Donald Trump’s creepy Ivanka complex
If you’re eating anything right now I’d advise you to stop immediately because the next couple of paragraphs will turn your stomach. A new book by Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration official, contains some extremely disturbing claims that Donald Trump repeatedly sexualized his daughter Ivanka Trump.
Taylor, you might remember, first made headlines back in 2018 when he wrote an anonymous op-ed for the New York Times called “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”. People were beside themselves with excitement for a while thinking that Anonymous might be someone high-profile like Melania Trump. Some of that excitement died down when it transpired Taylor, who was the chief of staff of the Department for Homeland Security, wasn’t in Trump’s inner circle and wasn’t really doing any meaningful “resisting”. Still he’s been eking out his 15 minutes of fame ever since, issuing warnings about democracy and dropping scandalous anecdotes about how unhinged Trump is.
His latest allegations? That Trump was lewd about his own daughter. “Aides said he talked about Ivanka Trump’s breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her,” Taylor writes in an excerpt from his new book, Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump, obtained by Newsweek. His remarks, Taylor writes, were so gross that John Kelly, who was White House chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, once had “to remind the president that Ivanka was his daughter”.
There is, I should note, no incontrovertible proof that Trump said all these things. (John Kelly hadn’t publicly commented on the allegations at the time of writing.) But the idea that the former president was creepy about his daughter in private isn’t hard to believe. There is, after all, plenty of evidence, going back decades, of Trump being creepy about Ivanka Trump in public. Remember when he told Howard Stern, in 2003, that Ivanka Trump has “got the best body”? Remember when he said that, if Ivanka Trump weren’t his daughter, “perhaps [he’d] be dating her”?
Ivanka Trump obviously isn’t the only woman that Trump has said a lot of crude things about. While a lot of Trump’s misogyny is in the public domain, Taylor claims there are plenty of sexist episodes that haven’t made the news yet. “There still are quite a few female leaders from the Trump administration who have held their tongues about the unequal treatment they faced in the administration at best, and the absolute naked sexism they experienced with the hands of Donald Trump at worst,” Taylor told Newsweek.
Gee, I wonder why they held their tongues? Could it be because they know that any woman who speaks out about Trump’s sexism will inevitably a face a vicious new torrent of sexism from his supporters? Could it be because they know that “naked sexism” has never damaged Trump – rather it seems to have turbocharged his career?
Just look what happened with the advice columnist E Jean Carroll. Earlier this year a jury in New York found Trump guilty of sexually abusing Carroll in a department store changing room 27 years ago. During the trial Carroll’s lawyer asked her why she hadn’t gone public about the assault when Trump first ran for president. “I noticed that the more women who came forward to accuse him, the better he did in the polls,” she replied.
Being found guilty of sexual abuse by a jury and ordered to pay $5m to Carroll didn’t jolt Trump into toning down his public misogyny – quite the opposite. The day after the Carroll verdict was delivered he swaggered onto a very ill-advised CNN town hall and called Carroll a “whack job” who had lied about the abuse allegations. Some audience members actually laughed when the CNN moderator, Kaitlan Collins, noted that Trump had been found liable for sexual abuse. They laughed.
While it is clear that Trump fans don’t care about the former president’s misogyny, might they care about the claims he sexualized his own daughter? After all, these are the same people who have whipped themselves into a moral panic about the non-existent danger LGBTQ+ people pose to children. These are the same people who can’t go a day without spewing unfounded slurs about gay people being “groomers”. These are the same people who are intent on banning books from school libraries because they’re worried that references to race or gender identity will harm their children. They’re the people triggered by a book about seahorses, for God’s sake, because it contained too many details about their mating rituals. And yet, they have no problem voting for a guy who pays off porn stars and allegedly fantasizes about his daughter. Republican family values in action.
Naomi Campbell, 53, welcomes her second child
“It’s never too late to become a mother,” Campbell said in an Instagram post announcing the arrival of her son. Which is a nice sentiment but not entirely true: becoming a mother at a more advanced often means spending a lot of money on reproductive technology like IVF. It’s not something everyone can afford.
A man stabbed multiple people in a Canadian gender studies class
“A rightwing culture war and transphobic propaganda is never just about discourse, debate, or the ‘potential for violence’,” said one gender studies professor in response to the attack in Ontario, Canada, this week. “It’s about actual violence.”
How Moms for Liberty became America’s newest extremist group
“This is not just concerned moms. This is not the PTA. This is a group that is fully aligned with authoritarian politicians and activists,” one expert told Vice News. In the last two years, Moms for Liberty has gone from being a small Facebook group to a national organisation with over 115,000 members. This didn’t happen organically. “Vice News investigations have found that it is an astroturf movement with deep ties to far-right Christian organizations, as well as to the GOP establishment.”
The US supreme court was busy this week
It struck down Biden’s student loan forgiveness executive order, declared that the use of affirmative action in higher education was unconstitutional, and ruled against a Colorado law protecting the LGBTQ+ community from discrimination by businesses. Just nine unelected judges with lifetime appointments have enormous amounts of power over the lives of millions of people.
The week in porktriarchy
Tourists in China are reportedly paying more than $1,200 for a hotel room with a view of a famous piggery. The first-floor room at the pig-themed amusement park looks onto a farm full of black-and-white colored animals known as “panda pigs”. They’re also known as “dinner”: sadly, these pigs don’t meet a very happy end, they end up in sandwiches. Guests who book the pig suite can take home a panda pig of their own or a year’s worth of pork.
