A new book by Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration official, contains some extremely disturbing claims that Donald Trump repeatedly sexualized his daughter Ivanka Trump.
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Taylor, you might remember, first made headlines back in 2018 when he wrote an anonymous op-ed for the New York Times called “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”. People were beside themselves with excitement for a while thinking that Anonymous might be someone high-profile like Melania Trump.
Some of that excitement died down when it transpired Taylor, who was the chief of staff of the Department for Homeland Security, wasn't in Trump's inner circle and wasn't really doing any meaningful "resisting". Still he's been eking out his 15 minutes of fame ever since, issuing warnings about democracy and dropping scandalous anecdotes about how unhinged Trump is.
His latest allegations? That Trump was lewd about his own daughter. "Aides said he talked about Ivanka Trump's breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her," Taylor writes in an excerpt from his new book, Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump, obtained by Newsweek. His remarks, Taylor writes, were so gross that John Kelly, who was White House chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, once had "to remind the president that Ivanka was his daughter".
There is, I should note, no incontrovertible proof that Trump said all these things. (John Kelly had not publicly commented on the allegations at the time of writing.) But the idea that the former president was creepy about his daughter in private isn't hard to believe. There is, after all, plenty of evidence, going back decades, of Trump being creepy about Ivanka Trump in public. Remember when he told Howard Stern, in 2003, that Ivanka Trump has “got the best body”? Remember when he said that, if Ivanka Trump weren't his daughter, "perhaps [he'd] be dating her"?
Ivanka Trump obviously isn't the only woman that Trump has said a lot of crude things about. While a lot of Trump's misogyny is in the public domain, Taylor claims there are plenty of sexist episodes that haven't made the news yet. "There still are quite a few female leaders from the Trump administration who have held their tongues about the unequal treatment they faced in the administration at best, and the absolute naked sexism they experienced at the hands of Donald Trump at worst," Taylor told Newsweek. .