On Tuesday, Donald Trump went on Twitter to blast his former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, calling her a “lowlife” and a “dog.” Manigault Newman—currently promoting a tell-all, Unhinged, about her time working for the president—has said in recent days that she plans to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian collusion and also has released recordings of Trump’s chief of staff John Kelly firing her in the White House Situation Room.
“When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out,” Donald Trump tweeted. “Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”
Shocking, certainly, but even more so: This isn’t the first time Donald Trump has referred to women as animals. Throughout his career, he’s hurled the “dog” insults at people he doesn’t agree with, and while his list includes a few men (Steve Bannon and Mitt Romney), it’s also stacked with women including journalist and entrepreneur Arianna Huffington (“…she is a dog who wrongfully comments on me”) and actress Kristen Stewart (“Robert Pattinson should not take back Kristen Stewart. She cheated on him like a dog & will do it again–just watch.”) Writer Gail Collins also once claimed that Trump wrote “The Face of a Dog!” over her picture after seeing a column he thought unflattering.
Trump has also repeatedly called women pigs and commented on their looks. During the first Republican debate, moderator Megyn Kelly commented, “You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals. Your Twitter account …” Trump interrupted to say, to laughter, “Only Rosie O’Donnell.” (He’d said O’Donnell was a “big, fat pig,” a “disgusting pig” and a “real loser” after a disagreement they had in 2006). The women whose physical appearances he’s judged ranges from his former political rival Carly Fiorina and Morning Joe host Mika Brzezinski to celebrities like Heidi Klum and Angelina Jolie. And let’s not forget the time he was caught on a 2005 hot mic saying he could grab women “by the pussy.”
Trump’s disrespectful cracks and hostility against women may be nothing new, but many critics quickly pointed out that calling Newman a dog could also read as racially charged. The insult comes after Trump has attacked other women of color, including Maxine Waters, whom he has referred to as having a low IQ. It also seemed to add fuel to Newman’s allegations that she’s heard tape of the president using the N-word while he was on his former reality show ,The Apprentice, on which Newman competed in 2004.
Trump denied the allegations in a series of tweets on Monday, writing, “.@MarkBurnettTV called to say that there are NO TAPES of the Apprentice where I used such a terrible and disgusting word as attributed by Wacky and Deranged Omarosa. I don’t have that word in my vocabulary and never have. She made it up. Look at her MANY recent quotes saying….such wonderful and powerful things about me – a true Champion of Civil Rights – until she got fired. Omarosa had Zero credibility with the Media (they didn’t want interviews) when she worked in the White House. Now that she says bad about me, they will talk to her. Fake News!”
Just over a year-and-a-half into Donald Trump’s presidency, Ivanka Trump announced that she’s shuttering her namesake fashion line.
In many ways, it’s been a long time coming. Marketed as a purveyor of affordable basics for working women since it launched in 2007, with its face being Trump herself, the brand—once valued at $100 million—has experienced a considerable decline since its founder left to join her father’s administration in January 2017. Ivanka Trump, the brand, has taken one hit after the next as many shoppers and retailers have distanced themselves from its products, with pieces increasingly popping up on the resale market post-election.
Then, there were the boycotts.
Grab Your Wallet and similar campaigns against Trump’s products, which have gained steam thanks to the power of social media, have contributed in part. Their goal is to be “a centralized resource for the flexing of consumer power,” specifically as it pertains to Trump-affiliated companies. Shannon Coulter, a San Francisco-based digital marketing expert, is at the center of Grab Your Wallet—as the initiative’s co-founder, she and Sue Atencio helped launch this movement in 2016, encouraging people to use their spending to protest then-candidate Trump following the release of that now-infamous Access Hollywood tape (hence the name). The hashtag quickly went viral, and the Grab Your Wallet website was launched as a resource for customers to check whether the places they shopped had a relationship with the Trump family, as well as to provide tips for people who wanted to call companies with ties to them. When the first Women’s March took place in 2017, 350,000 people visited the site during a 24-hour period, according to the New York Times.
