A lot has gone wrong under Donald Trump, but at least we narrowly avoided the catastrophe of a female president. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Kamala Harris. But it’s hard to imagine how any woman would have managed the unrelenting cascade of crises that have descended the escalator this year.
Women don’t understand money, and that would have created a perfect storm, since presidents don’t understand money either. Presidents are tasked with mismanaging the economic world order by misapplying the dubious lessons they learned while floundering as unsuccessful businessmen. What if a woman had to navigate the constant economic whiplash brought on by her own ruinous financial policies—while on her period?
Relationships with foreign leaders are an important part of the presidency. You know women: they love to talk and talk and listen and talk and listen, but presidents need to yell, threaten, harangue, decline to follow through on threats, alienate, and negotiate like an overtired toddler refusing his nap. Would a woman have what it takes to instantly destroy decades of built-up goodwill by cutting foreign aid? Plus, what if she took her finger off the nuclear button to get her nails done?
In fact, since a woman president would be so busy putting on makeup, shopping for shoes, and baking pies, would she even have time to stage ego-mad public slapfights with her billionaire friends-turned-advisors? I doubt her she-schedule could fit in deploying federal troops to incite chaos among peaceful protestors.
A woman president simply could not have handled today’s president-caused challenges. Plus, because society is sexist, she would have been judged so much more harshly for how she’d cope with the self-inflicted disasters that presidents continuously create.
I want a female president to succeed! How could she, considering all the ways presidents fail these days? If she had called herself a queen, sort of as a joke, but then confirmed that she wasn’t joking, I feel like no one would ever trust a lady president again.
Could women’s reputation as leaders ever recover from how presidents build their Cabinets? Once she surrounded herself with uniquely unqualified snake-oil salesmen and general dumdums who merely needed to flatter their way into her inner circle, no woman would ever again be trusted to assemble an incompetent leadership team.
Once a woman president attacked education, national parks, legal refugees seeking asylum, cancer research, and Muppets, as presidents must, she would be condemned as a monster. It’s not fair, but consequently, all women would be thought of as monsters unfit for the presidency.
If a woman president made tasteless jokes at the expense of the defenseless, people would say women are too cruel to be in charge. If she lashed out in juvenile anger at enemies and allies, people would say women are too emotional to lead. If she rambled on senselessly without completing a train of thought, people would say that women are too stupid to serve as commander-in-chief.
As bad as things are right now, it’s better to have a president who makes the expected cataclysmic mistakes, but with no reputational consequences to his gender.
Because, while we can’t foresee what would happen with a woman president, there’s one thing we can count on from the male presidents we prefer: a complete lack of accountability.