Is America hopelessly sexist? Harris vs. Trump will answer that question.

The music at America’s political conventions usually tells you more than the prefabricated blather spewing from the podium. In 1992 in New York, Bill Clinton announced the era of baby boomer presidents with Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop.” In 2000 in Philadelphia, Ricky Martin walked off “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush with “Livin’ La Vida Loca.”

In 2024 in Milwaukee, Donald Trump really wanted the nation to know that “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”

As the Fiserv Forum crowd roared and snapped iPhone pictures of their beatified nominee marching in, his right ear bandaged after the July 13 assassination attempt, Trump reveled in the 1966 James Brown anthem to undiluted machismo — Rolling Stone once called it “biblically chauvinistic” — that is reportedly one of Trump’s all-time favorite songs (although this was a 1993 remake duet with Luciano Pavarotti, half in Italian, because everything with Trump has to be weird).

The Day 3 walk-on song was really the mantra for an entire Republican National Convention that smelled like a dingy rundown gym on North Broad Street. The run-up to Trump’s big acceptance speech included Ultimate Fighting CEO Dana White — captured on video in 2022 in a violent altercation with his wife — and wrestling icon Hulk Hogan, who ripped off his top shirt to reveal a Trump-Vance T-shirt, called the GOP nominee “a gladiator,” and urged his supporters to “run wild, brother!” What about sisters? Many spoke at the RNC and reveled in their role as traditional wives and mothers — even Usha Vance, the Yale Law School grad married to the vice presidential nominee.

Of course, the overdose of Viagra in Milwaukee was targeted at another man: President Joe Biden, whom Team Trump fully expected to cling to the Democratic nomination because that’s what their own self-centered boss would do. Much of what I saw in Wisconsin was meant to kick sand in the 81-year-old Biden’s face as a 98-pound weakling.

Two weeks later, the man’s, man’s, man’s world of Trump finds itself facing an energetic, vivacious 59-year-old woman in Vice President Kamala Harris. Brother, the GOP looks lost — unable to decide whether the first Black and Asian American woman to hold national office is a diabolical San Francisco radical or “a DEI hire” (or, as many right-wing online trolls put it, “DEI higher”).

But Trump and his supporters know that America’s Lake Powell-sized reservoir of misogyny, more than anything else, carried a blustery businessman and reality TV star to his 2016 victory over a former secretary of state and U.S. senator in Hillary Clinton, fueled by pitchfork rallies chanting “Lock her up!” for nonexistent crimes. Now, Trump — who will go down in history now as winless against male opponents — is busy cranking up the sexism machine from eight years ago.

And let’s be honest: A lot of the former trepidation among Democrats about replacing Biden with the younger Harris was based on one thing: the fear that America is still not ready, after 248 years, for any female president, let alone a Black woman.

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There was already so much at stake in November’s election. Voters must still choose between continuing a government committed to normal stuff like defending democracy in Europe, fighting pollution, and fixing bridges, or replacing that with a “Red Caesar” or “post-Constitutional” monarchy of mass deportation camps, and political prisoners that would replace civil servants with Trump cultists. Nothing could be more important, and yet — much as happened in 2016 — the fate of the republic may ultimately hinge on how we feel about the battle of the sexes.

Even before Biden’s stunning decision to drop out just a month before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Trump’s lead in the polls, including the make-or-break swing states, was almost exclusively on the backs of men. In particular, there was a lot of evidence — both in polling data and anecdotal — that male voters, and especially young men, found Biden’s apparent frailty, as seen on TV in his disastrous June debate performance, off-putting.

Indeed, a remarkable New York Times/Siena College poll just after that debate showed Biden’s weak performance had boosted Trump’s lead with male voters from 11 percentage points to a whopping 23 percentage points. Yet, women watching that same debate actually elevated their support for Biden, from 5 percentage points to 8 percentage points. Clearly, female voters saw the rising odds of a Trump victory and were terrified of what 2025 might bring.

Given that, you might think that the replacement of Biden with a female candidate would clinch a Trump victory in November — but it’s not feeling that way, not now. In the early days of Harris’ candidacy, the Hulk Hogan-style bravado of Milwaukee now sounds awkward and clunky.

“If you’re a dude and you vote for Kamala Harris for president, your man card gets revoked immediately,” posted self-proclaimed MAGA political commentator Gunther Eagleman — which inspired Harris-supporting former Navy SEAL Dan Barkoff to reply: “I feel OK about my man card. Where were you during the war champ?”

The fallback position, voiced openly by leading Republicans like Tennessee U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett, is that the first Black and Asian female vice president is “a DEI hire” — not surprising from a movement that is increasingly open about its racism and its sexism, even inexplicably claiming that Boeing’s falling aircraft parts made them afraid of Black pilots, or that Trump’s shooting in Butler, Pa., was because the Secret Service employs women.

Any DEI claims from the Trump-Vance ticket are absurd. JD Vance, in his best-selling Hillbilly Elegy, admits that he got a nearly free ride to Yale Law School because the Ivy League campus wanted the diversity, equity, and inclusion of working-class whites like him. Trump, speaking Wednesday in Charlotte, N.C., tried to make an issue of the fact that — like many lawyers — it took Harris two tries to pass the bar exam. That’s rich from a man who, according to close relatives, paid someone else to take the SATs for him to get into the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where a professor called Trump “the dumbest” student he’d ever had. DEI-type programs were invented to remedy the centuries of advantages afforded to utterly mediocre white men, like the two atop the Republican ticket.

Overconfidence on the right has led to an open acknowledgment of the movement’s true goal of bringing male-female relations back to the 1950s, before The Feminine Mystique and the modern feminist movement.

“Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society,” states Project 2025, the right’s blueprint for an authoritarian Trump government that is loaded with calls to end diversity programs and limit reproductive rights for women. Vance himself said the quiet part out loud in 2021 when he proclaimed that Harris, as vice president, was the avatar of “childless cat ladies.”

With Harris suddenly replacing Biden atop the ticket, the GOP’s rank misogyny has had the political effect of poking a giant grizzly bear with a stick. The female voters drifting toward Biden with quiet desperation after the debate have now erupted with an emotional catharsis for Harris that already is standing the 2024 election on its head.

The massive outpouring of enthusiasm for a woman to finally put Trump in his place — the 44,000 Black women who hopped on a Zoom call that became the kind of telethon for a Harris presidency that Jerry Lewis could have only dreamed of, the flood of $250 million in campaign cash with much coming from first-time small donors, the 28,000 instant new volunteers — is a moment that will be written about in political science textbooks for decades to come.

But will it be enough? To paraphrase a maybe apocryphal H.L. Mencken quote, no one ever went broke underestimating the capacity of the American voter to embrace sexism and racism — to sing that this is a man’s, man’s, man’s world while borne ceaselessly back into the past of our ancient, founding hierarchies.

Suddenly, more than ever, the 2024 election is a referendum on the future of American sexism. If the Trump-Vance ticket prevails, an unrestrained MAGA movement will move quickly to impose its Handmaid’s Tale vision for the nation’s future. In a nation that — unlike the United Kingdom, Germany, New Zealand, and a bunch of other forward-thinking countries — has never anointed a female leader, the right is betting on our bleak history.

But as Barack Obama or the 2017-2018 Eagles could tell you, the story never changes until suddenly it does — and things are not always what they seem. The lyrics for “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” were written by a woman — Betty Jean Newsome — and the song’s true message is that male braggadocio “don’t mean nothing — nothing! — without a woman or a girl.” Ironically, it may prove the perfect anthem for shattering America’s last glass ceiling into a million pieces.

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