In 2016, Hillary Clinton was a former secretary of state and senator running against the politically inexperienced real-estate tycoon Donald Trump. She lost. People would vote for a woman, the thinking went, just not that woman.

In 2024, Kamala Harris was the vice president, a former senator, and a former attorney general also running against Trump, who was by then a convicted felon and sexual abuser. She also lost. People would vote for a woman, once again, just not that woman.

The events of the past eight years might prompt some to wonder: If Clinton wasn’t good enough, and neither was Harris, will a woman ever be good enough to be president? What kind of a woman would it take? According to interviews I conducted with six researchers who study gender and politics, sexism was a small but significant factor that worked against Harris. And it’s going to be a problem for any woman who runs for president. “American voters tend to believe in the abstract that they support the idea of a woman candidate, but when they get the real women in front of them, they find some other reason not to like the candidate,” Karrin Vasby Anderson, a communications professor at Colorado State University, told me. In 2017, she wrote an article about the long odds faced by women running for president. The title? “Every Woman Is the Wrong Woman.”

It’s important not to overstate the role that sexism played in Harris’s loss. She’s the vice president of an unpopular incumbent. Although the U.S. economy writ large is objectively strong, many voters feel pinched by high inflation and interest rates. And after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July, Harris had less than four months to make her case to the American public. A very small number of people have ever run for president, and, well, someone has to lose.

[Read: The shadow over Kamala Harris’s campaign]

But some people are biased against female presidential candidates. In 2017, a study found that about 13 percent of Americans were “angry or upset” about the idea of a woman serving as president. In an experiment that same year using hypothetical political candidates, Yoshikuni Ono and Barry Burden, political scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that voters punish female candidates running for president by 2.4 percentage points. This means that a hypothetical female candidate would get, say, 47 percent of the vote, rather than 49.4 percent if she were a man. This bias against female presidential candidates, Ono and Burden found, was most pronounced among men and among politically unaffiliated voters—two demographics that Harris struggled with. (Because they don’t feel strongly attached to a party, independents rely on other characteristics of the candidates to make up their mind.)

The obvious counterpoint is that, although they are still underrepresented, women have attained other types of high political offices. We’ve never had a female president, but women make up nearly a third of Congress. Twelve governors are women.

The presidency may be different from other elected positions, though. When researchers ask voters to list the traits that they want in a president, they rate masculine-coded traits, such as strength, as more important than feminine-coded ones, such as compassion. “The prestige and the height of the office contributes to the perception that women are just too big of a risk to take,” Nichole Bauer, a political-communication professor at Louisiana State University, told me.

Masculinity is so important to the presidency that candidates often try to cast their male opponents as feminine: Think of George W. Bush painting John Kerry as effete in 2004, and Marco Rubio’s opponents mocking him for his high-heeled boots in 2016. Female heads of state tend to emerge in countries—including Germany and the United Kingdom—that have parliamentary systems, in which leaders are chosen by political parties, not by voters.

But women who behave in masculine-seeming ways are also penalized for not being traditionally feminine. “For a woman to be seen as presidential, she would have to be hyper-masculine, but the moment she does that, she is condemned by a swath of the population for violating norms of femininity,” Caroline Heldman, a gender-studies professor at Occidental College, told me. “Sarah Palin tried to straddle the masculine-feminine line really wide, ripping the guts out of a moose, and Hillary Clinton barely stepped on either side of the line with her pearls and her pants. It just doesn’t matter. They all get beaten up in the same sexist ways.”

[From the November 2020 issue: Kamala Harris’s ambition trap]

Members of Congress, meanwhile, aren’t held to this same macho standard. There are more of them, they individually have less power, and they are seen as servants of the people. They’re middle managers to the president’s big boss. And although governors are also chief executives, they don’t command an entire nation’s army. Their families aren’t held up as an ideal American family, with the father in charge. As a female presidential candidate, “you’re upsetting not just our idea of what presidents should be,” Anderson said, “but you’re upsetting a whole bunch of gender norms.”

In their study, Ono and Burden found that the hypothetical female candidates weren’t disadvantaged if they were described as running for Congress rather than for president. Burden told me he suspects this is because there has never been a female president, so voters strain to imagine what a female president would be like.

