Ivanka Trump, Republican nominee Donald Trump’s daughter, is being tagged on social media as being “difficult” and “evasive” after she abruptly cut off an interview with Cosmopolitan magazine.
She’s being accused of avoiding what some left-leaning members of the media are calling “tough questions.” But Ivanka says she sat down with Cosmo to talk about her father’s policies for working women and her crusade to help mothers in the workplace, but was instead railroaded by a journalist with a very obvious anti-Trump agenda. She took to Twitter late Thursday morning to express her frustration.
Unfortunately for Ivanka, Cosmopolitan clearly had no intention of allowing the successful fashion mogul and working mom talk about her vision for positive change—especially because that positive change could come as the result of a Donald Trump presidency.
In fact, it seems that Cosmopolitan has quite the dim view of its readership’s grasp of politics and policy—a theory borne out by Cosmopolitan’s real-life political efforts. In 2014, Cosmo‘s get-out-the-vote campaign featured buses of shirtless male models gyrating around college campuses, signing up female students to cast their ballot.
Cosmo‘s political coverage, of course, is emblematic of political coverage across women’s magazines—even the ones that pride themselves on their cultural worldliness.
Vogue‘s coverage consists largely of slightly fuzzy photos of Hillary. The extent of InStyle’s commitment to informing its readership about hard-hitting issues is one article about Hillary’s many television doppelgangers. Glamour magazine has an explanatory article on gun control—authored by Ke$ha. Elle magazine covered Cosmopolitan covering Ivanka Trump.
During this week’s Cosmo interview, once they had Ivanka in the chair, reporter Prachi Gupta pressed her on her father’s history of sexist comments. She asks Ivanka to defend a statement about women Trump made back in 2004, long before either Ivanka or her father entered the political sphere.
Ivanka told Gupta that she thought the questions were “an unfair characterization of his track record and his support of professional women,” and asked Gupta why her interview had such a negative focus. Gupta then tried to stump Ivanka with a question on why Ivanka’s policies applied only to “mothers,” and whether she’d be willing to extend maternity leave benefits to gay men.
Ivanka then walked out, saying she had another appointment—and she was right to, though you wouldn’t know it from left-leaning media. The interview was negative, the coverage would, no doubt, be biased, and the journalist clearly had an idea of what she was going to write, Ivanka’s answers notwithstanding.
It is, of course, shocking that Ivanka would give the decidedly Democratic Cosmopolitan an interview at all. Its editor, Joanna Coles, is far from friendly to Republican candidates.
When Coles made the decision to move Cosmopolitan away from sex tips and beauty product reviews, and delve into politics, she was clear that she would come at “women’s issues” from the left, even telling POLITICO that candidates who didn’t support abortion rights or government-based solutions to problems like equal pay shouldn’t bother to apply for Cosmopolitan‘s endorsement. (That includes Ivanka’s father.)
If you do manage to find Cosmo‘s politics section (buried under the conflicting editorial priorities of “women’s empowerment” and “sex tips designed to please your man”), you’ll find a host of vapid articles defending Hillary Clinton, including a swoony essay on the Clintons’ marriage.
If there’s any common thread that unites the various magazines, it’s that they think women are incapable of handling tough ideas, without either making the decision for them or insulting their intelligence with below-average political thought.
Ivanka, of course, is no shrinking violet (although at least one blog called her Tweet storm a “white-hot emotional meltdown“). Given her track record, she might just finish out this election at the helm of her own women’s magazine. She’d probably take the job more seriously than Cosmo.