A year-and-a half later, Coulter and Grab Your Wallet have what she described on Twitter as “a win.”
PHOTO: The Washington Post via Getty Images
Shannon Coulter, co-founder of Grab Your Wallet.
“All over the world, women have so much consumer power and influence and their awareness of that influence is growing,” Coulter tells Glamour. “I’ve watched so many individual women successfully get companies to make significant, positive changes over the last twenty months simply by communicating with them. It’s been dazzling to behold and it makes me believe we could use that power to help remake the world into one that puts a premium on equity, peace, education, and care. I think that’s only a dream for as long as we fail to roll up our sleeves and do it.”
Coulter, for one, doesn’t believe Ivanka Trump, the person, when she says the decision to close Ivanka Trump, the brand, had nothing to do with sales. “I don’t think any Trump would willingly shut down a profitable company with a bright future,” she argues. “I’ve seen several indications that Ivanka Trump’s line has probably been performing poorly for some time on several measures, especially brand. I think Ivanka likely wanted to avoid the embarrassment of more retailers dropping her line in the future. At the consumer level, the Trump brand has become permanently politicized and she knows it.”
In 2015, the Ivanka Trump line was reportedly raking in $100 million annually, per public statements from G-III, the company that made its clothing. Then, the election happened: Ivanka joined her father in Washington, and formally stepped away from the company’s day-to-day operations—though, she never divested her ownership, and still made $5 million from the company in 2017, according to financial disclosure documents.
That’s when things started to take a turn, as consumers increasingly found it difficult to separate Ivanka Trump, the product, from Ivanka Trump, the political operative.
PHOTO: MANDEL NGAN
Ivanka Trump.
In an interview with Refinery 29 from early 2017, Abigail Klem, president of Ivanka Trump, claimed the brand had its best-performing weeks in its history following President Trump’s inauguration. According to the e-commerce search platform Lyst, sales of the brand spiked by more than 700 percent in February 2017, compared to February 2016.
Around that same time, the backlash began to strike Ivanka Trump’s stockists. Nordstrom became the first major U.S. retailer to announce it would no longer carry the brand, in February 2017, citing poor sales: “We’ve said all along we make buying decisions based on performance,” a spokesperson told Racked at the time. According to an e-mail sent to employees that week, though, Nordstrom executives reportedly did express disagreement with President Trump’s policies—his executive order restricting travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, in particular, writing: “We currently employ more than 76,000 people who comprise different races, ethnicities, and genders. It’s important that we reiterate our values to all of you and make it clear that we support each of our employees.”
PHOTO: MANDEL NGAN
Trump, wearing an Ivanka Trump dress.
“By then, a dozen companies had already announced they had severed ties with the Trump brand, but when Nordstrom announced it was dropping Ivanka, I knew the movement had achieved real momentum,” Coulter says, noting how a New York Times news item quoted an anonymous source from a third-party consumer data company who said that Grab Your Wallet kept coming up in Nordstrom customer feedback.
Other retailers were feeling the heat, too. A source at TJ Maxx tells Glamour that the retailer received hundreds of angry letters and phone calls in 2017 because it sold Ivanka Trump products; the retailer instructed its employees via a note to throw out signs promoting the label in stores. And for those stockists that continued to carry Ivanka Trump in the post-#GrabYourWallet landscape, the pressure never really eased up: Just this month, Canada-based Hudson’s Bay announced it was dropping the brand—in a statement, it offered: “As part of our regular course of business, we review our merchandise offerings and make appropriate changes.” Coulter says that Hudson’s Bay was the 40th company to be removed from Grab Your Wallet’s master list.
While a statement from the Ivanka Trump brand insisted on strong sales through 2018, when the company launched its own e-commerce, the numbers publicly available—the company is privately held, so not many are—suggest a different story.
PHOTO: Spencer Platt
Ivanka Trump shoes, available for purchase.
