Christine Todd Whitman had a blunt response to President Donald Trump vowing to “protect” women if elected, “whether the women like it or not.”
“Well, frankly, that comment of his, ‘whether they like it or not,’ is just infuriating,” Whitman told CNN’s Jim Acosta on Wednesday. “And I think there are a lot of women who are still ... on the fence to whom that will be extremely offensive, and it will sway the vote.”
“I do agree that his base loves this, but there are still an, amazing to me, number of people who haven’t quite made up their mind,” she added. “And it’s comments like he’s going to take care of women ‘whether they like it or not’ that just makes you clench your fists.”
“It makes me clench my fists,” Whitman continued. “I wanna smack him across the face!”
Trump admitted onstage Wednesday at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, that his own advisers urged him not to make the comment.
“Well, I’m gonna do it whether the women like it or not. I’m gonna protect them from migrants coming in. I’m gonna protect them from foreign countries that wanna hit us with missiles and lots of other things,” he said.
“He’s not taking care of me or my body,” Whitman declared on CNN.
Whitman, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency under former President George W. Bush and currently co-chairs the centrist Forward Party alongside Andrew Yang, ironically also voiced her frustration with the focus on Trump’s language over his actions.
“Trump has been denigrating people, men, women, minorities,” she said Wednesday. “They’re calling them trash, calling them vermin, you know, ‘poisoning our blood.’ We have to stop talking about the things he’s talking about and say, look at the things he’s done.”
The lifelong politician argued during Trump’s first term that he is “living in his own reality” when it comes to environmental protections. Ahead of the 2020 election, Whitman warned Republicans to speak out — or be “complicit.”