Mr. Trump’s penchant for hiring women into often vaguely defined but closely held roles.
.. “Women, according to Trump, were simply more loyal and trustworthy than men,” Mr. Wolff writes. “Men might be more forceful and competent, but they were also more likely to have their own agendas. Women, by their nature, or Trump’s version of their nature, were more likely to focus their purpose on a man. A man like Trump.” Mr. Trump, the author continued, “needed special — extra-special — handling. Women, he explained to one friend with something like self-awareness, generally got this more precisely than men. In particular, women who self-selected themselves as tolerant of or oblivious to or amused by or steeled against his casual misogyny and constant sexual subtext — which was somehow, incongruously and often jarringly, matched with paternal regard — got this.”
The term “emotional labor” gets vastly overused, but this is a textbook example. The women who work for Mr. Trump aren’t just required to perform their professional tasks; they also have to coddle and care for a volatile patriarch.
Donald Trump doesn’t just have a woman problem; he has a work wife problem.
.. the terms “work wife” and “work husband” sneaked into the lexicon, describing what are typically benign workplace intimacies: a close co-worker with whom you share not only tasks but also complaints and office gossip.
.. as women who work know, egalitarianism is not always the norm, and many of us have found ourselves serving as the caretaking “work wife” to the emotionally needier male co-worker or superior. This is common dynamic, if a seldom-addressed one (it certainly went unmentioned by the “Women Who Work” author, Ivanka Trump, who occupies this very role in her father’s professional world).
.. What Mr. Trump demands of his female subordinates, though, is something greater than your still-sexist but wholly run-of-the-mill concerns about gendered expectations in the workplace. Women like Ivanka Trump, Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway don’t just counsel the president and liaise with the press and public; they offer a feminine salve, simultaneously sanctioning Mr. Trump’s sexist commentary and buttressing his ego by situating themselves as little girls in need of direction from Big Daddy (literally, in Ivanka’s case).
.. Benevolent sexism is more insidious. In the view of the benevolent sexist, women and men should occupy fundamentally different roles, with the men as patriarchs and women, with our naturally maternal and gentle dispositions, as helpmates and caretakers. In some conservative, religious or simply strongly male-dominated communities, you see this dressed up as a form of feminism — the idea being that women can find respect and purpose by tapping into our intrinsic maternal nature.
.. When Mr. Trump’s defenders use the fact that the president has employed and encouraged a handful of women — to, as we now know, also serve as his uncompensated therapists — as a shield against accusations of sexism, they are deploying a similarly mendacious argument.
.. So what if the requirements for being treated as “special” involve playacting hyperfemininity, stroking a man’s ego and carefully managing his feelings? That’s just how men are, and that’s what men want.
.. Assumptions that women will monitor and manage men’s emotions span industries and political persuasions. It’s not that subtly sexist men refuse wholesale to hire women; it’s that they often hire a small number of us, with the unspoken but swiftly understood expectation that we will be the uncompensated “chief feelings officer.” Then they often lose respect for us because we play this very role.
.. But when faced with bosses or colleagues who require this hybrid of good-daughter devotion and quasi-maternal coddling from their “work wives,” women have two choices: Expend the unpaid effort and lose valuable time and energy, all while knowing you’ll never be as respected as a man who doesn’t have to handhold and head-pat his employer; or refuse to do it, and risk losing the job altogether. It’s not just the craven Kellyannes and Hopes and Ivankas of the world who opt for the former.
Money man: Robert Mercer
Reclusive U.S. billionaire Robert Mercer
helped Donald Trump win the
presidency. But what is his ultimate goal?Bannon’s relationship with Robert Mercer is cited in a remarkable lawsuit brought by David Magerman, a former employee of Mercer’s hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies. On its surface, the lawsuit is a wrongful dismissal complaint against Mercer. But at its heart, it is an indictment of Mercer’s character and reputation that draws together his political views, his connections to Bannon and Trump and racist comments Mercer allegedly made to Magerman directly.
.. “I have a lot of respect for Bob Mercer. I think he’s a very intelligent person, a very thoughtful person,” Magerman told me recently. But he quickly added, “If the world knew what he was trying to do, they wouldn’t stand for it.”.. He’s fond of talking about the time, years ago, when a colleague he was visiting summoned a helicopter to his estate to whisk them into Manhattan.There was no life-or-death reason for the extravagance, not even a business emergency. They were just going to a dinner, he says, and his friend rented the chopper to avoid the bother of traffic. From the helicopter, Magerman saw his fellow citizens travelling along a thin ribbon of perfectly good highway below.
.. “Either you are in awe of the grandeur of commuting, taking a two-hour drive and turning it into a helicopter ride, or you can just be, like, disgusted by the waste.” As though there were even a sliver of doubt, Magerman added, “I was in the latter category.”