Following the reported surge that followed the Inauguration, Lyst reported that order growth for Ivanka Trump dropped to 288 percent in March 2017, then to 114 percent in May 2017, and then to 6 percent in July 2017; in August 2017, order volume was down negative one percent compared to August 2016. This downward spiral continued into 2018, as sales for Ivanka Trump products online at Amazon, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Zappos fell almost 45% in June 2018, compared to June 2017, according to data from Rakuten Intelligence reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Simultaneously, Trump couldn’t distance herself from allegations that she was using her new political capital to profit unethically from her White House role. For instance, she wore a $10,800 bracelet from her fine jewelry collection for an appearance on “60 Minutes” in 2016 promoting her father’s presidential win—and the Ivanka Trump brand sent out a press release for it, presumably to drum up sales. Then, when news broke that Nordstrom was dropping the label, President Trump sent out a Tweet blasting the retailer for the decision on his person account, which was then retweeted by the official @POTUS Twitter handle. As recently as May 2018, there were reports that the First Daughter had won new trademarks from China—13 in three months—which set in motion a firestorm from ethics experts questioning whether Trump was using her influence with foreign governments for personal gain. Meanwhile, the brand contended with controversies of its own unrelated to its founder’s political affiliations: In the spring of 2017, news broke that the factories in China where Ivanka Trump products were being produced were facing labor violations.
PHOTO: Bloomberg
Trump, wearing Ivanka Trump shoes.
To be sure, the Ivanka Trump brand is far from the first company to be at the receiving end of negative attention—Uber, United, and Chick-fil-A are but a handful of examples—but not all consumer-driven boycotts have had nearly as big impact on a company.
“Social media provides a platform for people to have these conversations that didn’t exist 10 years ago,” Barbara E. Kahn, a professor of marketing at the Jay H. Baker Retailing Center at The Wharton School, says. Still, negative attention doesn’t necessarily mean the death knell for a brand: “There could be lot of negative activity on social media, and that doesn’t necessarily translate into changes in purchase behavior or sales.”
Think of how Chick-fil-A enraged many after it publicized its anti-gay marriage position in 2012—the company barely registered a hit, beyond some bad PR. Many fashion brands and retailers have faced accusations of sweatshop labor that have resulted in boycotts, but it hasn’t truly affected their bottom lines much.
“Boycotts are not created equal,” Bruce Hicks of The Alliant Group/Houston, a longtime public relations and crisis management consultant, explains. “What comes into play is how important the product is to people lives. Is it a crucial product? Is it an important brand to people? With Ivanka Trump you have a brand that is insignificant, it’s not a commodity product. People don’t need to buy her shoes, there are a lot of choices out there. Mix that up with emotion over President Trump, and it’s easy for people to make the decision to spend their dollars elsewhere.”
PHOTO: Chip Somodevilla
Trump, wearing an Ivanka Trump dress.
With the Ivanka Trump brand closing its doors, the Grab Your Wallet campaign strikes off one of its main targets. What comes next? According to Coulter, the fight isn’t over—not even close.
“The Grab Your Wallet community seems really excited to continue doing this,” she says. “Our goal now is to develop a more comprehensive, sophisticated knowledge base about the moral and ethical dimensions of consumer brands and then disseminate that information in highly impactful ways. We’re also looking at the possibility of partnering with organizations that advocate for fair wages, labor rights, and equity in hiring in order to continue making an impact.”
The retailers that remained on the Grab Your Wallet boycott list for continuing to carry Ivanka Trump through its final season will be removed, per Coulter, “although we will be making a note that they failed to divest from the Trump brand prior to Ivanka’s company being shut down.”
Democrat Stacey Abrams has an opponent in her quest to become Georgia’s next governor. The Yale-trained attorney will take on Republican Brian Kemp in the race, drawing the eyes of the nation to a pivotal November contest between a progressive black woman and a pro-Trump conservative man.
Abrams is campaigning to become the first black woman governor in U.S. history. A businesswoman and writer, she was the first female leader of her state’s General Assembly. On the other side is Kemp, who is currently Georgia’s sitting secretary of state and a former state senator. President Donald Trump endorsed him as “tough on crime, strong on the border and illegal immigration”—helping him defeat Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle in Tuesday’s Republican primary for governor to become his party’s nominee.
