Donald Trump was allegedly creepy about Ivanka – but will his fans care?
Arwa Mahdawi
A new book by Miles Taylor, an ex-Trump official, claims the former president repeatedly sexualized his daughter
Sat 1 Jul 2023 23.00 AEST
Donald Trump’s creepy Ivanka complex
If you’re eating anything right now I’d advise you to stop immediately because the next couple of paragraphs will turn your stomach. A new book by Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration official, contains some extremely disturbing claims that Donald Trump repeatedly sexualized his daughter
Ivanka Trump.
Taylor, you might remember, first made headlines back in 2018 when he wrote an anonymous op-ed for the New York Times called “
I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”. People were besides themselves with excitement for a while thinking that Anonymous might be someone high-profile like Melania Trump. Some of that excitement died down when it transpired Taylor, who was the chief of staff of the Department for Homeland Security, wasn’t in Trump’s inner circle and wasn’t really doing any meaningful “resisting”. Still he’s been eking out his 15 minutes of fame ever since, issuing warnings about democracy and dropping scandalous anecdotes about how unhinged Trump is.
His latest allegations? That Trump was lewd about his own daughter. “Aides said he talked about Ivanka Trump’s breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her,” Taylor writes in an excerpt from his new book, Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump,
obtained by Newsweek. His remarks, Taylor writes, were so gross that John Kelly, who was White House chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, once had “to remind the president that Ivanka was his daughter”.
There is, I should note, no incontrovertible proof that Trump said all these things. (John Kelly hadn’t publicly commented on the allegations at the time of writing.) But the idea that the former president was creepy about his daughter in private isn’t hard to believe. There is, after all,
plenty of evidence, going back decades, of Trump being creepy about Ivanka Trump in public. Remember when he told Howard Stern, in 2003, that Ivanka Trump has “got the best body”? Remember when he said that, if Ivanka Trump weren’t his daughter, “perhaps [he’d] be dating her”?
Ivanka Trump obviously isn’t the only woman that Trump has said a lot of crude things about. While a lot of Trump’s misogyny is in the public domain, Taylor claims there are plenty of sexist episodes that haven’t made the news yet. “There still are quite a few female leaders from the Trump administration who have held their tongues about the unequal treatment they faced in the administration at best, and the absolute naked sexism they experienced with the hands of
Donald Trump at worst,” Taylor told Newsweek
.
Gee, I wonder why they held their tongues? Could it be because they know that any woman who speaks out about Trump’s sexism will inevitably a face a vicious new torrent of sexism from his supporters? Could it be because they know that “naked sexism” has never damaged Trump – rather it seems to have turbocharged his career.
Just look what happened with
the advice columnist E Jean Carroll. Earlier this year a jury in New York found Trump guilty of sexually abusing Carroll in a department store changing room 27 years ago. During the trial Carroll’s lawyer asked her why she hadn’t gone public about the assault when Trump first ran for president. “I noticed that the more women who came forward to accuse him, the better he did in the polls,” she replied.
Being found guilty of sexual abuse by a jury and ordered to pay $5m to Carroll didn’t jolt Trump into toning down his public misogyny – quite the opposite. The day after the Carroll verdict was delivered he swaggered onto a very ill-advised CNN town hall and called Carroll a “whack job” who had lied about the abuse allegations. Some
audience members actually laughed when the CNN moderator, Kaitlan Collins, noted that Trump had been found liable for sexual abuse. They laughed.
While it is clear that Trump fans don’t care about the former president’s misogyny, might they care about the claims he sexualized his own daughter? After all, these are the same people who have whipped themselves into a moral panic about the non-existent danger LGBTQ+ people pose to children. These are the same people who can’t go a day without spewing unfounded slurs about gay people being “groomers”. These are the same people who are intent on banning books from school libraries because they’re worried that references to race or gender identity will harm their children. They’re the people triggered by
a book about seahorses, for God’s sake, because it contained too many details about their mating rituals. And yet, they have no problem voting for a guy who pays off porn stars and allegedly fantasizes about his daughter. Republican family values in action.
www.salon.com
