Republicans have made a series of offensive and misogynistic comments only five days before the vote, boosting Democratic hopes of turning out women on election day in a contest where the rights of women have been a central issue for the Kamala Harris campaign.
With a large gender gap appearing to define the election race – women disproportionately breaking for Kamala Harris and men for Donald Trump – both campaigns have been seeking to shore up their bases in their final-pitch remarks.
On Thursday, the former US president, discussing his claims that the US did not become involved in any new foreign conflicts during his administration, attacked former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, daughter of George W Bush’s vice-president Dick Cheney for being a “radical war hawk”, saying a gun should be pointed at her to “see how she feels about it”.
The violent imagery of this broadside against a prominent female politician was just the latest in a string of dark comments coming from Republicans that the Harris campaign has seized on as evidence that a Trump victory would be a disaster for women’s freedoms.
Calling Cheney “a very dumb individual”, Trump said, “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Ian Sams, a senior adviser for Harris’s campaign, called out Trump for “dangerous, violent rhetoric”. “You have Donald Trump, who’s talking about sending a prominent Republican to the firing squad. And you have Vice-President Harris talking about sending one to her cabinet,” Sams told MSNBC on Friday.
Meanwhile, Harris described as “very offensive” a pledge by Trump the day before to “protect” women “whether the women like it or not”.
The Democratic campaign also aired a new ad, narrated by Julia Roberts, showing a woman going into a voting booth and apparently secretly voting for Harris. “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want. And no one will ever know,” the ad says, as the woman gives another a knowing look across the voting booth partitions.
As she emerges after voting for Harris, a man asks her if made “the right choice”. “Sure did, honey,” she says with a smile.
The Fox News primetime host Jesse Watters, responding to the ad, said on air that if his wife votes for Harris, “that’s the same thing as an affair” and that he would divorce her. “That, to me, violates the sanctity of our marriage. What else is she keeping from me? What else has she been lying about?”
The remark was followed by Charlie Kirk, whose rightwing organization Turning Point Action has a key role in Trump’s get-out-the-vote efforts, saying the man in the ad “probably works his tail off to make sure that [the wife] can go and have a nice life”, adding: “And she lies to him saying ‘I’m going to vote for Trump’, then she votes for Kamala Harris as her little secret in the voting booth.”
And the pro-Trump pastor Dale Partridge declared on Tuesday that “in a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction”.
The Trump campaign has attempted to hit back, accusing the Democrat-supporting billionaire Mark Cuban of talking down to female Trump supporters by saying that Trump was too “intimidated” to surround himself with “strong, intelligent women”.
Kristi Noem, the Republican South Dakota governor, challenged Cuban to a duel. “Game on, buddy. I’ll take you on any day in a debate or maybe even arm wrestling.”
But a promise by Trump on Thursday that he would give Robert F Kennedy Jr a prominent role in his administration working on “women’s health” attracted further criticism.
Trump has attempted to court women with the dubious suggestion that they would not have to worry about reproductive rights – Trump claims credit for overturning the federal right to abortion – if they’ve already been killed by an undocumented migrant.
“I’m going to protect them from migrants coming in,” Trump said. “I’m going to protect them from foreign countries that want to hit us with missiles and lots of other things.’”
The Harris campaign, meanwhile, is hoping that that his comments are a useful political wedge coming from a man who has been found liable for sexual abuse, with a judge calling an accusation of “rape” against Trump “substantially true”.
Another accusation of sexual assault was leveled against Trump last week by the model Stacey Williams, who revealed to the Guardian that, she says, Trump groped her in a “twisted game” with the convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump’s first presidential campaign was jeopardized by leaked audio in which Trump boasted about sexually assaulting women by grabbing women by their genitals, and he was found guilty of 34 felony counts after trying to buy the silence of the adult film star Stormy Daniels, thereby interfering unlawfully with the 2016 election.
“This is the same man who said women should be punished for their choices,” Harris said on Thursday at an event in Phoenix.
“He simply does not respect the freedom of women or the intelligence of women to know what’s in their own best interest and make decisions accordingly. But we trust women.”