Now Abrams and Kemp will duke it out to succeed Republican Governor Nathan Deal, who can’t run again because of term limits. Their showdown highlights a coast-to-coast midterm battle between Republicans who embrace Trump’s economic and social agenda and the Democrats who passionately reject it.
Abrams got her shot at Georgia’s highest office after the backing of A-list supporters and strong fund-raising helped her win a May Democratic primary showdown against a somewhat more moderate white candidate, Stacey Evans.
But with an opponent who is a Trump favorite in the other corner, how will Abrams fare? Audrey Haynes, University of Georgia associate professor of political science, says she has a tough fight ahead of her.
She expects the possibility of an Abrams win will energize Democrats, including black women voters, who have been key players in many of this cycle’s highest-profile elections, especially at a time when America has just six sitting female governors and not a single state with a black chief executive.
But Georgia went for Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, and has yet to join the ranks of swing states that neither Republicans nor Democrats can consider a lock. (In fact, Georgia has not elected a Democratic governor since 1998.)
That same excitement could also emerge among Republican voters who want to use the midterms as a show of support for Trump and his chosen candidates, including people like Kemp, whose campaign featured an ad in which he proudly proclaimed himself a “politically incorrect conservative” who’d even use his “big truck” to “round up criminal illegals” personally.
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A Brian Kemp for Governor ad
Bring it on, says Abrams, who’s running on a platform that emphasizes criminal justice reform and economic opportunity and who tweeted that she’d be proud to join the ranks of Democrats Trump has campaigned against.
Kemp, meanwhile, tweeted his thanks to Trump and said he looks forward to working with his former rival Cagle “to defeat Stacey Abrams and her radical, left-wing backers!” He promises to be a governor who will defend the rights of gun owners, fight crime, and cut government regulations.
Come November “I would predict that turnout will be high. People are passionate,” Haynes told Glamour via email. “I suspect that President Trump will make an appearance, and I am sure that the Abrams campaign would love to see him go off script and deliver a message that they can use to motivate their voters, particularly women, to turn out.”
Individually, “Kemp has shown that he can campaign, stay on message, build bridges to his intra-party opponents, and stump well. Abrams is a very good communicator, can raise money, stay on message, and can campaign as well. Both come into the general election with some baggage that will be the content of a multitude of negative ads from a host of super PACs and such,” Haynes told Glamour.
For Abrams, that baggage includes her admission of racking up significant personal debt. Kemp’s critics, meanwhile, say his political ambitions have been financed by some of the same people whose businesses he oversees as secretary of state.
“In the end, this will be a contest of ideas—whose do you like better—and one’s existing partisanship may have already decided that in a very polarized political environment,” Haynes said. “It will be a contest of organization, who can mobilize, and it will be a contest of endurance [as to] who can campaign to the very end. Those of us who study politics are watching to see what will happen.”
And with the nation’s eyes laser-focused on a race that could go down in the history books, they won’t be alone.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Abigail Klem, president of the Ivanka Trump brand, announced the closing to the company’s 18 employees on Tuesday, with Ivanka Trump, the person, expected to speak to them later in the day.
In a statement issued to Glamour, Klem said she was proud of the company they built and product they sold, noting that the business had “seen strong sales since the brand’s inception, which continued throughout this year with the successful launch of our rapidly growing e-commerce business.”
“I know that this was a very difficult decision for Ivanka, and I am very grateful for the opportunity to have led such a talented and committed team,” Klem added.
Ivanka Trump, the person, also released a statement, which was obtained by Glamour: “When we first started this brand, no one could have predicted the success that we would achieve. After 17 months in Washington, I do not know when or if I will ever return to the business, but I do know that my focus for the foreseeable future will be the work I am doing here in Washington, so making this decision now is the only fair outcome for my team and partners. I am beyond grateful for the work of our incredible team who has inspired so many women; each other and myself included. While we will not continue our mission together, I know that each of them will thrive in their next chapter.”
