By A week or so ago, I got the most beautiful Trump family photo in the mail.
In the picture, Ivanka Trump plays on a pastel rug with her daughter, Arabella, and her first son, Joseph. She holds a cardboard cutout of a number three over her stomach. The photo must have served as a pregnancy announcement for Theodore, born earlier this year. But I received it on a flyer advertising Donald Trump's maternity leave and child care initiative plans.
The timing could not have been worse. As the flyer hit my mailbox, nine women were in the process of coming forward to say that Trump had touched them inappropriately or harassed them, alleging that the Republican nominee for president doesn't just talk about doing such things, he actually does them. (Another came forward today.) Trump and his handlers fired back, denying everything, throwing every slut-adjacent word in the book at the women. Crazy. Phony. Desperate.
All the while the Ivanka flyer sat on my counter while I wrote work emails and cooked toddler dinner and then cooked adult dinner. She smiled beatifically at my cutting board as I chopped onions. Something about that flyer was bothering me, something I couldn't put my finger on.
Finally, as cable news sound bites of Trump's alleged victims played in the background, I figured it out: It was the caption. "The most important job a woman can have," it read, "is being a mother."
That sentence is a brazen, tone-deaf judgment disguised as a nice sentiment. But it's not disguised well enough to conceal a pattern that has quietly become a theme of Trump's presidential run. Trump separates women into two categories: sexual beings who are valuable only for their looks, and mothers. (Madonna/whore; no one is claiming great originality in Trump's world view.) To him, females exist only to be ranked on a scale from cattle to Maxim.
This has been one of his more subtle efforts at divisiveness, but it's been consistent all the same. Think of the way Trump has spoken about his accusers (look at them, he wouldn't even be interested!), about Alicia Machado ("Miss Piggy"), and about the women of Fox News leveling charges against Roger Ailes (to paraphrase: ungrateful). Each of these women—never mind whether they are moms in real life—was assessed according to sex appeal and sexual contact. Trump's unvaried response was to discuss their bodies and judge them harshly. The habit goes beyond the scandals. In Wednesday's final debate, Trump portrayed women who have abortions as monsters "ripping" babies from their wombs (aka, the worst moms).
Throughout it all, Ivanka has been the shining madonna. Quite literally, in the early months of 2016, she was a vision of motherhood. And then at the convention she announced a mom-friendly plan advertising six weeks of guaranteed maternity leave. (The campaign bypassed Melania, whose nude photos and model past presumably disqualified her to play shining madonna, though it was nice of them to let her play the mom card to excuse her husband's "locker room" talk: "I have two boys at home—I have my young son, and I have my husband.") It's worth noting that Trump doesn't even seem committed to this mode of apology. He rarely mentions the platform himself; he failed to reference it Wednesday night.
The problem with this is not just that it smells like damage control for his mistreatment of women. The larger problem is that even as a mode of damage control, it only addresses mothers. To the Trump campaign, it seems moms are the only redemptive versions of women. With her high necklines and Wharton degree, Ivanka made the perfect idol. Trump continues to let her push his platform benefiting mothers while he insults women regularly, never seeming to pick up on the hypocrisy.
He's counting on us not picking up on it, either. To Team Trump, mom voters are distinctly different from women who don't have children—why should they be offended by talk of sexual assault? They're moms. Let's be honest: he's manipulating a segregation comes up naturally sometimes. It's the disconnect you feel, as a woman without children, when it seems like your friend's kids have warped her into a boring sippy-cup wrangler. It's that flash of judgment you experience, as a mother, when you see photos of your kid-less friend partying and traveling. It's that "I so cannot picture that life" shake of the head each group gives the other.
But it's an instinct to be checked, not indulged, especially when the stakes are this high. I'm a mother, but I'm a woman first, and I'm suspicious of anyone who seeks to undermine that solidarity. Especially when it's a man who's made it excruciatingly clear that if your pussy isn't expelling a child, it's literally up for grabs.
And even though I work and have children, just like Ivanka, I have to disagree with her tagline. The most important job a woman can have is the one she decides is most important. It might be mother. It might be something else. And soon, it might be president.
