The Recent Presidential Debate Suggests Men May Just Be A Little Too Emotional To Be President

After former President Donald Trump delivered a huffy, visibly emotional debate performance Tuesday night, many viewers hopped online to make the same joke: “Perhaps men are too emotional to be president.”

After decades of hearing that female candidates were too emotionally unstable ― hysterical even, especially around that time of month ― for the top job, the joke was too good to pass up, given how the night panned out: It was the woman on stage, Vice President Kamala Harris, who came across as cool, calm and collected (albeit characteristically prone to laughing).

Expertly baited by Harris ― one reference to Trump’s small crowd sizes was all it took to set him off ― a petulant Trump glared into the camera all night, his mouth bunched and his eyes squinted in a scowl. 

Those same eyes never seemed to make direct contact with his Democratic rival for the presidency, who, by comparison, seized the split-screen format, smirking and shaking her head as Trump rambled about immigrants eating cats and his admiration of Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán.

Clearly thrown off his game, Trump refused to call Harris by her first name, one he often mispronounces, preferring “she.” 

Eventually he went full schoolyard gossip mode, claiming that even President Joe Biden didn’t like Harris. “I’ll give you a little secret. He hates her. He can’t stand her.”

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni said Trump looked “livid” on stage. Britain’s The Independent went for “unhinged.” Whatever word you go with, the gist is that Trump was overly emotional Tuesday night on the Philadelphia debate stage ― a label that’s been lobbed for decades at women who run for office. (Not to mention, used as arguments against women voting and serving on juries.)

“The performance by the two candidates last night should, but probably won’t, put to rest forever the myth that all men are rational and all women are emotional,” said Barbara A. Perry, a presidential studies professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs.

As recent as 2019, a Georgetown University study found that 13% of respondents still had serious doubts about women’s emotional suitability for political office. And it hurts their chances of winning: A number of studies have shown that labeling women as “emotional” undermines their credibility. 

Despite his emotional outbursts ― he was nearly as tantrum-y in his debates with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016 ― Trump’s credibility has never taken a hit within his base.

“What we saw again last night was that Trump didn’t maintain a calm demeanor and avoid the verbal landmines Vice President Harris placed in his path,” Perry told HuffPost. “Harris, however, maintained her prosecutorial affect, offering reasoned and logical responses to his statements.”

When she needed to be indignant or offended for her gender, she raised the tone of her voice, Perry said. “She also used her facial expressions of disbelief, bemusement, shock, dismissiveness to great effect. While, with him, we got glaring, unhinged anger and smiling idiocy.” 

Throughout the evening, Trump played out every stereotype about unhinged female political leaders who can’t keep calm and lead on. 

Often when such assertions are made, menstruation is invoked. “A woman is too hormonal to be president,” the jokes go. “Imagine she’s on her period and starts a war because she’s in a bad mood!” (Shoutout to all the women who’ve been on their period and managed to get their work done without maiming a single soul.) 

In 1970, feminists called for Edgar Berman, a physician and friend of former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, to resign from his position on the Democratic Party’s platform committee after he argued that women could never be effective presidents because of their menstrual cycle changes. 

“Suppose that we had a menopausal woman President who had to make the decision of the Bay of Pigs or the Russian contretemps with Cuba?” asked Berman, according to a Time article, suggesting that a female president might be “subject to the curious mental aberrations of that age group.”

The assertion was so bad, even Berman’s wife took him to task. When asked about his statements, she reportedly replied, “If he really said that, I would disagree with him.”

Still, the stereotype lingered. In 2016, comedian Amy Schumer advanced the same played-out notion about periods and mood swings in a sketch called “Madame President” from her show “Inside Amy Schumer.” In it, the president calls a timeout on a meeting to change her tampon and loses it when a diplomat takes her last piece of chocolate.

Trump himself lobbed such “she must be on her period” criticism at Megyn Kelly in 2015, after the former Fox News host moderated a GOP debate he felt was unfair to him: “She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions,” Trump told CNN at the time. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

Tropes about the heightened emotionality of women spring from Greek-influenced classical education; Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates all suggested that women were inferior due to their fierce, unwieldy emotions, with Hippocrates arguing that women’s “wandering wombs” drove them to madness. 

And the history of women in the U.S. is replete with “critiques of women as too emotional and therefore they aren’t capable of the hard work of public citizen,” said Julie Gallagher, a professor of history at Penn State University and the author of “Black Women and Politics in New York City.” 

Knowing how they’ll be scrutinized for showing emotions, women in politics have worked to stifle their displays of feelings  ― even in scenarios that warrant emotions.

In 1987, Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.) teared up while announcing that she’d no longer be seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. She never let herself live it down, and others didn’t either.

“I choked for a few minutes and shed a few tears. And, oh, my goodness, the end of the world happened,” she told NPR in 2016. “I mean, people were like, that’s it. That’s it. We can never have women. They’re just so emotional.” (Schroeder, who died last year, told NPR that for a while she kept a file tracking every time a man in politics or sports cried in public and didn’t make headlines.)

In the realm of politics ― and certainly outside of it, too ― Black women endure the “hysterical woman” label far more often, Gallagher said. 

“The ‘angry Black woman’ trope has been used so often to undermine, dismiss and silence Black women,” she said. (Harris is no stranger to such “angry woman” attacks; in 2017, former Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller called Harris “hysterical” during her questioning of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.)

Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman to seek the nomination of a major party for president of the United States, said repeatedly that sexism had impeded her in the campaign more than racism: “The emotional, sexual and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, ‘It’s a girl,’” one of her famous quotes goes.

Given that history, Gallagher thinks it was ironic that Trump “looked, at points, like he might explode,” while it was Harris ― the Black woman on stage ― who exuded cool, calm confidence. 

“By maintaining her presidential posture and commanding posture, even as Trump lied and insulted her, she embodied the challenge to the ‘angry Black woman’ trope without uttering a word and without taking any of the bait Trump threw,” Gallagher said. 

What audiences saw Tuesday night at the ABC News event was a man who regularly brags of his power and masculinity being swept away by hurt feelings, said Ann F. Lewis, a former communications director for President Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, the woman on stage stayed focused on her strategy and message. 

“I have worked with a number of women candidates preparing for debates, always speaking to the importance of demonstrating responsible, compassionate leadership,” Lewis said. “If I do it again, I will use VP Harris’ example last night as a master class.”

And if Lewis is asked about the dangers of overly emotional men running for office? She said she’ll cue up a YouTube clip of Trump on Tuesday night.