Whether it's intentional or not, Donald Trump loves to pin women around him as traditional caretakers. When describing his mother in his book, "The Art of the Deal," while he did acknowledge her to have "had a sense of the world beyond her," he ultimately framed her as "a very traditional housewife." Which is a bit wild, considering Mary Anne MacLeod Trump took on significant philanthropic work later in life. Trump seems to view his wife with the same exact lens, as he told "Fox & Friends" in a 2020
interview that, "Melania has been a great mother to Barron ... Barron is growing up really beautifully, and she's been a great mother to Barron."
And we all know Melania Trump is more than just a wife and mother considering her past as a model, her prior jewelry brand, and her current extensive philanthropic work. But, Trump still tends to narrow her identity to just the role of a caretaker. Again, this pattern reveals that Trump seems to value a woman's loyalty and devotion to family over anything else, which almost feels like he's encouraging the toxic tradwife trend. The way he describes the women around him is a stark difference from that of even his Vice President JD Vance, who often speaks very highly of his wife and even referred to her as a "powerful female voice" and "Yale spirit guide" in an interview on "The Megyn Kelly Show."
Read more: How Melania Trump Responds To Donald's Alleged Infidelities By Barely Saying Anything At All
Trump's Views On Women Seem To Be Stuck In Another Era
Donald Trump's boomer phone isn't the only thing that shows his age, it's also his traditional views on the role of women and the way he casually talks about them. His bizarre and outdated takes don't stop at his mother and wife, he also loves to make inappropriate comments about his daughter, Ivanka Trump. Despite her Ivy-league education and running a successful business, Trump often reduces her to her looks. There have been too many times to keep count of Trump saying something highly inappropriate about his daughter. But just to give you an idea, in a 2004 interview with New York Magazine, he said, "Ivanka is great, great beauty. Every guy in the country wants to go out with my daughter. But she's got a boyfriend." The comment came the year she graduated from the prestigious Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
It's remarks like these or even the alleged strict dress code for women staffers during his first term in which they were expected to dress appropriately, with dresses being the preferred choice, that suggests Trump's views of women remain traditional, dated, and image-focused. But the man is in his late 70s. What can we expect from someone whose ideas of gender roles were heavily influenced by an era in which a woman's dress size was far more important than the work she could do?
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