Speaking to reporters in Wisconsin on Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris said former President Donald Trump’s remark at a Wednesday rally that he would protect women “whether the women like it or not” was “very offensive” to women.
“It actually is, I think, very offensive to women in terms of not understanding their agency, their authority, their right and their ability to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies,” Harris said. “He does not prioritize the freedom of women and the intelligence of women to make decisions about their own lives and bodies.”
“I think it’s offensive to everybody, by the way,” she later added.
At a rally in Green Bay, Wisc., on Wednesday night, Trump said his advisers told him in recent weeks to stop saying “I want to protect the women of our country,” but that he insisted he will keep saying it “whether the women like it or not.”
“They said ‘we think it’s very inappropriate.’ I said, ‘why? I’m president. I want to project the women of our country,’” Trump said. “I pay these guys a lot of money, can you believe it?”
“I said ‘well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not.’ I’m going to project them. 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,” he continued.
Harris, at her rally in Arizona later Thursday, echoed a similar sentiment to her previous remarks: "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."
In his remarks, Trump falsely claimed Harris was deliberately bringing undocumented immigrants into the country “including savage criminals who assault, rape and murder our women and girls.” Trump has highlighted incidents where undocumented immigrants have been accused or convicted of violent crimes as he’s campaigned, though studies from Stanford University and the conservative-leaning Cato Institute show that immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.
“Anyone who would let monsters kidnap and kill our children does not belong anywhere near the Oval Office,” Trump said.
Trump also railed against transgender people, a topic his campaign has featured prominently in ads airing during nationally televised football games and baseball’s World Series, and swore to keep transgender women out of women’s sports. Harris, who has largely avoided the topic since becoming the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee this summer, made no mention of his attacks on transgender people in her brief remarks on Thursday morning.
Harris did bring up Trump’s 2016 comment that “there has to be some sort of punishment” for women who get abortions — a position he quickly walked back, though he said earlier this year he would leave it up to individual states to decide if they wanted to prosecute women who receive abortion care — as well as his frequent boasts about appointing three of the Supreme Court justices who ultimately ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022.
“He has actually created a situation in America where now one in three women lives in a Trump abortion ban state and has legal restrictions on the right she rightly should have to make decisions about her own body,” Harris said.
Running to restore the nearly 50-year precedent of access to abortion that ended with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Harris has hit Trump hard on abortion, appearing on the trail with advocates and celebrities speaking passionately about their support for a right to abortion.
Democrats have argued that the pro-Trump transition plan known as Project 2025 — denounced by the former president, but crafted by close allies and former administration officials at the Heritage Foundation — provides a blueprint for banning abortion across the nation.
“What he’s bragging about, is those women you’re thinking about right now have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, said in Pennsylvania on Thursday. “He also said this… this was a moment of self-reflection for him. He says, ‘I know a lot of people don’t like that.’ Well, no s--- they don’t like it.”
Walz went on to say Trump telling the crowd he would do things “whether women like it or not” fit into a pattern in his life, from the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape discussing forcibly grabbing women’s genitalia that nearly derailed his 2016 campaign to being found liable for sexual abuse in a civil trial earlier this year brought by a woman accused him of raping her in a New York City department store in the 1990s. Trump is appealing the civil ruling.
“That’s how this guy’s lived his life,” Walz said. “Women turned away now because of what he’s doing from emergency rooms to get basic care, having miscarriages in parking lots. Survivors of rape and incest being forced to carry their attacker’s child.”
Harris slams Speaker Johnson after he says Trump win would mean ‘massive’ changes to U.S. health care
In her brief comments to the press on Thursday morning, Harris also slammed Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., after the latter said this week that Republicans plan “massive” changes to the Affordable Care Act and the way health care works in the United States if Trump is reelected.
“I've been saying throughout this campaign, be very clear that among the stakes in this election are whether we continue with the Affordable Care Act or not. It has been a part of Donald Trump's agenda for a very long time,” Harris said. “He has made dozens of attempts to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, and now we have further validation of that agenda from his supporter, the Speaker of the House.”
The Affordable Care Act, also known colloquially as “Obamacare,” subsidizes health care for millions of Americans, expands Medicaid programs to cover more adults and requires insurers to cover people living with pre-existing health conditions. Signed into law in 2010, Republicans have long sought to appeal it and attempted to do so several times during Trump’s first term.
“What that would mean for the American people is that… insurance companies could go back to a time when they would deny you coverage for health insurance based on pre-existing conditions, pre-existing conditions such as you being a survivor of breast cancer, asthma, diabetes,” Harris said. “What I know is that the American people, regardless of who they're voting for, know the importance of the Affordable Care Act… based on a fundamental principle that I hold deeply: access to health care should be a right and not just a privilege to those who can afford it.”
Johnson said at the Pennsylvania event on Monday that “health care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda” if Trump is reelected and promised that congressional Republicans would be “very aggressive” in the first 100 days.
Trump denied he supported repealing the Affordable Care Act, despite his past support for such a position, in a social media post after Harris spoke on Thursday.
“Lyin’ Kamala is giving a News Conference now, saying that I want to end the Affordable Care Act. I never mentioned doing that, never even thought about such a thing,” Trump wrote. “Kamala is a LIAR! Everything that comes out of her mouth is a LIE. It’s MADE UP FICTION, and she’s doing it because she’s losing, and losing BIG!”
Trump campaigned for president in 2016 on repealing the Affordable Care Act – a message on his campaign website in 2016 read, "On day one of the Trump Administration, we will ask Congress to immediately deliver a full repeal of Obamacare" – and the first executive order he signed after taking office in 2017 was aimed at beginning the transition for a repeal of the law. That and another Trump executive order targeting the ACA were revoked by President Joe Biden in 2021.
In May 2017, Trump held a Rose Garden ceremony with Republican lawmakers celebrating the House passing a bill that would have partially repealed the ACA. But come July, the Senate scuttled the bill after three Republican senators – Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and John McCain – voted against it.
Afterwards, Trump said the new plan was to "let Obamacare fail," adding: "It’ll be a lot easier. We’re not going to own it. I’m not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. We’ll let Obamacare fail, and then the Democrats are going to come to us."
Biden sought to strengthen the ACA under his administration, and has seen record sign-ups during his tenure in the White House.