Tag: women
Perfect Together: History's Worst President And His Wretched First Lady

Perfect Together: History's Worst President And His Wretched First Lady

Melania Trump hasn’t been associating with her husband, Donald, on his retribution tour across America. She hasn’t been at his side during his trials for fraud or for defaming a woman he sexually assaulted in a dressing room. She didn’t even show up for her spouse’s New Year's Eve party. That level of dedicated absence may lead to suggestions that the Einstein visa-winning former nude model doesn’t really care for her ketchup-hurling husband.

But over the weekend, there was more evidence that the pair are perfect for each other. They may not be a match made in heaven, but in whatever spiritual sweatshop cranks out rich-old-guy-and-much-younger-trophy-wife relationships, these two are a chef’s kiss.

That fresh evidence starts with Fox News fuming over the latest presidential rankings from a survey of political scholars who specialize in presidential history. Those rankings once again have Abraham Lincoln in the top spot. It’s also no surprise who is riding in the historical caboose. Not only is Trump ranked dead last, he’s last by a huge margin. It’s bad. Like, way behind James Buchanan bad.

And to really get MAGA fans grinding their molars: Both Barack Obama and Joe Biden are in the top 15.

The survey notes that since the last survey of political professors in 2018, Obama’s star has risen significantly, bringing him up nine slots, No. 16 to No. 7. Biden has entered the list at a more-than-respectable No. 14.

Trump is reliably at the end of the line, picking up so few votes that it’s genuinely amazing. Just three points separate the top three spots on the list, making the difference between fans of Lincoln, FDR, and Washington. But Trump is six points behind Buchanan—the biggest difference between two slots on the whole list. It certainly gives the impression that, no matter how many names are added in future surveys, Trump will have no problem defending his territory.

But how does this make him perfect for his disinterested import?

As a weekend article in The New York Times shows, Melania isn’t just disinterested in Donald; she’s disinterested in everything. Especially anything that looks like work.

As the Times put it, Melania spent “spent four years flouting many of the expectations about what a modern first lady should be.” Especially, it seems, when those expectations are visible, engaged, and giving a damn about the nation.

“For months, Mrs. Trump had taken to walking around the Executive Residence in hotel-style terry cloth robes,” insiders told the Times.

Throughout her husband’s presidency, she often perched on the bed in his room to listen to or join his calls with advisers and allies, Stephanie Grisham, Melania’s former press secretary, said in an interview. By the time her White House tenure came to an end, Melania was described as “checked out” and “exhausted,” but there’s not much evidence that she ever really checked in.

Between “Who gives a fuck about Christmas?” and wearing a jacket stamped with "I really don't care, do you?" on her way to a detention center for migrant children, Melania never seemed to even make a gesture in the direction of being concerned about the institution of first lady, the White House, or the nation.

Her office in the East Wing was so rarely used, that it was converted into a space for wrapping gifts. Whether those gifts were for fucking Christmas or some other occasion isn’t clear.

There was one thing that Trump’s wife did seem to like about her time at the White House: how much she got to murder the aesthetics. Whether that was the “evisceration” of the Rose Garden or the hallways of nightmare trees, Melania loved the changes she had made to the White House. And she loved to arrange photo albums of those changes.

“All she cared about was those photo albums,” Grisham said. Though Grisham apparently tossed in an expletive that the Times chose not to print.

The Times also has a perfect description of how Melania spent her days leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

In the days before the attack on the Capitol, Mrs. Trump had been cataloging the contents of her swag room, including the small mementos and gifts that she would hand out to friends and allies of the Trump family. An aide traveled back and forth to the Executive Residence with a binder listing the current inventory, according to two former Trump White House officials.

In the middle of the assault on the Capitol, as Grisham was trying to get Melania to issue a statement against the violence, the first lady turned her down. Instead, Melania spent Jan. 6 taking pictures of herself with a new rug she had selected for the White House residence. More pictures for her photo albums. Because that was her priority.

Could we please get a fresh ranking of first ladies? It’s safe to say that Eleanor Roosevelt’s spot really isn’t in doubt. But if there was a new list, it seems a pretty good bet that Melania Trump could take the badge of dishonor with the same laziness and disdain she has displayed toward everything else.

