'Bizarre' GOP 'embrace of misogyny' hardly new — but now core to its brand: Trump's niece

The Republican Party has escalated past simply tolerating hatred of women — it now actively requires it.

That's according to Mary Trump, former President Donald Trump's niece and a prominent psychologist, who blasted the GOP in her latest newsletter.

This comes as Trump and the Republican National Committee weigh how best to go after chief rival Vice President Kamala Harris, trying out various attack lines against her laugh. It also comes as Trump's newly minted running mate J.D. Vance (R-OH) faces criticism over a resurfaced interview in which he likened Harris to a "childless cat lady" and said her not having biological children means she has "no stake" in America's future.

"We’ve been on this road for a long time," wrote Ms. Trump. "From the day failures in the 70s to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed to Donald’s getting elected despite bragging about assaulting women to his corrupt illegitimate super-majority on the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, the GOP’s war on women and embrace of misogyny is hardly new. But the elevation of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the ticket has revealed a very simple and unsettling truth — Republican men are really bizarre when it comes to women."

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Vance, she continued, is far from the only figure in the GOP demanding that politicians, and especially female ones, submit to their family ideals: "Blake Masters, the 2022 Republican Arizona U.S. Senate nominee, wrote on Twitter Wednesday night that 'political leaders should have children. Certainly they should at least be married. If you aren’t running or can’t run a household of your own, how can you relate to a constituency of families, or govern wisely with respect to future generations? Skin in the game matters.'"

He didn't explicitly mention women in this proclamation, but it echoes Vance's "cat lady" logic, Ms. Trump made clear. "Women are used to having to be on-guard around dangerous men who want to hurt and control us; those men who won’t take no for an answer. And we are painfully aware of how detrimental it would be to our safety and freedom if a party this dedicated to taking a sledgehammer to our rights was allowed anywhere near the levers of power."

"Nobody who believes in democracy or equality should want Vance to be a heartbeat away from the presidency any more than they should want Donald Trump to be president," she concluded.