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As Donald Trump looks set to contest the presidency, Sky News’ Martha Kelner asks what it means for women
THE LOBBY OF THE upmarket Hotel Fort Des Moines was abuzz as Donald Trump arrived in Iowa for the caucuses, the primary election that fires the starting gun on the race for the White House. Secret Service police instructed me and my team, as well as a crowd of ‘Make America Great Again’ groupies, wearing Trump 2024 hats and sweaters, to keep our distance.
But we were close enough to see him shuffle from his motorcade. Wearing a black jacket and white shirt unbuttoned to the chest, he looked dishevelled, dressed more for a mild Florida winter than the –25 degrees in Iowa that weekend.
The sliding doors to the hotel opened and a gust of wind caught him, threatening to lift his hair clean from his head. He patted it down. ‘Are you worried about the cold affecting your voters?’ I shouted at him. ‘It’s nasty out there,’ he replied, ‘but we got a lot of tremendous support.’
He was right, his followers were typically fervent. Trump ended the night with more than 50% of the vote. His closest rival, Ron DeSantis, wasn’t even on the map. ‘F** k, here we go again,’ one cameraman said, as it became clear a Trump landslide was taking shape. The primary elections in other states will continue but it is hard to envisage any scenario now where Trump is not battling Joe Biden for the presidency by the spring.
The morning after the caucuses, I met Haley, a 16-year-old high school student and Ashley, a teacher, at a café having breakfast. They neatly surmised the Trump phenomenon. ‘My friends vote for him even though they know he did X, Y and Z and it was awful,’ Ashley said. ‘He could kill someone and they’d still vote for him.’ Haley was fearful. ‘I’m scared for our future as girls and women, given what he did when he was in charge, if he gets elected again,’ she said.
Top of their concerns is the role Trump played in reversing Roe v Wade. From the Oval Office he appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, which then, in 2022, overturned the constitutional right to choose abortion, which had stood for half a century. There are now near total bans on abortion in Indiana, North Dakota, South and North Carolina and Nebraska.
I’ve spoken to women across the US who have been impacted in the most horrific ways. In Florida, I heard how Deborah Dorbert was forced to carry her pregnancy to term even though her baby had no chance of surviving beyond a couple of hours. Her little boy, Milo, lived just 93 minutes. In Tennessee, Mayron Hollis recounted to me how she almost bled to death on her doorstep after being denied an abortion in her home state, despite her pregnancy having known life-threatening complica
