During the campaign, the president-elect tweeted a thirty-second campaign ad outlining some of his plans to help families (transcript below, or you can watch the full clip here). The spot features Ivanka Trump, “a mother, a wife and an entrepreneur,” explaining how her father will work to help families as president. Though ostensibly about families, the ad is almost exclusively framed around issues to help women balance career and the responsibilities of raising children.We can, then, begin to glimpse the state of Trump’s family politics in this video.
What are Trump’s family values? President Obama made light of Trump’s personal life as evidence that the GOP had abandoned its traditional mantle of family values. The Donald kept his kids close on the campaign trail, and it seems that they will play important roles in his administration (within, we may hope, the legal ambit of nepotism laws). Many have noted the importance of his family in preparations for the White House, but what will President Trump do with more traditionally Republican positions on family policy? Since the 1970s, the Party has tended to regard any policy proposal for helping families as a government intrusion into the family. But as this clip makes clear, President Trump plans to revisit issues like childcare and maternity leave.
Discursively, the clip demonstrates an old theme: women=family. Though the clip was tweeted as an example of Trump’s “family first” approach, Ivanka Trump speaks exclusively of women, flattening women’s needs into the needs of the family. Childcare and eldercare are portrayed as issues that only affect women. This is a departure of sorts from recent discourse on family policy that has tended to focus on the needs of parents and of getting fathers to play a more active role in the lives of their children. The recent announcement that Melania Trump would be staying in NYC to raise their son indicates that presidential life might be mirroring policymaking art.
But by focusing on the needs of mothers as workers, this ad officially abandons an archetype that has been in decline for decades: the stay-at-home mom. Ivanka tells us that her father “will provide tax credits for childcare, paid maternity leave, and dependent care savings accounts.” In embracing working women, Donald Trump seeks to accommodate “have-it-all” liberal feminism in its calls for greater supports for women to be professionals and mothers. While the suggestion of tax breaks and “dependent care savings accounts” are a far cry from the free childcare, wage increases, and universal health care that will actually help most parents (especially single mothers), focusing on the needs of women as workers and embracing redistributive family policy recalls Nixonian Republican policy priorities. I venture a guess that the “Lean In” share of the vote for Hillary Clinton was somewhere in the 80% range, so it is clear that Donald has a way to go to appeal to this crowd. This clip highlights an aspect of Trump’s populist nationalism that could alter the policy stances of the parties in coming years.
Transcript:
“The most important job any woman can have is being a mother, and it shouldn’t mean taking a pay cut. I’m Ivanka Trump, a mother, a wife, and an entrepreneur. Donald Trump understands the needs of the modern workforce. My father will change outdated labor laws so that they support women and American families. He will provide tax credits for childcare, paid maternity leave, and dependent care savings accounts. This will allow women to support their families and further their careers.”
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