Ivanka: My father knows what women want
Many voters fear Hillary Clinton wants to force through a welfare state that is destructive to the US’s founding principles
DONALD TRUMP has released the first campaign advertisements starring his daughter, Ivanka, as his team scrambles to boost his support among women and recover from a week dominated by his war with a Miss Universe contestant.
The new adverts involve Ms Trump, an entrepreneur herself who is seen by many to be one of Mr Trump’s greatest assets, discussing his child care policies and the importance of motherhood.
They came as a new poll by Fox News showed Hillary Clinton, his Democrat rival for the presidency, benefiting from a three-point bounce after Monday night’s debate in which a rattled Mr Trump failed to provide cohesive arguments, struggled with the microphone, and left many viewers confused as to where he stood.
In the closing minutes of the debate Mrs Clinton startled the billionaire by reminding him how he had called Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe, “Miss Housekeeping” – a dig at her Venezuelan origins – and “Miss Piggy”, accusing her of putting on weight.
The 70-year-old businessman has long struggled to win over female voters, and Friday’s poll put Mrs Clinton ahead with women by 20 points.
“The most important job any woman can have is being a mother,” Ms Trump says in the spot, which will be broadcast in swing states this week.
“And it shouldn’t mean taking a pay cut,” she adds as the video shows mothers playing with their children. She then proceeds to discuss Mr Trump’s proposed policies, including paid maternity leave and tax credits for child care. The US and Papua New Guinea are the only countries in the world not to guarantee paid maternity leave.
“Donald Trump understands the needs of a modern workforce. My father will change outdated labour laws so that they support women and American families,” Ms Trump says.
“He will provide tax credits for child care, paid maternity leave, and dependent care savings accounts. This will allow women to support their families and further their careers.”
Despite Ms Trump’s best efforts, however, her father seems unable to help himself. After Mrs Clinton’s coup at the debate in bringing up Ms Machado, Mr Trump hit back in the early hours of Friday – around 3am – launching a Twitter attack against the former beauty queen, describing her as “disgusting” and referencing a “sex tape.”
Ms Machado did appear on a Spanish reality television show, and grainy night-time footage from 2000 shows her having sex. She also posed in sultry, but not pornographic, magazines. But there is no evidence of any “sex tape” existing.
Ms Machado accused Mr Trump of cheap lies, humiliation and bullying.
“Through his attacks, he’s attempting to distract from his campaign’s real problems and his inability to be the leader of this great country,” she said.
The Republican candidate’s woes did not end there. On Friday Buzzfeed, obtained a Playboy video from 2000 – featuring Mr Trump. He promised in August to crack down on pornography, yet in the video he appears – fully clothed – alongside Peruvian twins on a tour of America, most of which they seem to spend naked, covering each other in honey, and sexually posing.
“Beauty is beauty, and let’s see what happens with New York,” Mr Trump says in the film, Playboy Video Centerfold, as he sprays champagne on a Playboy logo-emblazoned limo. In an interview with The New York
Times published yesterday, Mr Trump risked further alienating women by announcing that he plans to attack Mrs Clinton for her husband’s infidelities.
When asked about his own – the thrice-married billionaire was still married to Ivanka’s mother Ivana when he began a relationship with Marla Maples – he dodged the question. “No – I never discuss it. I never discuss it. It was never a problem,” he said.
Mr Trump accused Mr Clinton of having had numerous indiscretions that “brought shame onto the presidency, and Hillary Clinton was there defending him all along”.
Mr Trump’s aides are said to be urging him to prepare more for the next debate, a week today. They are also concerned that his referencing Mr Clinton’s affairs is a risky strategy that may hurt his ratings with women even more. Mrs Clinton’s campaign described him this week as “unhinged.”
But the billionaire does not seem to mind. “She’s nasty, but I can be nastier than she ever can be,” he said.
‘He’s attempting to distract from his campaign’s problems and his inability to be the leader of this great country’
In New York last week, everybody – absolutely everybody – wanted to talk about the presidential election. This is, by the standards of American political participation, quite unusual. Even though the polarisation of US politics has pulled far more people into lively (that’s the polite word for it) argument about national affairs, you could generally go about your business as a visitor during an election year scarcely aware of the impending event.
As I recall, even the historic candidature of the first black presidential candidate did not dominate conversation in the way that this election does. There was a palpable sense that this time was very different and so disturbing that it created an almost therapeutic need to talk – especially to outsiders who might offer a different perspective, or who had to be persuaded that the country had not gone completely insane. (There was quite a lot of the latter: the unspoken premise of many arguments was, “This is not what it seems.”)