PHOTO: Chip Somodevilla
Trump, 36, left the apparel and accessories brand in January 2017, to join President Trump’s administration. Though she cut official managerial ties with the company, she was still often photographed in Washington, D.C., wearing Ivanka Trump–branded clothing. Despite ongoing boycotts and criticism, signage went up inside Trump Tower in New York in August 2017, announcing the first stand-alone Ivanka Trump store, which would open later that year.
Because the business is privately owned, financial records and sales information aren’t available for the Ivanka Trump fashion brand; however, retailers that have dropped the brand have cited poor sales as a reason. From June 2017 to June 2018, WSJ reports that online sales for the label on Amazon, Macy’s Inc., Bloomingdale’s, and Zappos.com were down almost 45 percent, per data from Rakuten Intelligence.
Shannon Coulter, cofounder of #GrabYourWallet, which urges retailers carrying brands associated with the Trump family to cease business with them, celebrated the news of the Ivanka Trump brand closing on Twitter. “Yes, it’s true: Ivanka Trump is shuttering her fashion line,” she wrote. “Things may be close at the polls. They are not at the cash register. The big hearted, fair minded people hold the majority of the consumer power and we vote every single day.”
On Tuesday, Melania Trump had the pleasure of joining her husband, President Donald Trump, during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, where the two world leaders reportedly discussed how to improve relations between their two nations going forward (and colluded in public, according to multiple news outlet opinions).
Although, it might be more accurate to say Melania had the displeasure of meeting Putin, if her facial expression after shaking his hand was any indication.
The scene was standard: As is customary for presidents and first ladies, the Trumps shook hands and posed for a photo with Putin before the summit began. Trump was his usual long-handshake self, while Melania was more refined, clasping Putin’s hand for a more practical one or two seconds. But for a split second, before the photographers started clicking, the first lady appeared to flash through a multitude of facial expressions—none of which exactly embodied happiness, as eagle-eyed Twitter users noted. “Watch Melania’s face, she’s terrified. I’m starting to feel for her,” one wrote. “Watch Melania’s face and body language after shaking Putin’s hand. She is scared to death of him,” another added, while a third user tweeted, “She looks like she just stared into the eyes of evil….”
Other Twitter users used this viral moment to add some levity to what has been a divisive trip for the Trumps so far. “It’s so cruel to tweet jokes about Trump being in love with Putin what if Melania sees and thinks she’s finally free,” one person wrote. “The funny look from Putin, right after the ball was passed to Melania,” added a second user.
Besides this unusual interaction, Mrs. Trump seems have had a decent time during her husband’s European trip, which began last week when she met Queen Elizabeth II and wore a yellow J. Mendel gown that Twitter deemed meme-worthy.
Ahead of Donald Trump’s announcement of his choice for a nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, pro-choice groups like Planned Parenthood, NARAL, Shout Your Abortion, and Advocates for Youth are gearing up for a fight over one of the nation’s most divisive issues—a woman’s right to choose and the possible overturning of the landmark Roe v. Wade, the court case that ostensibly legalized abortion in the United States.
Today, they are launching a social media campaign called #OneInFour where they are asking women to share their own abortion stories (if possible) or to stand with those who are. Participants can also tag their senator and ask them to oppose any SCOTUS nominee who does not voice explicit support for Roe v. Wade. (You can find your senator’s Twitter handle here.)
That’s almost a quarter of the female population and yet there is still an incredible amount of stigma attached to women talking about their own abortions. Not to mention the online trolls. But as the Shout Your Abortion website states: “Abortion is normal. Our stories are ours to tell. This is not a debate.”
When women share their abortion stories, we see that there is not one type of woman who makes the choice to end her pregnancy. And that there are also legions of women standing behind her, supporting her right to do so.
And that’s just the beginning as women keep talking and keep sharing.
We will know more about the battle ahead for the pro-choice movement Monday night after the president names his SCOTUS nominee, but the future of access to safe and legal abortion is most certainly in jeopardy.
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