Ivanka Trump Doesn’t Handle Criticism of Her Child Care Plan Very Well

Ivanka Trump, daughter of Republican Presidential Nominee Donald J. Trump, takes the stage during the final day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Thursday, July 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)

It appears Ivanka Trump may have inherited her dad’s temperament after all.

During an interview Wednesday with a Cosmopolitan reporter, Ivanka became clearly rattled when pressed about her maternity plan and accused the reporter of asking “negative” questions and attempting to “editorialize” before cutting the interview short.

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The interview turned sour when the reporter, Prachi Gupta, mentioned that Ivanka’s father made a comment back in 2004 that pregnancy is “an inconvenient thing for a business.”

OK, I just wanted to make sure I understood. In 2004, Donald Trump said that pregnancy is an inconvenient thing for a business. It’s surprising to see this policy from him today. Can you talk a little bit about those comments, and perhaps what has changed?

So I think that you have a lot of negativity in these questions, and I think my father has put forth a very comprehensive and really revolutionary plan to deal with a lot of issues. So I don’t know how useful it is to spend too much time with you on this if you’re going to make a comment like that. My father obviously has a track record of decades of employing women at every level of his company, and supporting women, and supporting them in their professional capacity, and enabling them to thrive outside of the office and within. To imply otherwise is an unfair characterization of his track record and his support of professional women. So the policies at our company reflect that, and the diversity of our workforce, from a gender perspective, and in all perspectives, reflects that. So my father has been a great advocate for the women in the workforce, and that’s part of why he recognized that reform is so necessary.”

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Ivanka went on to say she wasn’t even sure he made those comments, although Gupta correctly cited an NBC interview, and then continued to praise her father’s plan:

“I think what I was — there’s plenty of time for you to editorialize around this, but I think he put forth a really incredible plan that has pushed the boundaries of what anyone else is talking about. On child care specifically, there are no proposals on the table. He really took ownership of this issue, and I really applaud him for doing that. I hope that, regardless of what your political viewpoint is, this should be celebrated.”

After attempting to explain how to pay for the plan, Trump decided she had enough and abruptly ended the interview with, “I’m going to jump off, I have to run.  I apologize.”

So lifelong Democrat Ivanka Trump is talking up the child care plan she helped create for her Republican candidate father, and she wants conservatives and liberals alike to celebrate it.  Not shocking.

No, the shocking part is that we are being told by fellow “conservatives” (that is what they call themselves, anyway) that we should get on board with a nanny state “child care reform” plan.

Forget about the ins and outs of the plan, the minutiae, forget about figuring out how this plan is going to be paid for and if the math really works out (although for the record, it doesn’t).

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This isn’t us.  This doesn’t represent our party.  Or at least, according to the millions of alleged TEA Partiers who voted for Trump in the primaries, it didn’t until 2016. A sweeping regulation on employers mandating what benefits they have to provide their employees (and requiring them to pay for it in the process) is not a Republican concept. Or, again, it wasn’t until people decided that whatever Trump said was ipso facto Republican. It used to be that one of the parties in this country stood for less government regulation and less Federal interference with the free market, and that party was the Republican party.

Have we forgotten how we felt about Obamacare, when the person proposing it had a “D” in front of his name?  Who among Republicans “celebrated” President Obama “taking ownership” of the issue?  He was the only one with a proposal on the table, after all.

We didn’t celebrate his proposal because it stood for everything we were against.  It stood for big government regulation, it stood for crippling entrepreneurs and small businesses, and it stood for minimizing personal responsibility, among other reasons.

How about forcing insurance companies to provide birth control pills at no cost to the woman?  Outrageous, right?  How could you call yourself a conservative and support that at the same time?  If women want government to stay out of their bedroom, then that logic applies to all sides, therefore government shouldn’t force anyone else to pay for what happens in the bedroom, either.

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Well, now we have a child care proposal that does exactly that- it essentially forces businesses to pay for a woman to receive compensation for work she didn’t do, it forces employers to reward a woman for getting pregnant (it doesn’t, for the record, reward her husband with time off).  Let’s ignore the inherent discrimination within the idea for a moment and just focus idea itself.  This is just a plain old liberal ideal, coming from the liberal himself, Donald Trump.

But instead of speaking up, instead of saying “wait a second, this isn’t something we stand for.  We don’t want to force businesses to be responsible for women having babies.  We don’t want to pay for what goes on in the bedroom.  That’s never been what we’re about,” we’re talking about the details of the plan.  We’re talking about how it’s going to be paid for, who it includes or doesn’t include, and what a revolutionary occasion we have on our hands.

Government paying for what happens in the bedroom is STILL not a conservative value.  Kowtowing to feminists who want preferential treatment is STILL not a conservative value.  It is pure hypocrisy to support this measure from someone simply because they have an “R” in front of their name.

The craziest thing is that the people who were the most up in arms about Obamacare are the most likely to be the crazy enthusiastic stupid red hat wearing Trump supporters. It’s enough to make you wonder whether all the liberals we made fun of for years were right – maybe a huge portion of the people who opposed Obamacare were doing so simply because Obama was black.

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Leaving it up to a family to be responsible with their finances, to live within their means, and to make the decision to have a baby when their own personal finances can make the math work, that is what our party believes in.  Or, at least it’s what we used to believe in before some of us were blinded by orange.

 

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