On Wednesday's CNN Newsroom, during a discussion of Donald Trump accusing Hillary Clinton of playing the "gender card," host Brooke Baldwin declared that the comment reminded her of Mitt Romney using the words "binders full of women" which she asserted "really hurt him" in the 2012 presidential campaign.
CNN's Nia-Malika Henderson went on to complain, "We often think of women as only having gender. Men have a gender, too," and, after accusing Trump of playing a "gender card" by acting like an "alpha male," she concluded that "men certainly benefit from the gender card, too, and in some ways benefit more because it's more subtle in some ways for men."
At 2:41 p.m. ET, Baldwin brought up "binders full of women" from 2012:
Nia-Malika Henderson, let me bring your voice in because when I heard this woman card and, yeah, some people would agree with Tayna, and there are a lot of women who I know this infuriated, and I'm wondering -- it brought me back to the "binders full of women" comment from, you know, Mitt Romney during that debate when he was talking about when he was governor of Massachusetts he was combing through "binders full of women" of job applicants.
She added: "That really hurt him. People went out for Halloween as binders full of women that year. So I'm wondering: Does this hurt Trump or not?"
After injecting, "That's right," Henderson began pontificating about the issue of men benefiting from their own "gender card." Henderson brought up the "war on women" meme from 2012 as she began:
Yeah, you know, he's in a very difficult position at this point, and you go back to 2008, you had John McCain try to appoint Sarah Palin as a kind of corrective to the problems that he had with women, and then of course you saw Mitt Romney in the same way talking about "binders full of women," and you saw Democrats run that "war on women" strategy very effectively against him in 2012 with Barack Obama winning something like 11 percentage points of women to Mitt Romney.
She then added:
But what I think is also interesting here is what's sort of missed when we're talking about the gender card is the ways in which Donald Trump himself is playing the gender card. You know, we often think of women as only having gender. Men have a gender, too. And I think there's probably no presidential candidate that we've seen in modern times more sort of obsessed with his own masculinity than Donald Trump. Here's a person who got on a sort of debate stage and talked about the size of his hands -- and guess what, he wasn't talking about the size of his hands.
Henderson then elaborated:
Here's a presidential candidate ... and playing sort of who's wife is hotter with Ted Cruz and this whole idea of, you know, he's going to punch somebody out at a rally. He's certainly playing this role as the alpha male, right, which is certainly a form of playing the gender card. So I think we too often sort of see women as the only people who have a gender and forget about the ways and sort of subtle and overt ways that men certainly benefit from the gender card, too, and in some ways benefit more because it's more subtle in some ways for men.
Baldwin agreed: "That's a valid point."