This creates a maddening situation in which a woman can’t get elected president because there’s never been a woman elected president. Several of the researchers I interviewed were nevertheless doubtful that one would win the presidency anytime soon. “It would be really great to see a woman in the White House in my lifetime, but I’m very pessimistic,” Heldman said. Anderson told me that nominating another woman would be a “strategic risk” for either party.

Essentially, a female candidate would have to overcome her femaleness in order to win a presidential race. She would have to be running with significant tailwinds—as a “change” candidate during a terrible economy, say—so that voters wouldn’t pay too much attention to her gender. This is similar to what happened in 2008: An unpopular Republican was president, the economy was a wreck, and the preternaturally charismatic Barack Obama stepped into the breach. He became the first Black president, and now no one questions whether there could be another. But we’re still holding out for the female Obama. We might be waiting for a while.

This article was originally published by Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Donald Trump’s fans and critics alike have compared him to some of history’s most famous rulers: Cyrus the Great, Adolf Hitler, King David, and more.

But on the eve of the election, a celebrity pastor named Jonathan Cahn wants his evangelical followers to think of the Republican candidate as a present-day manifestation of a far more obscure leader: the biblical king Jehu, who vanquished the morally corrupt house of Ahab to become the tenth ruler of the Kingdom of Israel.

“President Trump, you were born into the world to be a trumpet of God, a vessel of the Lord in the hands of God. God called you to walk according to the template; he called you according to the template of Jehu, the warrior king,” Cahn told the hundreds of Christian leaders who gathered last week for the National Faith Summit outside Atlanta. He also shared a clip of his prophecy about Trump on his YouTube channel, which has more than a million followers.

What Cahn means—and why at least one scholar of the Christian right says he is worried—requires some background. Cahn, 65, is the son of a Holocaust refugee and grew up in a Jewish household in New Jersey. When he was 20, he says he had a personal revelation that led him to Jesus, and he eventually became the head of a Messianic congregation, blending Jewish rituals with Christian worship and a focus on doomsday prophecies.

Cahn helped popularize the interpretation of 9/11 as an apocalyptic biblical allegory. In his telling, the terrorist attacks were akin to God’s rebuke of the biblical nation of Israel, and they happened because God wanted the United States to revert to a time before legalized abortion and gay rights when religion held a more central place in society—or else. His book on the topic, The Harbinger, came out in 2011 and spent months on the New York Times best-seller list.

Cahn continued to release commercially successful books, and combined with his social-media activity, he established a growing and enthusiastic audience for his prophetic warnings.

Then Trump came along. During Trump’s first term, many evangelical-Christian supporters explained his lack of religiosity by comparing him to Cyrus, the pagan ruler of ancient Persia, who served as God’s agent by, according to the Bible, helping the Israelites return home from exile. In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, amid an effort to build stronger ties with the evangelical movement, praised Trump as a modern-day Cyrus.

But Cahn had spun a different prophetic narrative about the new American president. He released a book called The Paradigm the year after the 2016 election, which cast Trump as Jehu, the biblical king who took control of and restored the Kingdom of Israel, whose territory largely overlapped with parts of present-day Israel and Lebanon. Just as Jehu killed the idol-worshippers who had taken over the kingdom, Trump would “drain the swamp” of Washington and “make America great again.” In this contemporary rendition, Hillary and Bill Clinton play the role of Ahab and Jezebel, the evil rulers who had led the kingdom astray. Jezebel is also seen as wicked in the Jewish tradition, but she is far more prominent as a symbol in evangelical discourse today, representing feminism, sexual promiscuity, and moral decay.

In the 2024 election, Joe Biden’s replacement with Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate challenging Trump allowed the template of Jehu versus Jezebel to get updated and become salient again.

Two weeks before Cahn spoke at the National Faith Summit, an ally of his named Ché Ahn evoked the comparison at another mass religious event. Ahn heads Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, California, as well as a network of thousands of ministries all over the world. He is a leader of a spiritual movement known as New Apostolic Reformation, which aims for Christians to dominate society and government. Major Republican figures such as Mike Pompeo, Sarah Palin, and Josh Hawley have visited Ahn’s church, reflecting the growing influence of Christian nationalism on the Republican Party.