Because she and her husband may hate each other, but they are also perfect for each other.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Women's Leadership Summit

Right-Wing Career Women Urge Girls To Drop Aspirations -- And Marry Now (VIDEO)

I’m fascinated by Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit for the same reasons I watch ABC’s The Bachelorette. The dating show tries to awkwardly reconcile fundamentally opposed interpretations of gender roles in a woman’s pursuit of an opposite-sex partner. The woman crowned as the bachelorette each season represents a certain type of conformity. She is feminine, unattainable, a prize to be won, flirty, and non-threatening to masculinity -- the ideal future wife. At the same time, her role is highly subversive to traditional norms of courtship -- she’s “dating” 25 men at once. This scenario totally boggles the normative masculinity of the contestants pursuing her.

Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit, which targets college and high-school age girls, grapples with these same contradictions in a much darker and more prescriptive way. Speaker after speaker emphasized to the audience that they should become wives, mothers, and accessories to the astroturfed conservative movement rather than pursuing a demanding career. These themes were nearly identical to last year’s YWLS.

Yet this conference exists because of the labor of women on the right who clearly value their careers. Speakers like TPUSA influencer Alex Clark, Fox host Laura Ingraham, and The Daily Wire’s Candace Owens both covertly and overtly discouraged the audience of young women from pursuing high-powered careers — but it takes a lot of work to build an audience as a woman in right-wing media. Behind the scenes, Turning Point USA’s events and marketing leadership are also populated by women. Chief Marketing Officer Marina Minas’ biography says nothing of her achievements in the domestic realm. The same goes for the vice president of events, Lauren Toncich.

Forgoing a career in pursuit of marriage and motherhood is not something the women delivering this message can speak about from personal experience. This tension drew me to attend the event in person in Grapevine, Texas, from June 9 to 11.

Much to my surprise, the first thing I saw when I pulled up to the venue was a massive pride flag. In his opening speech, TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk described his unsuccessful efforts to have the flag taken down: “I tried my best to take down the flag everybody,” he said. The crowd responded with cheers. “I failed, OK? I’m sorry. I tried my best. I know you were all thinking it, right? What is that all about? By the way, this hotel better do something or we’re going to find another hotel because I’m not going to come back, this is ridiculous.”

The conference featured an exhibition hall with booths selling “dump your liberal boyfriend” sweatshirts from a right-wing dating app founded by a former Trump White House staffer, career recruitment for Turning Point USA and Turning Point Faith, and bedazzled purses shaped like guns. The bathrooms were decked out with advertisements for a gender-exclusionary tampon brand. Virtually all surfaces, including the elevator doors, were covered in the themed TPUSA aesthetic.

Alex Clark, host of Turning Point USA’s podcasts directed at young women and the face of this event, opened the conference with what can only be described as an angry, judgmental lecture, titled “The Top 4 Lies of Modern Feminism.” She opened by asking, “Young Women’s Leadership Summit, are you ready to see this degenerate rotten culture that we’ve been living in get a makeover?” After applause, she praised the audience’s themed outfits. Fair is fair -- there were some good ones out there.

For the next 30 minutes, she launched into a winding, pseudo-academic diatribe about the four lies of modern feminism, which according to Clark are birth control, abortion, fertility care, and day care. She has staked her brand in part on spreading misinformation about birth control -- it’s a regular feature of her podcasts POPlitics and The Spillover, as well as her prolific Instagram presence.

She asked the audience, “Who in this room has decided to ditch hormonal birth control?” Very few hands went up. “Wow,” she responded, following up by asking, “How many of you are considering ditching hormonal birth control?” Even fewer hands went up. Just a few minutes into her speech she lost the room, and it got worse from there.

Attacking abortion and fertility care are not unique to Clark’s brand, but her opposition to day care is both a new and relatively isolated stance, and it didn’t land with the YWLS crowd. It was on this topic that her speech veered from sleepy to bizarre. She described it as her “spiciest take,” saying that “a lot of mothers in the ‘70s” (the decade was the conference’s theme) “who desired freedom and flexibility or who didn’t necessarily have a support system were oblivious to the fact that the solutions presented to them as safe, liberating or harmless were anything but. And one of those solutions was day care.” After an awkward pause, she added, “It just got real uncomfy. Did you feel that shift?”

Clark claimed, “The feminist movement is in large part to blame for the fracturing of the traditional home, where women were coerced outside of their natural roles as mothers into the workforce.” She went on: “The feminist movement gave way to the notion that a woman could have her cake and eat it too. You can have the career you want and you can raise your children in a positive, educational environment, aka day care.” She described it as “a lie to tell women that we can have it all.” Just because day care is “normal or common doesn’t mean it’s right,” according to Clark.

Not only is Clark a highly successful political commentator with two podcasts and the face of a yearly conference, she is also, as she noted in her own speech, not a mother. Even more bizarrely, she was not giving opening remarks to a conference for mothers.

