With three weeks remaining before Election Day, President Donald Trump stood before supporters in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and made an unusually direct appeal to a group of voters his campaign was struggling to hold: suburban women. “Suburban women, will you please like me?” Trump asked. “Please. Please. I saved your damn neighborhood.” Behind the memorable line was a broader campaign argument linking affordable housing, racial integration, crime and the supposed destruction of America's suburbs.**
Donald Trump knew he had a problem.
It was suburban women.
On October 13, 2020, Trump traveled to the John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport in Pennsylvania for his second campaign rally since returning to the trail after his COVID-19 diagnosis and hospitalization.
Election Day was three weeks away.
Pennsylvania was crucial.
And Trump turned directly to a group of voters receiving enormous attention from both campaigns.
“Suburban women,” Trump said, “will you please like me?”
Then he repeated himself.
“Please. Please.”
And finally:
> “I saved your damn neighborhood, OK?”
The crowd cheered.
But Trump's argument about what he had supposedly saved suburban women from was much more consequential than the joke.
“I Don't Want to Build Low-Income Housing Next to Your House”
Immediately before asking suburban women to like him, Trump explained his reasoning.
He portrayed himself as the defender of America's suburbs.
“I don't want to build low-income housing next to your house,” Trump told the audience.
Trump then discussed an Obama-era housing regulation that his administration had eliminated.
He claimed the regulation had “destroyed your neighborhood” and “brought crime to the suburbs.”
Trump told the crowd that suburban women should therefore support him more than anyone else.
The regulation he was talking about was the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, or AFFH.
Its purpose was not to simply order low-income apartment buildings constructed next door to suburban homeowners.
The rule was intended to enforce a provision of the Fair Housing Act requiring jurisdictions receiving certain federal housing funds to examine patterns of segregation and barriers to fair housing and take steps to address them.
Trump's administration terminated the rule in 2020.
And Trump turned that decision into a campaign message.
Trump Said Biden Would Destroy the Suburbs
The Johnstown comments were part of a much larger argument Trump had been making throughout the campaign.
He repeatedly warned that Joe Biden and Democrats would destroy America's suburbs.
The warnings often revolved around housing.
Trump portrayed Democratic housing policies as an attempt to force low-income housing into suburban communities.
He also repeatedly connected that housing with crime.
That connection was significant.
Low-income housing does not inherently bring crime into a community, and the Obama-era rule Trump was attacking was fundamentally concerned with fair housing and segregation.
But Trump's campaign message reduced the issue to something much simpler:
Democrats would change your neighborhood.
Trump would stop them.
A Remark With a Long History Behind It
The Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, just days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Among other things, the law prohibited discrimination in housing based on race.
But outlawing explicit discrimination didn't automatically eliminate residential segregation.
Decades of discriminatory housing practices—including redlining, racially restrictive covenants, discriminatory lending and exclusionary local policies—had helped shape American communities.
The federal government had played a role in creating some of those patterns.
The AFFH rule adopted during Barack Obama's presidency attempted to make local governments receiving certain federal housing funds more actively evaluate those patterns and identify barriers to fair housing.
Critics argued that the federal government was intruding too deeply into local zoning and housing decisions.
Trump went much further.
He presented the regulation as a threat to the suburban way of life.
“People Have Gone Crazy Over This”
Trump repeatedly promoted the issue during the summer of 2020.
After his administration moved to terminate the AFFH rule, Trump announced that people living what he called the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” would no longer be “bothered or financially hurt” by construction of low-income housing in their neighborhoods.
The language immediately generated criticism because of its racial implications.
American suburbs had historically been shaped in part by policies that excluded Black families and other minorities.
Trump nevertheless continued making the argument.
By October, it had become part of his direct pitch to women.
At Johnstown he insisted he had protected them.
The Appeal Wasn't Subtle
Trump also acknowledged that people had questioned whether suburban women liked him personally.
“They may not like the way you talk,” Trump said of what others had told him.
His answer was that his policies mattered more.
He was about “law and order.”
He was keeping people safe.
And he had eliminated the housing regulation.
Then came the plea.
“Suburban women, will you please like me?”
It was an unusually explicit acknowledgment from a presidential candidate that a particular group of voters wasn't responding to him the way he wanted.
Trump later insisted during an interview with CBS's Lesley Stahl that he had been joking.
“I say jokingly, ‘Suburban women, you should love me because I'm giving you security,’” Trump explained.
But the policy argument surrounding the joke was entirely serious.
Suburban America Was Changing
There was another problem with Trump's message.
The American suburb of 2020 wasn't the suburb of 1960.
Suburban communities had become increasingly racially and economically diverse.
Millions of Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans lived in suburbs.
So did renters.
So did families receiving housing assistance.
So did women who didn't necessarily view affordable housing as a threat to their neighborhoods.
Trump himself acknowledged some of that diversity during the Johnstown rally, noting that minorities represented a significant share of suburban residents.
Yet his political message continued to rely heavily on the idea that suburban homeowners needed protection from low-income housing and the crime he associated with it.
Three Weeks Before Election Day
The timing made the moment especially revealing.
Trump wasn't casually discussing housing policy at a White House meeting.
He was standing at a campaign rally in one of the most important states in the presidential election.
He needed votes.
And he was speaking directly to a demographic his campaign was trying to win.
His pitch wasn't primarily about schools.
It wasn't about childcare.
It wasn't about healthcare.
It wasn't about wages.
It wasn't about the enormous disruption COVID-19 had brought into American homes.
It was:
I protected your neighborhood.
And underneath that statement was another message:
I protected it from low-income housing.
“I Saved Your Damn Neighborhood”
The line became one of the most memorable moments of Trump's final weeks of the 2020 campaign.
Partly because it sounded so unusual.
Presidential candidates usually tell voters why they deserve support.
Trump simply asked them to like him.
But the exchange was about much more than Trump's personality.
It captured an entire campaign strategy.
Trump presented himself as the protector of an idealized American suburb.
He warned that Democrats would change it.
He linked affordable housing with crime.
He celebrated eliminating a federal rule designed to address housing discrimination and segregation.
And then, standing before thousands of supporters in Pennsylvania, he turned to the women whose votes he wanted.
“Suburban women, will you please like me?”
“Please. Please.”
“I saved your damn neighborhood.”