“Such a nasty woman,” Donald Trump sneered at Hillary Clinton during one of their 2016 debates. At another point in the campaign, he mocked his opponent for taking longer to go to the bathroom than a man. “It’s disgusting,” he said. “Disgusting.” 

Sexism is part of Donald Trump’s playbook. He once called former German Chancellor Angela Merkel “that bitch.” Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, should get ready for the same misogynist epithets. Trump has already called her “dumb as a rock,” “Laughing Kamala,” and declared that “nobody likes her.” As the New York Times noted, Trump “has a long history of attacking female rivals and critics in personal terms, usually describing them as mentally unstable or worse.”

Trump can’t help himself. Sexism is baked into his political persona, which is all about projecting masculinity. During the convention, he walked onstage to James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” He’s strong. He’s powerful. He survived a shooting. He behaves in ways that a lot of his male admirers wish they could get away with. His third wife is a model young enough to be his daughter. He never changed his children’s diapers, or pushed their strollers. He bragged that he can grab women “by the pussy,” because “when you’re a star, they’ll let you.”

Trump’s politically incorrect alpha male act is perfectly in tune with today’s Republican Party. Right now, no issue divides the parties more than traditional gender roles. The core value of the Republican Party is the supremacy of the straight white male, of which Donald Trump is the ideel. If you believe Trans Lives Matter, you’re a Democrat. If you believe gender-affirming care for minors should be a felony, you’re a Republican. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s right-wing policy initiative, declares in its manifesto that “The only valid family is a working father married to a stay-at-home mother and their children.” So far, all 46 of our presidents have been men. The Heritage Foundation would like to maintain that tradition. Trump’s Supreme Court appointees overturned Roe v. Wade, because women need to be bearing more children. Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, said so as part of his criticism of the “childless left.”

“The fact that we’re not having enough babies, the fact that we’re not having enough children, is a crisis in this country,” he added. “It’s a crisis because it makes our media more miserable. It’s a crisis because it doesn’t give our leaders enough of an investment in the future of their country. And it’s a crisis because we know that babies are good.”

During Trump’s acceptance speech in Milwaukee, the biggest cheers from his fellow Republicans were in response to his attack on trans athletes.

“We will not have men playing in women’s sports,” Trump promised. “That will end immediately.”

As Archie and Edith Bunker sang in “Those Were the Days,” the theme song to All in the Family, “And you knew who you were then/ Goils were goils and men were men.” Mister, they could use a man like Donald Trump again.

Of course, Kamala Harris isn’t just a woman. She’s a woman of color, the daughter of immigrants — one from Jamaica, the other from India. That gives Trump the opportunity to pile racism on top of his sexism. Xenophobia, the fear of immigrants replacing the white majority, is also essential to the Republican mindset. Trump got the second biggest cheers of his speech when he promised to deport refugees who have arrived in America during Biden’s administration.

“The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country,” Trump warned. “They are coming in from every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, Middle East. They’re coming from everywhere. They’re coming at levels that we’ve never seen before. It is an invasion indeed, and this administration does absolutely nothing to stop them.”

Harris’s parents emigrated from those non-white nations. Trump already mispronounces the name “Kamala,” in an attempt to “other” the vice president. (No matter that his running mate, Vance, is married to an Indian-American woman and has a son named Vivek.) Although Harris was born in California, Trump has also suggested she’s ineligible to hold her office because her parents were immigrants, a repeat of the birther argument he used against Barack Obama.

For better or worse, Joe Biden was the best candidate to beat Trump in 2020 because the old white guy was immune to his racism and sexism. But now the old white guy is too old. The Democrats have no choice but to run his vice president. To run anyone else would alienate Black and women voters, two important Democratic constituencies.

The New York Times also notes that Trump “has turned off a sizable proportion of college-educated voters and suburban women with his rhetoric on gender and race.”

Trump doesn’t care about college-educated voters and suburban women. They’ll never vote for him. And his base will never desert him. They crave the red meat of his sexism and racism. Trump cares about 100,000 or so swing voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. He cares about reaching men who feel emasculated by their economic failures, and who blame the loss of well-paying jobs on immigrants, Mexico, and Japan. When Trump promised in his speech to bring back automaking jobs, he wasn’t just making an economic pledge. Manufacturing is man’s work, and in the Rust Belt states he needs to win, there’s a powerful nostalgia for the days when a man could support a family on a factory paycheck. During the 2016 campaign, I saw this bumper sticker in Flint, Michigan: LIFE’S A BITCH, AND THEN YOU VOTE FOR ONE. 

If Trump can make a liberal Black/Indian woman from San Francisco — the epitome of modernity — seem like an avatar of those social and economic changes, he can win those Rust Belt states, just as he did in 2016, and win the election. Can Trump turn Kamala Harris into that target? He did it to Hillary Clinton. Why wouldn’t he try it again? 

Harris, the former prosecutor, is trying to counter those stereotypes with the argument that Trump is a convicted felon and a threat to democracy who tried to overturn the 2020 election. It’s going to be a nasty, negative campaign. Americans will vote against the candidate they fear the most. Biden didn’t drop out because he was afraid of ending his career as a loser. He dropped out because he was afraid Trump would win. Trump is still a 1-2 favorite in most of the betting books. Eight years after the country rejected a woman for president, has it grown enough to accept one?