Barbara Kay: Trump victory a win for women’s rights, War on Terror

As you’ve likely heard several times by now, Donald Trump’s decisive victory on Tuesday was “the greatest political comeback in American history.” It’s not an exaggeration, and while some media commentators (like those on Fox News, which I was watching on election night) made the observation in positive wonderment, most admitted it through gritted teeth.

For me, in this election like no other I can remember, the choice was clear and compelling. One candidate represented a perspective known as “wokeism” that I hold responsible for plunging the West into suicidal cultural decline, and the other represented a vigorous renunciation of the theories responsible for that decline. Two woke obsessions that have been endorsed or tolerated by the Democrats, gender ideology and anti-Zionism, offend me to the core.

So yes, I wanted Trump to win — and, for social peace, I wanted him to win “bigly.” The pollsters were, happily, wrong in their too-close-to-call projections (again!), resulting in quiet streets and widespread acknowledgement that the Dems are not the victims in this scenario, but — through a stubborn resistance to reading the societal room beyond their elite salons — enablers of their own demise.

During the campaign, for instance, Kamala Harris was invited several times by friendly media people to distance herself from her or President Joe Biden’s more contentious policies. Yet she refused, for example, to moderate her position on funding gender-affirming care, including sex-change surgeries for non-citizen prisoners.

Instead, Harris went all in for unfettered abortion rights, as though it were the only gender issue that women cared about. How could she not have noticed that gender ideology was also becoming a serious women’s issue?

Last year, 69 per cent of Americans told Gallup that, “Transgender athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender.” Commenting on the poll in an editorial devoted to the “sleeper issue” of transgender sports, the Wall Street Journal observed, “This isn’t bigotry. For most Americans it’s a matter of fairness, as well as the equal opportunity for women in sports enshrined in Title IX.”

Title IX is the law that guarantees equality for women in education programs that receive federal funding, including sports. But on his first day in office, President Biden — who won office by falsely representing himself as someone who would govern from the centre — signed an executive order on “Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation,” which conflated sex with gender identity and opened women’s single-sex spaces and women’s sports to men who identify — or say they identify — as women.

Harris boasted about her basic “values,” but there is no value dearer to any athlete or sports fan than “fairness.” By contrast, Trump, who is very good at reading the cultural room, announced in 2022 that he would ban biological males from women’s sports. The GOP spent a ton of money on transgender ads. And on the day after his election, Trump declared that such a ban would be a Day 1 priority.

As for Israel, Harris has displayed a dangerous ignorance of foreign affairs in general, and the Middle East in particular, in the latter case so sweeping that she makes our lacklustre Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly look like Henry Kissinger. She would have dutifully continued ploughing the Iran-appeasing furrow designed by former president Barack Obama, and embraced by Joe Biden.

Sixty-six per cent of Israelis favoured a Trump victory, and for good reason. Foremost is their appreciation of the momentous breakthrough in the moribund peace-process logjam signified by the Abraham Accords that Trump’s team brokered. The accords normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states.

Saudi Arabia likely would have joined in, but Biden alienated the Saudis by cutting off support for their military campaign against the Houthis. Trump had designated the Houthis as a terror group. Biden reversed that policy. Trump had restored sanctions on Iran, which would have prevented lavish spending on the regime’s terror proxies: Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Biden removed them.

Trump cut funding to UNRWA in 2018. Biden restored it. The list could go on and on. All of these measures ran counter to Israel’s interests and security, and all can be traced back to Obama’s pro-Iran vision. If for no other reason, approval for Trump’s win is justified on the grounds that it denies Obama a fourth term in office.

A female leader who privileges gender mysticism over sex rights would have been no gift to American girls and women. And a geopolitically ignorant leader of the most powerful nation on earth would have been no gift to Israelis, Palestinians, the region’s Arabs or, for that matter, the world.

National [email protected]/BarbaraRKay