The Woman Behind Trump

The Woman Behind Trump

Amy Wilentz on Ivanka, plus Calvin Trillin on Mississippi in 1964, and Rosa Brooks on the militarization of everything.

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The most powerful person in Donald Trump’s campaign is not a political professional but rather his own daughter, Ivanka. Amy Wilentz explains how Ivanka got there, and comments on her personal, and political, history.

Also: Rosa Brooks talks about “how everything became war and the military became everything”—the title of her new book.  She worked at the Pentagon; now she’s a law professor at Georgetown University.

Plus: We’re still thinking about the ’60s—and so is Calvin Trillin. He went to Mississippi in 1964 as a young journalist, and in the decades since, he’s written a lot about race in America. His new book is Jackson 1964.

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Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets. 

Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.  

As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war. 

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