Wednesday on MSNBC’s “The Beat,” actress Sandra Bernhard said white women voted for President Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election because they feel “inadequate” in comparison to former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Bernhard spoke with MSNBC’s Ari Melber, to whom she detailed her struggles with understanding the mind of the female Trump voter.
When asked about “white women for Trump,” Bernhard said, “Can’t understand it. Don’t know where it comes from…I think it’s a couple of issues. I think it’s being either under the thumb of your husband or, for the election, it was being so offended by Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton’s legacy that you turned on her. Or feeling inadequate, feeling like how can somebody be so educated? How can somebody who brought themselves up from their experience and gone to the top, educated herself, fought for rights, civil rights, and equality. And I think that is threatening to a lot of women.”
Melber asked, “How do you mean? Threatening to the deals they have made in their life?”
Bernhard replied, “Yeah. A lot of women have compromised, given in, raised their kids and not had the luxury of being able to think for themselves. When you sacrifice that in your life and say ‘I don’t think I’m going to lean on somebody else financially,’ that means you’ve got to get up every day and go work. I am not saying that none of these women work. Of course they do. But you also — there’s just those little gradations of how you look at other women and the sort of feeling you have of inadequacy.”
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