On October 12, Yom Kippur, Ahn appeared at the “Million Women March” event on the National Mall, speaking before a crowd of tens of thousands, with many wearing prayer shawls or blowing shofars—traditionally Jewish symbols highlighting the movement’s overlap with Messianic Judaism.

“Jehu will cast down Jezebel,” Ahn said, and prophesized a victory by Trump over Harris.

The social-media user who brought the recent Jehu comparisons to wider notice through posts on X is Matthew Taylor, a scholar of the Christian right at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, a Baltimore-based interfaith research and advocacy group, dedicated to “[dismantling] religious bias and bigotry.”

“Since Harris became the candidate this summer, we’ve seen the Jehu image really rise to the surface much more,” Taylor said in an interview. “This is the story [Cahn and Ahn] want running through their followers’ heads, their lens for interpreting the election and its aftermath.”

In the grim biblical story, recounted in the book of 2 Kings, as Jehu ascends the throne, he kills Jezebel by ordering her thrown out of a palace window, after which he stomps on her body, which is then eaten by dogs. The new warrior king then goes on a killing spree, slaying the families of Ahab and Jezebel and other Baal-worshipping pagans who had despoiled the kingdom.

“Jehu came to the capital city with an agenda to drain the swamp,” Cahn said in his speech, addressing Trump, who also spoke at the National Faith Summit. “Jehu formed an alliance with the religious conservatives of the land. So, it was your destiny to do the same. Jehu overturned the cult of Baal by which children were sacrificed. So, God chose you to overturn America’s cult of Baal, Roe v. Wade.”

Cahn and Ahn did not respond to my request to their ministries to discuss the theology of their recent statements.

Neither pastor elaborated on the analogy they were drawing, and neither made an explicit call for violence. But Trump has generated widespread concern by speaking of retribution, calling his political opponents “the enemy from within,” and talking about using the military against political enemies if he wins.

Given the riot that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, after Trump challenged the election results, and his ongoing promotion of election-fraud narratives, independent experts and government agencies are warning of increased political violence. Many Jewish leaders are particularly concerned because Trump recently blamed Jews for his potential defeat.

Taylor says the pastors’ followers would be familiar with the biblical story of Jehu, and he believes that they are priming their audience to accept violence during the election or afterward.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, that surfaced the Jehu prophecies, Taylor voiced his alarm.

“If Trump wins in this election, the Jehu ‘template’ tells Trump’s Christian supporters: some real-world violence may be needed to purge America of her demons,” Taylor wrote. “If Trump loses this election, particularly to Kamala Harris their ‘Jezebel,’ the Jehu template prescribes vengeance.”

Why has this election season featured so many stories about animal cruelty? The 2024 campaign has contained many remarkable moments—the Democrats’ sudden switch from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris; the two assassination attempts on Donald Trump; the emergence of Elon Musk as the MAGA minister for propaganda; the grimly racist “America First” rally at Madison Square Garden. But the bizarre run of stories about animal abuse has been one of the least discussed.

In late October, the National Rifle Association was supposed to hold a “Defend the 2nd” event with a keynote address by Trump, but it was canceled at the last minute, because of what the NRA described as “campaign scheduling changes.” Here’s another possible reason: Earlier last month, the NRA’s new chief executive, Doug Hamlin, was outed as an accessory to cat murder.

In 1980, according to contemporary news accounts unearthed by The Guardian, Hamlin and four buddies at the University of Michigan pleaded no contest to animal cruelty following the death of their fraternity’s cat, BK. The cat’s paws had been cut off before it was set on fire and strung up, allegedly for not using the litter box. “I took responsibility for this regrettable incident as chapter president although I wasn’t directly involved,” Hamlin wrote in a statement to media outlets after the Guardian report appeared.

In April, Kristi Noem, South Dakota’s Republican governor, scuttled her chances of becoming Trump’s running mate when her memoir revealed that two decades ago, she shot her wirehaired pointer, Cricket, in a gravel pit after the puppy had attacked some chickens and then bit her. (“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, adding that she later killed an unruly goat in the same spot.) More recently, during his only debate with Harris, Trump painted immigrants as murderers of American cats and dogs, repeating unsubstantiated internet rumors that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating “the pets of the people that live there.”

