Donald Trump, who has said that the sexual harassment allegations more than 20 women have made against Roger Ailes are “totally unfounded,” has some advice for Ivanka. If his daughter experienced sexual harassment on the job, the candidate said, “I would like to think she would find another career or find another company.”
This is a logical mental step from Trump’s previous comments on the Ailes allegations, which he’s repeatedly dismissed. On NBC’s Meet the Press on July 24, Trump told Chuck Todd that something smelled fishy about the claims against the former Fox News chairman. These women seemed fickle, maybe, or ungrateful. “Some of the women that are complaining, I know how much he’s helped them,” Trump said. “And when they write books … and say wonderful things about him … now, all of a sudden, they’re saying these horrible things about him.”
There are several unsettling aspects of Trump’s response to the Ailes allegations. His knee-jerk instinct to cast suspicion on the women (including Gretchen Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Laurie Luhn) who’ve come forward with horror stories about Ailes reveals his well-documented inability to trust women or see the harm in treating them as sex objects. Trump’s recommendation for Ivanka completely overlooks race, class, and gender barriers to quitting a job and finding new, better, immediate employment, where she might even face sexual harassment again. It ignores the injustice of sexual harassment and gives the hypothetical perpetrators a free pass.
Trump is also blaming women for their own mistreatment: If the women of Fox News didn’t like their male colleagues’ chronic sexual advances and demeaning behavior, they should have left. Ivanka’s brother, Eric Trump, reiterated that perspective on CBS Tuesday morning. “Ivanka is a strong, powerful woman,” he said on CBS This Morning. “She wouldn’t allow herself to be subjected to [sexual harassment].” After Charlie Rose asked if “perhaps a better answer” for Donald Trump would have been that Ivanka should alert her HR department, Eric agreed that “you should certainly take it up with human resources” and that Ivanka would, “as a strong person.” In other words, only weak women get sexually harassed? How does one “allow” oneself to be sexually harassed—by showing up in the clothes Fox executives demanded female journalists wear? By turning down a superior’s sexual advances over and over again? Eric also said that sexual harassment was a “no-go” at his father’s companies, a questionable claim in light of the dozens of documented instances and allegations of sexual harassment Trump has racked up over the years.
All Trump and his son needed to say was “yes, I would hate it if Ivanka were sexually harassed at work” or “I’d hope that if she reported it, her supervisors would take appropriate action.” Simple and uncontroversial and more or less meaningless! That would be the least anyone could expect from a decent human being with a smidge of empathy—let alone a politician trying to impress more than half the electorate—and still wouldn’t come close to a feminist response that addressed the systemic powers of workplace sexism with sensitivity and nuance. Instead, Trump has given us another reason to believe that he’s so deep down the rabbit hole of misogyny, even the prospect of the sexual mistreatment of his own daughter can’t shake him out.
