openpolitics.com

Ivanka Trump is for working women the way her father is for the working class: In both cases, the Trumps really just want their money.

President Trump’s daughter built her brand around women’s “empowerment,” by which I mean monetizing the anxieties and insecurities of stressed-out moms.

From the beginning, her stated goal was to help professional women dig deep down inside their souls and tap their inner purchasing power. She launched her jewelry line because the “concept of a self-purchasing female was lost among the traditional jewelers,” her website explains without apparent irony.

.. So what are Trump’s feminist bona fides, ..

.. She publicly advocates paid family leave, even though she contracted out the designs of her clothing line to a firm that offered zero weeks of paid maternity leave.

.. And on Equal Pay Day this year, she posted on Instagram that “it is the responsibility of all Americans to come together in pursuit of equal pay.”

Last week, however, she publicly endorsed a White House decision to trample a modest equal-pay enforcement initiative.

.. And rather than the usual “anonymous source” leaks about how Ivanka Trump really, truly didn’t want such a dreadful thing to happen, she released a statement offering her blessing.

.. It’s a trick Ivanka Trump learned well from her father.

Papa Trump, after all, ran on a platform of helping the fabled Forgotten Man through promises to

• plump his paycheck,
• revive his obsoleted jobs,
• discount his health care and otherwise
• return him to his former economic and cultural glory.

.. Trump is hellbent on passing a massive tax cut for the rich. Right now the tax cut looks to be unfunded. Just because it isn’t being paid for now, though, doesn’t mean it will go unpaid-for forever.

Rosy scenario notwithstanding, at some point the U.S. government will have to make good on its accumulating debts, through some combination of future tax hikes and spending cuts.