[Read: The link between animal abuse and murder]

American political figures have long showcased their pets to humanize themselves—remember Barack Obama’s Portuguese water dogs, Bo and Sunny, and Socks, Bill Clinton’s cat? But the relationship between animals and humans keeps growing in salience as our lifestyles change. Domestic animals have moved from being seen as ratcatchers, guards, and hunting companions to pampered lap dogs that get dressed up as pumpkins on Halloween. Half of American pet owners say that their animals are as much part of the family as any human, and many of us mainline cute videos of cats and dogs for hours every week. These shifting attitudes have made accusations of animal abuse a potent attack on political adversaries—and social media allows such claims to be amplified even when they are embellished or made up entirely.

At the same time, we make arbitrary distinctions between species on emotional grounds, treating some as friends, some as food, and some as sporting targets. Three-quarters of Americans support hunting and fishing, and the Democratic nominee for vice president, Tim Walz, was so keen to burnish his rural credentials that he took part in a pheasant shoot on the campaign trail. Similarly, only 3 percent of Americans are vegetarian, and 1 percent are vegan, but killing a pet—a member of the family—violates a deep taboo.

Noem, who seemed to view Cricket purely as a working dog, was clearly caught off guard by the reaction to her memoir. “The governor that killed the family pet was the one thing that united the extreme right and the extreme left,” Hal Herzog, a Western Carolina University psychology professor who studies human attitudes toward animals, told me. “There was this moral outrage. She was just oblivious.”

Herzog, the author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals, has been interested in how people think about animal cruelty since he researched illegal cockfighting rings for his doctorate several decades ago. He told me that the people who ran the fights, who made money by inflicting great pain on the roosters involved, “loved dogs and had families. But they had this one little quirk.” Politicians can trip over these categories—our deep-down feeling that some animals can be killed or hurt, and others cannot—without realizing it until it’s too late.

I had called Herzog to ask what he made of someone like the NRA’s Hamlin—a prominent man who was once involved in the torture of an animal. Should a history of animal cruelty or neglect—or just plain weirdness—be disqualifying for a politician, a corporate leader, or an activist? In his media statement, Hamlin maintained after the fraternity story came out that he had not done anything similar again. “Since that time I served my country, raised a family, volunteered in my community, started a business, worked with Gold Star families, and raised millions of dollars for charity,” he declared. “I’ve endeavored to live my life in a manner beyond reproach.” Could that be true—could someone be involved in such a sadistic act without it being evidence of wider moral depravity?

“What strikes me about animal cruelty is that most people that are cruel to animals are not sadists or sociopaths; they’re everyday people,” Herzog told me. A review of the literature showed that a third of violent offenders had a history of animal abuse—but so did a third of the members of the control group, he said. Then Herzog blew my mind. “To me, the greatest paradox of all is Nazi animal protection.”

I’m sorry?

“The Nazis passed the world’s most progressive animal-rights legislation,” he continued, unfazed. The German regime banned hunting with dogs, the production of foie gras, and docking dogs’ tails without anesthetic. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, “wrote that he would put in a prison camp anyone who was cruel to an animal.” When the Nazis decreed that Jews could no longer own pets, the regime ensured that the animals were slaughtered humanely. It sent their owners to concentration camps.

[Read: A single male cat’s reign of terror]

The Nazis dehumanized their enemies and humanized their animals, but Herzog thinks that the reverse is more common: Many people who are good to other humans are often cruel to animals. And even those who claim to love animals are nonetheless capable of causing them pain. Circus trainers who whip their charges might dote on their pets. People who deliberately breed dogs with painfully flat faces to win competitions insist that they adore their teeny asthmatic fur babies. “These sorts of paradoxes are so common,” Herzog said.