Kirk spoke next, telling the audience that women have a tendency to be “cliquey” and “mean,” unlike men, to encourage networking at the event.

The TPUSA founder then pivoted to the normal slop that someone hears if they have the misfortune of tuning in to his daily radio show, railing against a “social contagion that is spreading the country at a rapid pace that disguises itself as transgenderism and it is accelerating, it is not slowing down.” He told the audience, “We have seen an all-out, deliberate, concentrated, non-stop, relentless assault on women in this country” by “creepy, narcissistic freaks who think they are men wearing dresses to compete in sports against many of you.”

After establishing that “women are more agreeable than men,” Kirk told his audience they must “be disagreeable” in attacking the humanity of transgender people, who he called “creepy men that have deep-seated mental problems that need treatment.”

Throughout the weekend, attacks on transgender people consistently garnered the loudest and most enthusiastic cheers.

Lara Trump and Laura Ingraham finished up the first day of the conference. Lara Trump skirted around the massive elephant in the room -- her father-in-law’s stunning indictment on espionage charges relating to his handling of classified documents in his post-presidency. Her only remarks on the topic consisted of boilerplate talking points about some amorphous authority persecuting her father-in-law to stop him from becoming president again.

Like virtually every other speaker, Lara Trump attacked transgender athletes, and used the topic to draw attention to her own body: “I’ve been an athlete for most of my life. You might notice my legs are very muscular. I still do a little working out on the side, you know, I’ve got to stay in shape.”


Laura Ingraham’s remarks barely merit a mention, except for her puzzling comments on supermodel Gisele Bündchen. “It’s far easier to live in a society that encourages modesty than to live in a society that encourages women to show it all, flaunt it all, all the time,” she said. “Who can ever keep up with that? By the way, other than maybe Gisele Bündchen, who really does look good in a thong bathing suit on the beach? Sorry, you’ve got to be a special type of person who looks good in that.”



Fundamentalist podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey opened day two of the conference. She, unsurprisingly, struck a notably more pointed Christian extremist tone than the other speakers, though religious rhetoric was ubiquitous throughout the conference. “I can tell you what your highest calling is,” she said. It’s not to have a career, “it’s not even to be a wife and a mom, as wonderful as those things are. Your highest calling is to glorify God.”

Podcaster and Turning Point USA personality Benny Johnson followed, and used much of his time to tell the audience of college and high school girls to “become a woman of value.” Calling out women who say they have trouble finding a partner, he asked, “Have you behaved like a great woman that would attract a great man?”

“Have you been a great woman? There ain’t nothing wrong with being a trad wife. Being a trad wife’s based. Men love this.”


Gross.

Naturally, the idea that elections are being stolen from Republicans also permeated the conference. Real America’s Voice host Gina Loudon sympathized with the young audience about how much they have “endured” in recent years: “You’ve had your country stolen, you’ve had an election stolen, you’ve had your restrooms taken over by men who say they’re women and you’ve had your entire gender completely, just, undermined.”

The only person who spoke more than once at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit was Kirk, who returned to the stage on day two for a Q&A session. One question during the session came from a college student involved with Turning Point USA on her campus, who said she is working toward her dream career in orthopedic surgery.

The exchange almost perfectly distilled the overarching message of the weekend. The audience member told Kirk that she is career-driven and has not thought much about marriage or starting a family. She asked if he had advice to give to “somebody who so badly wants to succeed in surgery,” but will be 30 years old before she has time to think about “settling down.”

Kirk’s answer was straightforward and clear: “You’re going to have to choose which one matters more.” He then told her to spend a couple of days with infants and see how she feels afterward, and stressed that she may run out of time to find a husband if she focuses on her career throughout her 20s.

Kirk told her that “there are a lot of successful, 35-year-old orthopedic surgeons that have cats, and not kids, and they’re very miserable."


This is one of the fundamental contradictions of the Young Women’s Leadership Summit and Turning Point USA’s recruitment of young women overall. If the main message for this audience — many of whom identified themselves as leaders of campus TPUSA chapters — is that they should leave politics to men, seek fulfillment exclusively in the domestic sphere, and focus on indoctrinating a litter of children into an ideology of hate and victimhood, then most of the organization’s activity is irrelevant to its female members.

In the early evening, Owens closed day two. Her walkout was met with the loudest cheers and applause of the entire weekend.

She framed her remarks around the idea that women have a biological predisposition to sentimentality, motherhood, and nurturing.

