'Very infantilizing': Ex-Trump staffer creeped out by old boss' 'protector' comments

A former White House staffer for former President Donald Trump scolded her party over what she called it's "infantilizing" comments about women who need a "protector."

In recent days, Trump has tried to push back on claims that he's struggling in the polls with a gender divide.

"I am your protector," Trump said at a rally Monday night in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. "I want to be your protector as president, I have to be your protector. I hope you don't make too much of it. I hope the fake news doesn't go, 'Oh, he wants to be their protector.' Well, I am. As president, I have to be your protector."

Appearing on CNN's "AC360," Alyssa Farah Griffin told anchor Anderson Cooper that she initially laughed at the comment.

"I started laughing and thinking it was creepy," she said. "And thinking more about it, it's very infantilizing. Talking about women as though we're weak, we're meek, we need a protector, we need a defender and we just sit around thinking about abortions all day. It just underscores a fundamental lack of understanding for why a demographic that represents half of the country is one that he is struggling so profoundly with."

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Griffin said that if Trump loses, his biggest regret could be not having a woman on the ticket, who "knows how to speak to normal living, breathing, normal women."

She noted that access to reproductive health care matters to women, but economics and national security are also issues women care deeply about.

"And just the way he is talking about them is not the way to sway voters in the middle," she concluded.

Griffin's comments came about an hour after Republican strategist Republican strategist Erin Perrine, who served as principal deputy communications director for Trump, got a "little animated" as she roundly criticized candidates in her party over their remarks attacking or insulting women.

"If a woman is having a miscarriage and bleeding out, that's not a question," she said, emphatically. "That shouldn't be a question in the 21st century and it should not be a question for the Republican Party. And the fact that we have people running for office in the Republican Party who can't state the obvious truth about access to health care when a woman needs her life saved boggles my mind. And I'm getting a little animated here because it actually flabergasts me that Republicans can't speak the truth on this."

Watch the clip below or at this link.