The daily horrors of the Covid-19 crisis, together with the Trump administration’s bid to gaslight, bluff, lie, and bully its way through a rampaging pandemic, are likely to numb us to the many retrograde failures of Trumpism that play out beneath the red-flag panic moments that now make up the American news cycle. Just this week, a true rogue’s gallery of high-profile female Trump supporters and apparatchiks bluffed their own way through an "Hour to Empower” confab, sponsored by the Trump campaign’s Women for Trump auxiliary wing, and devoted to the unlikely subject of the president’s amazing success as a bona fide “wartime president,” boldly uniting a terrified nation in the face of the coronavirus threat.
As New Republic contributor Nina Burleigh notes, the abject spectacle—conducted via Zoom, of course—sought to elevate an administration led by a self-confessed serial sexual assaulter into the vanguard of a brand of boardroom feminism only imaginable in the age of Trump. Of the four discussion leaders, three claimed their political eminence by the classically Trumpian means of nepotism: Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump was the de facto moderator; GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, aka Mitt Romney’s niece, and HUD Secretary Ben Carson’s daughter-in-law Merlynn Carson all hymned the wonders of self-starting feminist advancement in the house of conservatism, while the apparently non-mobbed-up Michigan GOP chair Laura Cox presumably had to stifle a deep-seated impulse to let loose with at least one sarcastic Yeah, right.
Then again, as Burleigh observes, the way for women to get and hold onto power in Trump’s inner circle is to be very much seen—and very much not heard:If Trump can be said to “empower” women at all, it is in the same way that he empowers the women closest to him, promoting them as commodities; as deal enhancers. Trump’s wife, daughters, and daughters-in-law must resemble in style and stature the thousands of women this impresario of female flesh has lined up beside himself for years in his beauty pageants and reality television escapades. They must choose his favorite shoe and relinquish their right to run.... The Trump women’s willingness to submit to abuse goes along with their willingness to participate in the commodification of the feminine. Female flesh is a marketing tool with which to hawk everything from cars to music to movies. Many women already participate in this trade, with Anna Wintour at one end of the spectrum and Stormy Daniels at the other. Trump and his women emerged from this world.Consider the Trump figure most aggressively marketed as a Poster Child for the hollow right-wing ideal of female empowerment: Trump’s daughter Ivanka. Smiling and networking her way through the global corporate seminar-and-conference set, Ivanka relies on an inert corps of access journalists to burnish her image as a kinder, gentler, equality-minded face of the vicious Trump regime. Little notice is thus paid to awkward Ivanka appearances at “ridiculous events like February’s Dubai women’s conference, held just days before a British court accused the Dubai sheikh of kidnapping and torturing his own adult daughters,” Burleigh writes.
Or take the other woman at the summit of White House power: First Lady Melania Trump, who has seamlessly gone from a racy modeling career to an unlikely Oval Office helpmeet held up by the evangelical right as a model of female submission. In reality, she has leveraged the queasy disgust that visibly courses through the first marriage into a very familiar sort of patriarchy-sanctioned power base:Long gone are the days when Donald could discard a pretty young wife with a million-dollar payoff, as he did with Second Wife Marla Maples. Donald is today, by comparison to then, a slave to his hot “supermodel.” He is entirely dependent upon her continued willingness to accessorize him. And he has grown obedient under her occult power, as old men with young wives do. Trump has even “joked” that Melania wouldn’t care if he died. In other words, the new Republican vision of success-minded gender equity seems very much like the hoary old double standards that governed the sexual prerogatives of powerful men gone sour. You could this a lot of things, but “empowering” isn’t one of them. —Chris Lehmann, Editor |
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