“Your emotions and your nurturing are meant for those relationships in your life that mean the most,” Owens said. “You will see it — you will become a tiger, you will become a bear when you have children,” adding bleakly, “The reason that you fight, the reason that you get up in the morning, the reason that you breathe will become so clear. You will never be more sure of yourself when you realize that there is something inside of you that just knows what to do with a child.” She assumed that members of the audience “already experience that.”


According to Owens, the left has used the media to manipulate these natural female instincts. Her message to this group of “young women leaders” in the conservative movement: “Every ill that we are fighting right now in society has been brought forth by women.”

Setting aside Owens’ extremely misogynistic message, we can look at the pillars of her own life for a moment. She is a woman who you might say “has it all”: a career, a public platform, and a family. But she presents herself as if she appeared on stage to roaring adoration by accident, her authority stemming from her status as a model mother, and not because of a single-minded ambition to get famous through a Faustian bargain with conservative media.

As I write this, the third day of the conference has begun. The speakers are the weekend’s afterthought: failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, anti-trans former swimmer Riley Gaines, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), among others. By now the narrative of the weekend is clear: there is a very narrow vision of what a fulfilled woman's life can consist of and an extremely limited set of acceptable aspirations. If you don’t want to give up everything else to have children and marry a Christian man, something is fundamentally, biologically, biblically wrong with you. Charlie Kirk recommends you pray about it.

The things that went unsaid were notable, too -- former President Donald Trump’s indictment on federal charges, perhaps one of the biggest stories of any post-presidential period in American history, was hardly mentioned, despite the massive reaction in the broader right-wing universe. Current events, news, politics, struggles over justice and power -- these things were not deemed relevant to the audience at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit. It was all identity, all the time -- no substance, just aesthetics and grievance.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Young Women's Leadership Summit

Shady 'Police' Nonprofit Sponsors Far-Right Young Women's Conference

The weekend of June 9 brings the Turning Point USA Young Women’s Leadership Summit back to Texas. The three-day event, which promises to be a hotbed of transphobic, staunchly anti-feminist propaganda and fearmongering about contraceptives and trans women, is sponsored in part by a sketchy nonprofit that fundraises off deceptive, pro-police appeals to right-wing media audiences.

Last year’s YWLS event was billed as a “celebration of freedom and femininity” for “cuteservatives,” and speakers told attendees that their mission was to find a conservative husband to settle down and have children with.

This year, the event will be sponsored in part by the National Police Association, a shady nonprofit that seeks to bring “attention to the anti-police efforts challenging effective law enforcement.” But a 2019 investigative report from the IndyStar newspaper revealed that the organization does not have the support of local police departments, and local police chiefs call it a “scam.”

The IndyStar reported that the NPA fundraises based on the assumption that donations go directly toward supporting police officers, with letters sent to “vulnerable people” asking for donations to “give our law enforcement officers the crime prevention tools they need.” According to the IndyStar, these donations do not go to police agencies, and the outlet found that “only 25 percent of the group’s spending went to programming.” The letters the NPA sends paint “a dystopian picture of communities and police departments under attack,” even if the picture is plainly false:

The National Police Association's fundraising letters raise different issues depending on the city.

Fundraising letters in Germantown, Wisconsin, last year falsely warned that Germantown is a sanctuary city, a term that refers to states and municipalities that do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

“Countless Americans have already been robbed, mugged, raped and even murdered as a direct result of Sanctuary policies of allowing known criminals to remain on the streets,” one copy of a National Police Association letter says, adding, “your gift of $15 is needed to reach citizens like you ... so they realize the kind of risks they're facing because their elected officials have allowed their communities to become sanctuaries for violent criminals.”

Germantown Police Chief Peter Hoell told IndyStar the group “must not have researched the demographics.”

“It’s so far-fetched, especially if you know Germantown,” Hoell said of the sanctuary city claim. “It’s a highly conservative community.”

Hoell told residents to disregard the letter. He also reported the National Police Association to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service over what he considered to be fraudulent mail.

“It’s a scam,” Hoel said. “It’s no different than any other scam — just a different angle.”

The IndyStar reported that the NPA’s three employees were volunteers who were not paid by the organization. According to the report, founder Eddie Hutchison — a full-time fraud investigator for the Indiana attorney general's office — worked just a few hours per week and received no income from the NPA in 2019. This appears to no longer be true, as the group’s 2021 tax filings show that Hutchison was paid $96,000 for an average of 100 hours of work per week. The other two executives listed on the form, Derek Peterson and Brad Shaw, reportedly work an average of 0.24 and 0.12 hours per week and receive $58,113 and $28,000, respectively.

Even the NPA’s website shows that not much of its donation income goes toward helping police departments directly — grants for training or gear, it says, are limited to $1,000 per year.

