President Trump’s 32-year-old senior adviser has gained attention for his hard-line stances in support of the president. Glenn Thrush takes a look at Mr. Miller, from his days as a young conservative to his current role in the White House.
The Ivanka Way
Ivanka Trump made an offer to Cecile Richards, the head of Planned Parenthood. The first daughter had pressed her father to say positive things about Planned Parenthood during the 2016 campaign, and now she had a proposal for the organization’s leader: What if Planned Parenthood split up, creating a small operation that ran abortion clinics and a larger one whose health clinics didn’t perform abortions? Then her father would call for increasing funding to the larger operation, instead of joining with congressional Republicans in their efforts to defund Planned Parenthood entirely.
.. It was indeed implausible to imagine that Richards would seriously consider Ivanka’s proposal. But as a political idea, a way of rethinking the whole Planned Parenthood debate, it reminded me of Ivanka’s father’s 2016 approach to many questions — the Trumpian habit of ignoring the ideological assumptions around an issue, and groping toward views that more Americans might be likely to support.
.. It implies that Richards’ organization performs, say, a few thousand abortions for high-risk pregnancies and rape victims annually, instead of the real number, which last year was 328,348 — dwarfing the number of prenatal care visits by a factor of more than 30.
.. Republicans often imply they would happily support Planned Parenthood if the organization wasn’t the nation’s largest abortion business. But this is misleading as well: Many religious conservatives would still object to funding contraceptives, and many small-government conservatives would oppose public health care spending, period.
.. So a politician who proposed to fund a large network of women’s health centers that offered contraceptives, H.I.V. tests, mammograms, prenatal care and adoption referrals, but absolutely no abortions, would run afoul of both the liberal commitment to abortion-as-a-positive-good and various conservative positions.
Neo-Nazis in Your Streets? Send in the (Coup Clutz) Clowns
You’d think that a passionate anti-wage-gap crusader like Ms. Trump would relish a broad, ever-expanding data set illuminating her pet issue so that she could go after it with laser focus, but no. She is even more devoted than that. She hates the gender wage gap so much, she can’t even stand to know anything about it.
.. When Donald Trump was elected president last November, his elder daughter was portrayed as liberal America’s consolation prize
.. some people seem to be taken in. If Ms. Trump says she was dismayed by her father’s announced ban on transgender people in the military, well, I guess it’s true. What a nice moderate lady! If Ms. Trump says that America is no place for Nazis and white supremacists, are we going to tell her she’s wrong?
.. She is more a logo than a person, a scarecrow stuffed with branding, an heiress-turned-model-turned-multimillionaire’s-wife playacting as an authority on the challenges facing working women so that she can sell more pastel sheath dresses.
.. Stop wondering which of these people will save us and when. There is not going to be a surprise silver lining to the Trump presidency — not from Ivanka Trump, not from Jared Kushner, not from Rex Tillerson, not from John Kelly. This is it. The Trump Doctrine is to say whatever makes you feel good and do whatever makes you the most money.
Ivanka Trump has learned well from her father’s cons
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.