It wasn’t just the waste that gnawed at him — it was the trespass of a moral principle. The helicopter commute was an example of something that, if everyone did it, would obviously be wrong. ”10,000 people can’t be flying helicopters from their backyard,” he said.
.. Magerman calls that helicopter trip “extra-societal” and “outside the realm of normal behavior,” words that also fit what he believes is wrong with Mercer’s relationship to the president. Magerman thinks Mercer has bought special access to impose “extra-societal” views on the Trump administration.
.. “The ultra-wealthy of today differ from the ultra-wealthy in past eras in that they have, a lot of them, no stake in the infrastructure of society,” Magerman said. He’s seen that their wealth does not depend on the health and stability of the country. In fact, they get rich on volatility and instability.
.. Mercer is not a finance guy; he is a computer scientist. But his research developing speech translation programs through pattern recognition can apparently also be used to discover obscure patterns in the financial markets and make an enormous fortune
.. Instead of poring over prospectuses and profit and loss statements, they apply their sciences to the data that affect markets. It’s called quantitative analysis, and they themselves are known as “quants.”
.. Medallion has pumped out annualized returns of almost 80 per cent a year, before fees.” Even in a bad year, it churns out more than 20 per cent returns.
.. “The people I worked with were great scientists. I mean, we could have solved a lot of important and interesting problems if we’d worked on different things. Instead, we made hundreds of millions of dollars,
.. The problem that Renaissance Technologies faced trying to predict market behaviour is, he said, essentially the same problem that Cambridge Analytica faces in voter analysis and persuasion.
.. Data analysts are largely skeptical that Cambridge Analytica could have had a decisive impact on the 2016 U.S. election or the Brexit referendum, but Magerman brushes that off with a reminder that so-called experts were also skeptical that computer algorithms could predict financial markets.
.. , “Bob thinks the less government the better. He’s happy if people don’t trust the government. And if the president’s a bozo? He’s fine with that. He wants it all to fall down.”
.. They didn’t get rich by providing the goods, services and infrastructure that bring people into direct contact with their community and its interests — they got rich in financial markets, making money for the sake of it.
.. But the real shrinking of the role of government has been in Trump’s choice of cabinet members, whose aim seems to be to assail the policy goals of their departments.
Thus, the
- secretary of energy is someone who once campaigned to get rid of the Energy Department; the
- Secretary of Education has advocated against the public schools system; the
- Environmental Protection Agency director has a record of repeatedly suing the EPA; and the
- Attorney General has a reputation for opposing the expansion of civil rights.
Other departments are reportedly withering from neglect, as key positions are filled by unqualified people or not filled at all.
.. his daughter Rebekah was part of the transition team that helped Trump choose his cabinet.
.. Was it all worth it?
“It’s like, was having surgery worth it?” Magerman says. “I mean, it was necessary. There was a disease that I thought, like, maybe I had a scintilla of a cure for.”
The guardrails can’t contain Trump
Donald Trump’s character — volatile, impulsive, often self-destructive — had not changed since the campaign. But it seemed as if the guardrails of our democracy— Congress, the courts, the states, the media, the Cabinet — were keeping things within bounds.
Then came the past 10 days. The country is now caught in the internal maelstrom that is the mind of Donald Trump. We are in the realm of the id. Chaos reigns. No guardrails can hold.
.. Layers of falsehoods giving the impression of an elaborate coverup — in the absence of a crime.
.. Trump insists there’s no there there, but acts as if the there is everywhere.
.. Trump had three top officials come out and declare the disclosure story false. The next morning, Trump tweeted he was entirely within his rights to reveal what he revealed, thereby verifying the truth of the story.
.. The White House hurriedly issued a statement denying the story. The statement was unsigned.
.. this would be seen by millions as an establishment usurpation to get rid of a disruptive outsider. It would be the most destabilizing event in American political history
What the Vix Is Really Telling the Markets Now
There are good reasons not to worry about low Vix level—and one very good reason to keep close eye on it
The historical parallels are scary because when investors anticipate that volatility will be low, it can be sign of excessive complacency.
.. One of the things measured by the Vix is the balance between supply and demand for options. It’s a proxy (though not a perfect one) for the cost of protecting an S&P 500 portfolio against loss over the next 30 days. When it is very low, it suggests there are lots of people willing to sell insurance policies against a market fall, and few people wanting to buy protection.
.. Easy money encourages investors to pick up pennies of insurance premium in the options market, and to buy the dips in the S&P 500, the equivalent trade in equities.
.. Investors are prepared for some rise in volatility, but from an abnormally low level.
The puzzle then isn’t why the Vix is so low, but why the market has been so calm for the past couple of months. Why hasn’t there been a 1% move up or down in the S&P 500 since December 7? Bears might go back to central banks