The NPA’s stances are standard pro-police talking points found across right-wing media. In 2021, the group also came out against the COVID-19 vaccine, even though the illness was the leading cause of police deaths. The same year, the NPA ran a campaign called “Stop Filming & Start Helping” in an effort to refocus attention from police violence to police being “assaulted on the job.” The NPA website also features a “Wall of Shame” with articles about people and policies the group sees as “coddling criminals.”

NPA spokesperson Betsy Brantner Smith, who is scheduled to speak at Young Women's Leadership Summit, uses her Twitter account primarily to spread awareness about anti-police violence but also to applaud anti-LGBTQ hate from Megyn Kelly and retweet attacks against Kohl’s and Target for selling Pride merch. Smith is a frequent guest on Newsmax, where she agrees with hosts that crime is out of control and that police need to be protected, offering little else.

The organization also thrives off of filing lawsuits seemingly intended primarily to generate right-wing media attention for the NPA itself.

In April, the group filed a lawsuit pressing Nashville police to release the manifesto of the Covenant School shooter, which the school and parents filed separate motions to counter, citing safety concerns and asking time to allow surviving students to “finish the school year in peace.” NPA responded by saying the parents’ lawsuit is an “obvious expression of anguish seeking sympathy,” and “they will experience even greater suffering if they obtain a denial of public access that results in more school children being murdered.”

In December 2022, the NPA sued an Ohio homeowners association for telling a resident to take down his “thin blue line” flag, a pro-police symbol that has been increasingly embraced by and associated with white supremacists.

Shortly after the original IndyStar report, the NPA also sued two officers who told the outlet that the organization was a scam.

Ahead of this year’s YWLS, Turning Point USA recently took a hit over another one of its event sponsors, Rightside Up, whose founder is a registered sex offender convicted in 2014 of “attempted ‘coercion and enticement’ after trying to persuade ‘a minor female’ to ‘engage in sexual activity.’”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Jen Psaki

Grace And Integrity: Jen Psaki's Last Day At White House Podium

Today was White House Secretary Jen Psaki’s final day. Karine Jean-Pierre will be taking Psaki’s place in front of the press during the daily briefings. Jen Psaki has been a steady and welcome fixture in an administration that has been tasked with cleaning up the catastrophic destruction of the previous administration. It was a sad day in some respects, as Psaki has been a highlight for many, offering up witty and solid rebuttals to the steady fact-free propaganda of the right-wing media sphere.

Psaki began her final briefing by thanking the Biden administration, the Biden family, the press, and her husband, saying that anyone with children knows that they cannot execute any of their professional work without the support of a spouse. It was an emotional thank you that Psaki handled with the same level of grace that she has been able to apply to her daily press briefings over the past 16 months. Psaki opened the floor to questions and answered questions about abortion, inflation, supply shortages, and COVID-19, and then she signed off.

Here is Psaki’s opening statement on her last day.


White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki delivers her final press briefingwww.youtube.com

After covering all kinds of questions about subjects domestic and global, Psaki showed some of the flair that made her a hero to many Americans. A reporter asked a leading question about how President Biden’s Department of the Interior had recently canceled three oil and gas leases, and how this might be a sign that the Biden administration wasn’t doing what was needed to be done to lower oil prices (forget about the fact that fossil fuel companies are very clearly gouging consumers), Psaki gave a fact-filled extravaganza of an answer, detailing how oil and gas companies are sitting on fallow leases already, doing nothing but asking for more cheap public land leases.

At one point someone in the press asked Jen what wisdom she has gained in her position over the last year and a half. She reiterated what the nature of her job was, that she needed to make sure she spoke as frequently as possible with President Biden to understand what he wanted to say and what his policy ideas were. She also gave an important note to the press that learning about the policies being talked about, knowing exactly what are in any given policy, what it is trying to accomplish, and how, is fundamental in being able to ask meaningful questions or even criticizing those policies (I’m looking at you, Peter Doocy).

She said she was confident that Karine Jean-Pierre had also internalized many of those lessons as Deputy Press Secretary and that in the weeks ahead, she “will bring her own magic,” and style of communication to the position. Karine also assuaged many in the press by saying the plan was to continue holding daily press briefings, as being a fascistic dictatorial propaganda machine like the last administration is not an option.

Jen Psaki talks about her advice to others after having been WH Press Sec. for over a yearwww.youtube.com

Finally, Jen Psaki said her very quick good bye.

Jen Psaki leaves the White House Press Briefing podium for the last timewww.youtube.com

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.