Ivanka Trump. (photo: Reuters)
25 December 16
Wishful thinkers hope that Ivanka will curb her pussy grabbing father’s worst behavior, but it’s unclear how much influence she will have.
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are many reasons to worry about what a Trump Administration holds in
store for women. The President-elect has vowed to appoint Justices to
the Supreme Court who will overturn Roe v. Wade. Some states will be
emboldened to impose restrictive new laws that can become test cases;
the Ohio legislature did so last week, passing a bill that effectively
bans abortions, with no exception for rape or incest, after six weeks of
pregnancy—a point at which many women do not yet know they are
pregnant. Janet Porter, an activist against the “criminalization of
Christianity,” who has been pushing for the Ohio law since 2011, said,
“It’s a brand-new day with a Trump-appointed Supreme Court, and we are
very hopeful.”
Meanwhile, congressional Republicans are feeling
bullish about finally achieving a goal that they’ve sought for years:
getting rid of federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides
health services like cancer screening and contraception, as well as
abortion. If a Trump Administration succeeds in dismantling the
Affordable Care Act, or simply in eliminating the mandate that health
plans include contraception coverage, many more women will lose access
to health care and, especially, to more expensive, but also more
effective, long-acting contraceptive methods, such as the I.U.D.
Tom Price, Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services
Secretary, is an opponent of the A.C.A. who apparently doubts that any
woman in America would have trouble affording birth control. “Bring me
one woman who’s been left behind,” he told an interviewer in 2012.
“There’s not one.” Under Jeff Sessions, the anti-abortion Alabama
senator whom Trump has named as his candidate for Attorney General, the
Justice Department is unlikely to provide robust protection for abortion
clinics. Eric Scheidler, the head of Pro-Life Action League, a group
that leads confrontational protests outside such clinics, wrote earlier
this month, “With Jeff Sessions at Justice, pro-life activists like me
can breathe a sigh of relief.” As members of Congress, both Sessions and
Price voted against the federal Violence Against Women Act when it last
came up for reauthorization. For Labor Secretary, Trump has in mind
Andrew Puzder, the C.E.O. of the company that runs Carl’s Jr. and
Hardee’s. An opponent of raising the minimum wage and of expanding
overtime pay, Puzder, referring to the company’s ads, told the magazine Entrepreneur, “I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis. I think it’s very American.”
Trump won the Presidency despite a well-documented
penchant for the vulgar belittlement of women, and with the help of a
fan base energized by chants of “Lock Her Up.” The oddly medieval
demonization of Hillary Clinton continues among Trump supporters: see
the conspiracy theory that posits her as a child-sex-trafficking witch,
hiding in tunnels beneath a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant, where
last week a man turned up with an assault-style rifle to
“self-investigate” the claim.
To be fair, Trump has suggested one decent policy for
women and families: a six-week paid maternity leave, which would indeed
end a national disgrace. (The U.S. is the only developed country with
no guaranteed family leave.) But the plan pointedly omits paternity
leave, enshrining an old-fashioned view of families and potentially
creating new grounds for employment discrimination against women.
Details of how the plan would be funded—by eliminating fraud in
unemployment insurance—are murky.
There is a popular notion that Trump’s daughter
Ivanka, a self-proclaimed avatar of “women who work,” will ward off her
father’s worst excesses. (It seems unlikely that Trump’s wife, Melania,
will play such a role: after proposing, late in the campaign and
apparently without irony, that her mission as First Lady would be to
campaign against bullying, she has retreated to the background, and will
reportedly be staying in New York with the couple’s son, Barron, when
the President-elect moves into the White House.) Trump has already
started outsourcing to Ivanka issues related to women. At a rally in
Iowa, in September, he explained that it was because of his daughter
that he took up the maternity-leave proposal. He imitated her, saying,
“Daddy, Daddy, we have to do this.” A recent piece in the Times
reported that, when Nancy Pelosi, the Minority Leader of the House of
Representatives, spoke to Trump by phone shortly after the election and
raised the subject of women’s issues, he handed the phone to Ivanka.
Perhaps Ivanka Trump will succeed in persuading more
people that she is an aspirational figure who can seamlessly combine
running her (made-in-China and, in the future, Ethiopia) clothing line
with advising her father on policy matters, keeping a hand in the old
family business (she’s said to be considering a leave of absence from
the Trump Organization), and bringing up her three young children. She
does seem to have found a new way of having it all. After the election,
she appeared in a family interview on “60 Minutes,” and her company sent
out a press release touting the bracelet she wore, available for
$10,800. The fact that she is negotiating licensing deals in Japan did
not stop her from meeting with her father and Shinzo Abe, the Prime
Minister of Japan, in the President-elect’s first sitdown with a foreign
leader.
But, even if Ivanka does want to be a steadying hand
on the wheel, it’s unclear how much influence she’ll have. Last week,
she and her father discussed climate change with Al Gore, but a couple
of days later the President-elect announced his selection for the head
of the Environmental Protection Agency: Oklahoma Attorney General Scott
Pruitt, a climate-change skeptic who has sued the agency he now seeks to
run. And anyone who hoped that Ivanka might be a voice decrying the
white supremacists and anti-Semites activated by her father’s campaign
is still hoping.
In her unelected, unappointed capacity, Ivanka Trump
calls to mind a daughter not so much of American democracy as of
nepotistic autocracy. In the U.S., if family members who don’t hold
office get too mixed up in governing, hackles are raised, as Bill and
Hillary Clinton discovered when he put her in charge of health-care
reform. And in countries where ruling families have used elected office
to promote their own business dealings democratic freedoms tend to be
correspondingly weak.
The United States almost had its first female
President, who, however flawed as a candidate, would certainly have
protected the fundamental rights of women, among other now newly
vulnerable groups. Instead, we have a First Daughter, and what she will
protect—or undermine—we really don’t know.
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