Given that this was New York, one of the most liberal, cosmopolitan cities in the country and the adopted home of the Clintons, I expected to find myself in rampant Hillaryland: the Democrats would be in wildly enthusiastic overdrive and the Republicans in apologetic despair. But it wasn’t quite like that. Support for Hillary was more resigned than fervent, and to my astonishment, some of my oldest Republican friends who are among the most civilised, enlightened people I know, were contemplating voting for Donald Trump, as were some newer acquaintances who did not remotely resemble the uneducated bigots who are generally thought to constitute his following. (Note: this was before the first debate.) All of this seemed to substantiate the implicit proposition: that what is going on in this election is not precisely what it seems.
I have never seen the US electorate more confused and uneasy, not just about what nearly everybody regards as the appalling choice of candidates with which it somehow finds itself landed, but about its own philosophical principles. Quite literally everyone we met was planning to use his vote either as a protest against the loathed alternative, or as a reluctant acceptance of a leader – and a programme – for which it had no enthusiasm.
And this in a country where optimism, and the unquestioned belief in democratic institutions, was once a quasi-religious faith. The disillusionment of this election – and the obsessive anxiety which it has produced – will have serious consequences for the American psyche however it ends.
But it is very important to understand the argument that came up repeatedly: this election and the forces that are driving it are more complex than they seem. Just as the Brexit vote was not only about immigration as its critics pretended, so the American antipathy to Hillary Clinton is not just about her notorious baggage (dishonesty, corruption scandals, policy failures, etc). What my old Republican friends and the Trump-supporting new acquaintances were determined to prevent was something more significant: a full-scale installation of the social and economic programme which Mrs Clinton represented, now in a more extreme version than ever since her need to recruit the Bernie Sanders youth movement. It was reiterated to me explicitly that another four years of welfare state, anti-free market programmes would alter the form of US government, and America’s political culture, in ways that would be effectively irreversible.
To a British audience, this sounds rather quaint. We may have our own concerns about benefit dependency and the moral hazard of creating a lifestyle in which welfare pays better than work but the debate about this is within the parameters of acceptable political possibilities. Those on the Left present a case for comprehensive welfare provision designed to eliminate inequalities between the employed and unemployed, which is widely accepted in the mainstream discourse. If anything, it is the critics of such policies who are on the defensive: the argument that you should always be better off in work than living on benefits is a radical and contentious departure from received opinion.
In the US, this is certainly not the case. For many of the people we met, it was deeply shocking (and positively wicked) that in many states of the Union it was possible to earn more on welfare than in a paying job, and that work had become optional to an acceptable adult life.
In order to comprehend this, it is necessary to appreciate how basic the notion of earning your keep, and making your own way, is to the American social conscience. Government-imposed equality is not seen as simply unfair as it is by many here, but as insidious and destructive of what America is
One of the most interesting people we encountered was a woman who had come to the US 30 years before from a former Soviet republic. She arrived with nothing (except two dependent children), and worked her way up in a medical profession. Now she had a flourishing practice in Manhattan, a flat on Central Park South and a professorship in her field at New York University. This educated, articulate woman was planning to vote for Trump because she was enraged by the undermining of the American dream of self-made opportunity which she believed that Hillary Clinton threatened.
She was, incidentally, fully appreciative of how alarmingly ignorant and absurd Trump’s behaviour appeared to be. But this, she insisted was just a pretence: he was putting on the act that was necessary to capture the voters whose support he needed to get elected. The campaign version of Trump was not the man who would become president. In truth though, the real character of the man who might occupy the White House was of less importance to her than the defeat of the woman whose prime object, she believed, was to destroy the most fundamental purpose of America: to provide the unique possibility of self-determination to those who arrived with nothing but resolve and talent.
This is, and has always been, the basis of American exceptionalism: it is a country composed of people who chose (or whose antecedents chose) to go there and who made that decision in the knowledge that they would have to take their chances along with all the other incomers. (The obvious exceptions are the descendants of slaves who did not choose to go, and for many of whom the American dream has proved tragically elusive.) The paternalism that gives rise to the welfare state is alien to Americans because it is part of the aristocratic culture they rejected when they came to the New World. Bourgeois guilt was, until very recently, almost unknown in the US. Even now, it is a hard sell. The puritan ethic of hard work and relentless self-improvement still runs deep.
My more experienced Republican friends agreed frankly that Trump was exactly what he seemed to be: stupid, belligerent, and objectionable on virtually every count. But they simply could not refuse the opportunity to vote against Hillary whose political project was anathema to America’s historic purpose. As I made clear to them at the time, I do not agree with this: nothing on earth could make me vote for a dangerously ignorant demagogue. But I do – sort of – understand what they are saying. At least, I get a glimmering of what it must be like to find a unique principle, like the self-determination of the individual, so sacred that the risk of losing it would make almost any act of opposition acceptable. Maybe that irrepressible strain of perverse conviction will be what saves America in the end.