanta this week.

Vance has previously broadly disparaged liberal women leaders as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.”

Conservative commentator Bill Kristol, who has long opposed Trump, quoted the former president’s remark about Pelosi and Vance’s “trash” comment about Harris on the social platform X, and replied, “If you’re voting for Trump-Vance, this is who you’re voting for.”

In Trump’s closing week, his campaign has increasingly brought women to speak as warm-up acts at his rallies and positioned women in the stands behind the stage. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas; retired race car driver Danica Patrick; and Sage Steele, a former ESPN anchor, have all rallied Trump’s supporters in the closing weekend.

But the difficulty of Trump simultaneously making a macho appeal to men while trying not to alienate women was on display at his rally in Pittsburgh the day before the election. He called Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News anchor, to the stage.

Kelly and Trump feuded publicly during his first campaign in 2016, when she pressed him about his comments calling women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs.” He responded by attacking her online and telling an interviewer that Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

But standing in a critical battleground state Monday, Kelly defended him from criticism over his comments about protecting women. Then, she closed her pitch to women by expressing her concern for men.

“I’m not into their version of toxic masculinity or new masculinity,” she said of Democrats. “I prefer the old version.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Michael Gold/Maddie McGarvey
c. 2024 The New York Times Company