PHOENIX — Kamala Harris said Thursday that Donald Trump’s comment that he would protect women whether they “like it or not” shows that the Republican presidential nominee does not understand women’s rights “to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies.”
“I think it’s offensive to everybody, by the way,” Harris said before she set out to spend the day campaigning in the Western battleground states of Arizona and Nevada.
She followed up those remarks at her rally in Phoenix: “He simply does not respect the freedom of women or the intelligence of women to know what’s in their own best interests and make decisions accordingly. But we trust women.”
The comments by Trump come as he has struggled to connect with women voters and as Harris courts women in both parties with a message centered on freedom. She’s making the pitch that women should be free to make their own decisions about their bodies and that if Trump is elected, more restrictions will follow.
Trump appointed three of the justices to the U.S. Supreme Court who formed the conservative majority that overturned federal abortion rights. As the fallout from the 2022 decision spreads, he has taken to claiming at public events and in social media posts that he would “protect women” and ensure they wouldn’t be “thinking about abortion.”
At a rally Wednesday evening near Green Bay, Wisconsin, Trump told his supporters that aides had urged him to stop using the phrase because it was “inappropriate.”
Then he added a new bit to the protector line. He said he told his aides: “Well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.”
Harris said the remark was part of a pattern of troubling statements by Trump.
“This is just the latest on a long series of reveals by the former president of how he thinks about women and their agency,” she said.
Harris tied Trump’s comments to his approach to reproductive rights, but Trump generally speaks more of protecting women from criminals, terrorists and foreign adversaries, in keeping with the bleak picture he paints of a country in decline.
“I’m going to protect them from migrants coming in. I’m going to protect them from foreign countries that want to hit us with missiles and lots of other things,” Trump said during a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
He seemed to tie in abortion when he first used the “protector” language in a Truth Social post and at a rally in Pennsylvania on Sept. 23. He assured the women who would be “protected” that they “will no longer be thinking about abortion.”
Before Trump headlined a rally in Henderson, Nevada, on Thursday night, he responded to a top Harris campaign surrogate’s claim that the former president does not surround himself with strong, intelligent women.
Mark Cuban said as a guest on ABC’s “The View” earlier Thursday that, “You never see” Trump “around strong, intelligent women — ever.”
Trump, on X, posted that Cuban was “very wrong,” and lashed out at him as “a fool” and a “MAJOR LOSER.”
“All strong women, and women in general, should be very angry about this weak man’s statement,” Trump’s post read.
Harris was also in the Nevada with rallies in Reno and Las Vegas. In Reno, protesters supporting Palestinians interrupted her speech right as she was about to criticize Trump over abortion, leading Harris to stress that her campaign is fighting for democracy as she told supporters to vote for a Nevada ballot issue that would provide a state constitutional right to abortion.
“Make sure you vote up and down the ballot to truly protect that right,” Harris said.
The dispute showed signs of further entrenching each candidate’s supporters.
It was not only women who described Trump’s remarks as offensive. At the Harris rally in Phoenix, Edison Kinlicheenie, 50, said he sees Trump more as a threat than a protector, noting that the former president has a track record of preying on women.
“I have a wife and a daughter, so I wouldn’t let no predator like that come around” them, Kinlicheenie said.
