How the President’s Problem With Women Is Now the GOP’s

The president has a woman problem, and we’re not just talking about payments to porn stars and Playboy models. Over the past four years, Donald Trump has shown that he simply can’t take it when strong women challenge him, whether it’s career diplomats like Marie Yovanovitch testifying against him in Congress or female reporters like Yamiche Alcindor or Paula Reid sharply questioning him at press conferences on the White House lawn. He prefers to surround himself with sycophants and enablers, women who will nod approvingly at his most ridiculous statements or go on Fox News to repeat his lies. 

This was nowhere more apparent than when one watched the 2020 Republican National Convention. This year’s super-Trumpy RNC featured plenty of women each of the four nights – among them, the president's wife, the president's two adult daughters, the president’s son’s wife, the president’s son’s girlfriend, the president's press secretary and the president's chief counselor (who is about to step down because her 15-year-old daughter says she wants legal emancipation). There were women at the RNC, to be sure, but all of them were either members of the Trump family or female Republicans who have had their reputations completely tarnished and destroyed by Trumpism. (We're looking at you, Nikki Haley.) After all, Trumpism is a choice.

A week earlier, the Democratic National Convention featured a very different lineup. Among the speakers was former first lady Michelle Obama, former first lady and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (and the party's 2016 nominee), the former Congresswoman and now gun control advocate Gabby Giffords, and three women who had forcefully challenged Joe Biden for the nomination (Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris), one of whom now shares the ticket with the former vice president. (Joe Biden's “I don't hold grudges” statement might have been the most un-Trump-like moment of the entire campaign season so far.) There were also rising stars of the Democratic Party, like New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, plus emotional links to the party's past, like Caroline Kennedy. Not a single one of them came to fame by joining their husband on the front lawn of their home and pointing a rifle at passing peaceful protestors.

On the first night of the RNC, the president’s eldest son’s girlfriend, dressed in fire-engine red, gave her best Eva Perón imitation, complete with outstretched arms, and ending by screaming into the empty hall, “Ladies and gentlemen, leaders and fighters for freedom and liberty and the American dream, the best is yet to come!”  After it was over, CNN's Wolf Blitzer said, “Very forceful speech, Jake, from Kimberly Guilfoyle.” And Jake Tapper responded with his quiet deadpan, “Forceful is one word for it.” Personally, I was struck by Guilfoyle musing about how she was a first-generation immigrant despite being from Puerto Rico, which, the last time I checked, was part of the United States. (Guilfoyle's speech also created a meme, #Guilfoylechallenge, in which people posted videos of themselves screaming nonsense in the abyss.)

Night one also included – well, almost included – Mary Ann Mendoza,  the mother of a slain police officer, who was cancelled at the last minute after it was revealed she had posted anti-semitic content on social media. Nice catch, RNC!

On Tuesday registered foreign lobbyist Pam Bondi (and the woman who was tasked with investigating the Trump university scandal until Trump made a 25,000 dollar donation to her re-election campaign) spoke. Bondi repeated debunked talking points that smeared Biden's only surviving son, Hunter, raging against nepotism. No small irony: Her speech was directly followed by one by the president’s daughter, Tiffany Trump, and a later one from Eric Trump. And that night was ended by the president third wife, former model and notorious birther, Melania Trump.  Many in the media lauded the first lady for her ability to not plagiarize her speech (as she did four years earlier) but it was a long and meaningless ramble through many of the usual tropes. I was stuck on Flotus's sharply tailored olive green outfit, which was clearly meant to suggest seriousness but also invoked the image of a female military guard.

Wednesday night’s theme was “the land of opportunity” and it featured the most boring white man on Earth, a character seemingly plucked from The Handmaids Tale, Vice President Mike Pence. In 2017, when we were all still young, Jia Tolentino wrote in the New Yorker, Pence “refuses to dine extramaritally, or, at least, he said as much to the Hill, in 2002. If he eats alone with a woman, that woman is Karen Pence; if he attends an event where alcohol is served and ‘people are being loose,’ he prefers that his wife be present and standing close to him.” Welcome to the land of opportunity – but not perhaps for you.

Also on Wednesday, Eric Trump’s wife, Lara, gave a speech in which she thanked Donald Trump for putting her in charge of his 2016 campaign in her native North Carolina, even though she had zero political experience, and then – true to her current job as a frequent contributor to Fox News (another extension of Trumpworld) – she warned of the armageddon to come if her father-in-law was not re-elected. “This is not just a choice between Republican and Democrat or left and right,” she said. “This is an election that will decide if we keep America America, or if we head down an uncharted frightening path towards socialism.” (She also managed to misquote Abraham Lincoln, launching dozens of memes.) But perhaps the most amusing part of her speech was when she talked about being welcomed by Donald into the Trump family and how much it reminded of her own. It immediately brought to mind Mary Trump's book about her uncle, where she quotes him as saying, “Lara, there. I barely even knew who the fuck she was, honestly, but then she gave a great speech during the campaign in Georgia supporting me." 

Thursday was Ivanka Trump night, chosen to introduce her father in a prime time speech that she kicked off by smiling robotically and stating, “Tonight, I stand before you as the proud daughter of the people’s president.” (I wonder how the families of the more than 180,000 Americans who have died of coronavirus so far feel about ”the people's president.") Ivanka is thought of as the woke feminist in Trumpworld because her father lets her give speeches and form meaningless initiatives. But she's not actually given any real power. Ivanka is a straw man created to give the appearance of feminism. She checks a diversity box, like Ben Carson, the only Black member of the Trump cabinet. But ultimately, she’s the fancy housewife allowed to take a symbolic job. 

On Thursday, as the set-up speaker to the 2020 nominee, she gave a long speech that was meant to present herself as a sort of de facto vice president, at one point casually mentioning a meeting in the Oval Office she attended with the president and his top economic advisers to discuss “our historic tax and regulatory cuts” and that afterward the two of them talked privately about the “guts” it took to make those decisions. (While it's nice that Ivanka thinks she’s her father's second-in-command, literally no one else does, so she comes off seeming sort of delusional.) Also this was the fourth Trump child to try to explain to the American people that even though their father seems cruel, because of the cruel things he does and says, he actually loves his children very much. I don’t understand how loving one's children (if he even does) in anyway negates his cruelty. As Trump himself would say, “It is what it is.”

There were women who didn’t have the last name Trump at Trump’s RNC but all of them were either Trump sycophants, like Rep Elise Stefanik who had jumped on the Trump train during the impeachment proceedings, or Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst who somehow thinks that Trump will help her in her neck and neck race in a state completely decimated by the president’s trade wars. Or they were people who had been used by Trump in transparent ways, like pardon recipient Alice Johnson or the people in the naturalization ceremony video who didn’t know the video was going to be shown during the RNC or the New York City housing residents who were tricked into appearing in a video by Trump adviser Lynn Patton. These women at Trump’s RNC were used as props or tools to make the president seem less misogynistic. 

The RNC is trying desperately to win back the white suburban women who held their noses and voted for Trump in 2016, but who largely deserted the party in the 2018 midterms. They want to lull those women into thinking the president isn’t a racist or misogynist, and that women matter in Trumpworld.  But anyone who watched even a single night of the RNC will know that the only person who matters in Trumpworld is Donald J. Trump.