The lines separating cruelty from the acceptable handling of animals have a way of shifting. I’m old enough to remember the 2012 election cycle, when Mitt Romney was reviled for having driven his station wagon with a kennel strapped to the top containing the family dog, Seamus. Midway through the 12-hour drive from Boston to Ontario, the dog suffered from diarrhea, obscuring the rear windshield. Like Noem, Romney was also blindsided by the scandal: Animal activists described his actions as cruelty, and a Facebook group called Dogs Against Romney attracted 38,000 fans. By the standards of a dozen years ago, Seamusgate was a big story, but it’s mild in comparison with this year’s headlines. When Romney was asked about Noem’s memoir earlier this year, he said the two incidents were not comparable: “I didn’t eat my dog. I didn’t shoot my dog. I loved my dog, and my dog loved me.”

One of the most reliable sources of strange animal stories this cycle has been Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmentalist with a lifelong interest in keeping, training, and eating animals who has frequently transgressed the accepted Western boundaries of interaction with the natural world. In July, Vanity Fair published a photograph that it said Kennedy, then an independent candidate for president, had sent to a friend. In it, he and an unidentified woman are holding a barbecued animal carcass up to their open mouths. The suggestion was that the animal was a dog. “The picture’s intent seems to have been comedic—Kennedy and his companion are pantomiming—but for the recipient it was disturbing evidence of Kennedy’s poor judgment and thoughtlessness,” the magazine reported. (In response, Kennedy said that the animal was a goat.)

A month later, Kennedy admitted that he had once found a dead bear cub on the side of a road in upstate New York and put it in his trunk. He said he had intended to skin it and “put the meat in my refrigerator.” However, that never happened, because, in NPR’s glorious phrasing, Kennedy claimed to have been “waylaid by a busy day of falconry” and a steak dinner, and instead decided to deposit the carcass in Central Park. (He even posed the dead bear so that it appeared to have been run over by a cyclist.) “I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea,” he later told the comedian Roseanne Barr in a video that he released on X. He was 60 when the incident occurred. What made the idea of picking up a dead bear sound so strange to many commentators, when the falconry would have caused, at most, a raised eyebrow—and the steak dinner no comment at all?

Kennedy’s animal antics still weren’t finished. In September, he released a bizarre video in which he fondled an iguana and recounted how in some countries, people slit open the lizards’ stomachs to eat the eggs inside. Then another old anecdote surfaced: His daughter Kick recalled a trip home from the beach with parts of a dead whale strapped to the roof of the car. “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick told Town & Country. She added that this was “just normal day-to-day stuff” for her father. Not everyone was so quick to minimize Kennedy’s conduct. “These are behaviors you read about in news articles not about a candidate but about a suspect,” my colleague Caitlin Flanagan observed.

[Pagan Kennedy: New York’s grand dame of dog poisoning]

I’m as guilty as anyone of making illogical distinctions—though I would like to stress that I have never murdered a cat or dismembered a dead whale. Having recently driven across Pennsylvania, where I counted three dead deer by the side of the road on a single trip, I support the right to hunt—population control is essential. Yet the infamous photograph of Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump posing with a dead leopard on a safari trip more than a decade ago disturbs me far more than the unproven assertion that one immigrant, somewhere, has eaten a dog or cat for sustenance. You can tell from the Trump sons’ expressions that they are extremely proud of having killed a rare and beautiful creature purely for their own entertainment. The image is grotesque. It reminds me of Atticus Finch’s instruction that it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird, because “mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy.”

As it happens, hunters, many of them animal lovers in their everyday life, have a complicated code of ethics about what counts as a fair chase. Hence the backlash over the former Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s support for shooting Alaskan wolves from an aircraft. Most of us are okay with killing animals—or having them killed on our behalf—as long as the process does not involve unnecessary cruelty or excessive enjoyment.

In the end, arbitrary categories can license or restrict our capacity for cruelty and allow us to entertain two contradictory thoughts at once. We love animals and we kill animals. We create boundaries around an us and a them, and treat transgressors of each limit very differently. In a similar way, some of Donald Trump’s crowds applaud his racist rumors about migrants—when they might not dream of being rude to their neighbor who was born abroad. “What we see in animals,” Herzog told me, “is a microcosm of the big issue of how humans make moral decisions.” In other words, illogically and inconsistently. The same individual is capable of great humanity—and great cruelty or indifference.