Trump Doesn't Track Why Forcing His 'Protection' On Women Is Controversial

Former President Donald Trump reiterated at a North Carolina rally Saturday his controversial vow to protect women "whether they like it or not" — and can't figure out why his paternalistic attitude is controversial.

"Tell me why it's a rough statement," a confused Trump said he asked his aides after he first insisted that he would protect women even over their objections.

"It's a little self-serving. They'll say, who do you think you are?" Trump said his aides told him. "I said, 'Yeah, I'm president, I want to protect the women of our country."

In rambling comments Saturday, Trump reiterated: "I believe that women have to be protected. Men have to be, children. Everybody. But women have to be protected where they're at home in suburbia," which he apparently believes is being overrun by immigrants and criminals.

"When you're home in your house alone and you have this monster that got out of prison and he's got, you know, six charges of murdering six different people, I think you'd rather have Trump," he added.

The man who a jury said sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store insisted: "I will protect our women, and I'm going to protect our women ... I got into so much trouble. You saw that. I said, 'We will protect because I keep hearing I think the women love me.' ... If they don't have me, they got millions of people pouring through and coming up to the suburbs. They say the suburban women, well, the suburbs are under attack right now."

Trump has presented himself as a protector of women even as women in the nation are dying when abortion restrictions pushed by him are keeping doctors from saving the lives of women having miscarriages — and forcing them to have babies they don't want. At a recent rally he crowed that a female protester ejected from one of his rallies would "get the hell knocked out of her" at home.

Opponent Kamala Harris has used Trump's statements to show he's out to reduce women's free "agency," and called them "offensive to everybody."