But for the broader core of Trump’s followers, the description of white, urban women as violent radicals obstructing mass deportations seems to reflect older anxieties around race, gender and immigration among the white, non-college educated men who make up the core of Trump’s movement and perceive their place in society slipping, said political scientist Shauna Shames, who co-edited the book The Right Women: Republican Party Activists, Candidates, and Legislators.
The notion of “white replacement” is not new. Far-right protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, were chanting “Jews will not replace us” in 2017. But the president’s mass deportation effort has crystallised battle lines. And gender is rising in that divide, along with race and ethnicity.
People rally in New York to demand an end to immigration deployments after the fatal shooting of Renee Good.Credit: Getty Images
“It’s all come to a head here,” Shames said of Good’s killing.
White, educated women may indeed be a threat to Trump, at least in the electorate. Some 17 per cent of voters last year were white women with college degrees, nearly matching the 18 per cent who were non-college-educated white men.
And in an election in which Trump cut into Democratic advantages among Black, Latino and Asian American voters, Kamala Harris expanded the Democratic lead among college-educated white women, winning 58 per cent of their vote compared with Joe Biden’s 54 per cent in 2020, according to the Centre for Women and American Politics at Rutgers University. Trump’s support from non-college-educated white women held steady at 63 per cent.
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The term AWFUL is not the first derisive name targeting white women. People across the political spectrum once gleefully targeted so-called Karens, a term meant to denigrate women – usually white and middle-aged – caught using their privilege to bend the world in their direction.
The use of AWFUL emerged well before Good was killed. Conservative critics began attaching it to female protesters at least as far back as last northern summer. Conservatives say there is good reason to key in on such women. Erickson, in a lengthy Substack post on Thursday, called Good’s death a “tragedy”, but one that Good and “her lesbian partner” had brought on themselves.
“Good had been harassing ICE agents much of the day,” he wrote. “Good had been involved in a progressive activist group called ICE Watch that encouraged not just obstruction of ICE, but also something they call ‘de-arrest’, which means helping detained illegal immigrants escape.”
It is not clear how deeply Good or her partner were involved in the organised protests that have greeted immigration agents in Minnesota. And while administration officials have said she was violent or mentally ill, that description bears no resemblance to the person relatives and neighbours said they knew.
Liberal academics have been diagnosing what they see as the problem. Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right author Laura Field said social, demographic and economic changes had left men with a sense that they have lost status.
“Women are, for many of them, the placeholder for their ‘stolen’ status,” she said.
Protesters outside the Minneapolis City Hall on Saturday.Credit: AP
If liberal academics have their theories, Naomi Wolf, who was once a liberal writer but moved rightward after the COVID-19 pandemic, has hers. Writing on social media, Wolf said liberal men, “disproportionately oestrogenised” and “physically passive”, had left liberal women sexually frustrated and eager for a fight.
“The smiles you see on their faces now say it all: white women long for all out combat with ICE – who tend to be strong, physically confident, masculine men – because the conflict is a form of physical release for them,” she wrote.
On Thursday, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media site X, jumped in, amplifying a post to his 232 million followers that said: “Liberal women will divorce their husband and only let him see his children once a month, then cry about how ICE hurts families.”
White men have been prominent in Minneapolis streets as well. But critics of the onslaught of attacks on women say male protesters are not being singled out as a cohort.
Protesters shout at federal law enforcement in Minneapolis on Saturday.Credit: AP
To be sure, white women who fit a traditional mould do enjoy status in American society, Field said. But that mould is not what the Trump administration and its supporters are responding to in Minneapolis.
“Trump and this administration are heavily misogynist, and that’s always a big part of what he does,” said former Republican congresswoman Barbara Comstock, a fierce critic of the president.
Comstock pointed to polling that shows that strong majorities now disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration, but public opinion is not tempering the administration’s tactics or rhetoric.
“I think the problem is these guys all talk to themselves, and they are in their own bubble,” Comstock said.
A photo of Renee Good at a protest and rally in Seattle last weekend.Credit: AP
When Trump was told in an interview with CBS News that Good’s father was a supporter of his, the president responded: “I would bet you that she, under normal circumstances, was a very solid, wonderful person. But, you know, her actions were pretty tough.”
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There are signs that the categorisation of Good as a radical may not be taking hold among the broader public. Joe Rogan, the influential podcaster who endorsed the president in 2024, said he was horrified watching video of Good’s killing. “It’s complicated, obviously, but it’s also very ugly to watch someone shoot a US citizen, especially a woman, in the face,” Rogan said on his podcast, which has more than 20 million subscribers on YouTube.
In all of this, race is at play, for critics of the white women in the streets and for their sympathisers.
“The idea that you could lose your life, that you too are at risk in the way that black people have been for centuries, I do think that’s different,” Shames said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
