How is it possible that we still don’t really
know the most famous woman in America?.. While all politicians at her level have stupendously sturdy egos, Clinton does appear to get a certain relief being in venues where the focus is on somebody else... instead of the end, middle age could be a jumping-off point for adventure. You could do all the things you weren’t able to do when the children were young — you could travel, make speeches, start newspapers, lead rallies. You could do things no women had done before in the public arena, because you looked mature and trustworthy and people could see you had paid your dues... “I’m not going to tell my daughter, ‘Oh, I quit, because I’m the girl and they’re all being mean to me,’ ” she said at one point... Young women are not universally crazy about the first-woman thing. Some just see her as an imperfect candidate. For others, it’s because the whole gender thing seems like yesterday’s news. “There aren’t as many overt questions about ‘Can a woman do it? Is it something the country is ready for?’ ” Clinton acknowledged... She drew a terrible straw in 2008, when she had to run against a guy who was not only a making-history candidate himself, but also clearly a member of the prom king sector... the only real platform appeared to be the desirability of locking Hillary Clinton up, and she was blamed for everything from ISIS to the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls.
Why Men Want to Marry Melanias and Raise Ivankas
What we’re seeing from Republicans: Men who want their wives at home while they celebrate the professional successes of their daughters.
.. The speech was, like the woman herself, fairly unobjectionable on its face, with platitudes about family and country, patriotism and hard work. Like much of the Trump image, though, the shiny veneer hid shoddy construction: The very same parts of the speech that lauded integrity, hard work and honesty were lifted almost word for word from Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech.
It seems not even purported Trump family values are authentic. To borrow from Mr. Trump: sad.
.. One traditional value Mr. Trump does hew to: wanting an old-fashioned wife but a modern, professional daughter.
.. They’ll also witness how the Trump family embodies a very old sexist hypocrisy: Men who want one thing for their wives and another for their children.
.. While Trump family values may not be particularly honorable, they are perversely traditional. Melania Trump told the R.N.C. audience that “Donald is intensely loyal to family,” a claim belied by his own marital history — she is wife No. 3, and No. 2 was the woman with whom he cheated on No 1. Mr. Trump has children with three different women; he blames giving his wife too much responsibility in his business for his first divorce, and his wife’s wanting him to spend too much time at home with her and their daughter for his second.
.. “We know our roles,” his wife has said. “I didn’t want him to change the diapers or put Barron to bed.” Mr. Trump agrees: “I won’t do anything” to take care of the children, he told Howard Stern in 2005. “I’ll supply funds and she’ll take care of the kids.”
.. Changing gender roles look less threatening when it’s their children who benefit.
.. Two-thirds of men want an independent daughter, but only one in three wants an independent wife. Fourteen percent of men said they wanted a wife who was a homemaker; just 5 percent said the same about their daughters.
.. When men have daughters, their attitudes shift and they begin to adhere less stringently to traditional gender roles; no similar effect happens to mothers of girls.
.. Even today, many men find themselves newly appalled at sexism after having a girl, a reaction apparently not stoked by being born of a woman, married to a woman or simply seeing women as human.
What It Means for Trump to ‘Speak From the Heart’
“Trump speaks from the heart.” For months, Mr. Trump’s supporters have been leaning hard on those words to turn his vengefulness and vigilantism into a virtue.
.. Casting Mr. Trump’s incitements to xenophobia and violence as heartfelt evidently makes them slightly less terrifying. A through-line of the convention has been to set up a powerful antagonism between “political correctness,” the province of the hypocritical, intellectual and weak-willed, and “speaking from the heart,” as a province of … Donald Trump.
.. I’m going to speak from the heart tonight.”
The phrase sounds smarmy. It compromises the Republican Party’s usual claim of hardheadedness over and against the bleeding-heart emotionalism of the other party.
But it’s probably the only possible rhetorical move of the Trump campaign.
.. It’s become impossible for Mr. Trump’s supporters to lend reason or logic to his vendettas, daft misogyny, thoroughgoing racism and bloodlust. Instead, they advertise it as lovable.
Melania Trump on Her Rise, Her Family Secrets, and Her True Political Views: “Nobody Will Ever Know”
a shockingly Trump-like dad, and even some family secrets.
.. He in a tux; she in a $100,000 Dior dress that laborers’ hands had toiled upon for a legendary 550 hours, affixing 1,500 crystals—jewels fit for private citizens like them.
.. In this respect, she is just like her husband. She’s alluringly opaque. She makes meaningful eye contact and emphatically repeats affirmative, folksy banalities—she “has a thick skin,” she takes things “day by day,” she follows the news “from A to Z”—until the interviewer either is transported into a supra-verbal understanding or decides it’s pointless to press for specifics.
.. This image of a retiring homebody, of course, is not the one that Trump’s enemies present when they conjure her in the White House. Ahead of Utah’s primary, allies of Ted Cruz posted a photo from a shoot for a 2000 issue of British GQ in which a naked Melania is lying on her stomach on a white bearskin rug. “Meet Melania Trump. Your next First Lady,” read the ad, aimed at conservative Mormon voters. “Or, you could support Ted Cruz on Tuesday.”