President Trump on Thursday appealed on Twitter to the “Suburban Housewives of America” in his latest attempt to paint presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s policies as a threat to the suburbs.
Trump shared a New York Post column titled “Joe Biden’s disastrous plans for America’s suburbs” that opined about the negative consequences of an Obama era fair housing rule that the former vice president has vowed to reinstate if elected.
“The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article,” Trump tweeted. “Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better!”
Trump referring to women voters with the outdated term “suburban housewives” drew mockery and criticism on social media. “Housewives” was trending on Twitter late Thursday afternoon.
“The president of United States thinks of women as housewives which I guess is better than his other comments about women,” tweeted Molly Jong Fast, a novelist and frequent Trump critic.
“‘Suburban women’ probably would have worked a bit better,” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted.
The tweet aligns with Trump’s rhetoric in recent weeks in which he has attempted to appeal to suburban voters by stoking fear and warning against Biden’s policies that would make it easier for minorities to access affordable housing.
At a White House event earlier this month, Trump claimed a Biden presidency would “totally destroy the beautiful suburbs. Suburbia will be no longer as we know it. So they wanted to defund and abolish your police and law enforcement while at the same time destroying our great suburbs.”
Critics have condemned Trump’s rhetoric as stoking racial animus by suggesting the implementation of fair housing standards that largely benefit minorities would lead to the destruction of the suburbs.
The Trump administration on Thursday repealed the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which was implemented in 2015 and required localities to draw up plans to address housing discrimination to receive certain federal funding.
Biden has vowed in his campaign’s housing plan to reinstate the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule and provide tax incentives to build more affordable housing in suburban, urban and rural areas.
Suburban voters, and suburban women in particular, will be a critical voting bloc for Trump if he hopes to win reelection in November.
A CNN exit poll found that 49 percent of suburban voters backed Trump in the 2016 election, compared to 45 percent who supported Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
But many of those same voters backed Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterms, and an ABC News/Washington Post poll released last week found Biden leading Trump among suburban registered voters, 52 to 43 percent.