Women find no cause to cheer as Trump celebrates first 100 days

The week that culminated in a “celebration” of Donald Trump’s 100^th day in office brought lots of news for American women – none of it good.

While concerned women were busy with other political issues – marching for science, calling Congress to protest the administration’s proposed tax reform, and demanding an independent investigation into the connections between the Trump administration and Russia – Trump and his misogynistic bunch were busy dismantling decades of progress for American women.

Medical benefits under attack

As Paul Ryan scrambled in vain to bring the latest version of Trumpcare to the House floor for a vote in time to give Trump a 100-day “win” to boast about, word spread that Trumpcare 3.0 was no better for women than the first two attempts.

All three versions would defund Planned Parenthood by blocking Medicaid reimbursements to the organization’s health clinics, causing millions of American women to lose access to reproductive and women’s health care (while stopping not a single abortion – the purported goal – since federal funds aren’t used to pay for abortion services).  

Trumpcare would make it virtually impossible to purchase insurance, whether private or federally funded, that would cover abortion by prohibiting tax credits to be spent on any plan that covers the procedure.

Depending on state-by-state decisions, maternity coverage could become unavailable or unaffordable to all but the wealthiest Americans – who could easily pony up for maternity costs anyway.

The GOP plan also calls for the essential health benefits requirement in the Affordable Care Act – which identifies 10 benefits that must be included in all health plans – to sunset at the end of 2019 for Medicaid recipients. No longer would they have coverage for such basic medical services as outpatient and emergency care, hospitalization, laboratory services, prescription drugs, and dozens of preventive care services, such as vaccinations, blood pressure and cholesterol screenings, and cancer-screening colonoscopies.

Included in those 10 essential benefits are three that help women in particular: maternity, newborn and pediatric services. Those, too, would be sunset.

Working women lose in court

On the job front, American women lost out in a decision by the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals – ironically the same court Trump wants to split up because of its decisions against his Muslim ban. The April 27 decision overturned a lower-court ruling that said employers cannot pay women less than men simply because the women earned less in their prior jobs. Since women’s salaries are likely to be lower than men due to existing gender bias, that inequity can now carry over when women compete for a new job with men possessing equal qualifications.

Attorneys for the plaintiff, a California school employee, may appeal the decision to the Supreme Court since other appeals courts have decided such cases differently. But for now, American women, who currently earn 80 cents for each dollar that an equally educated, skilled and experienced man earns, may have that pay inequity locked in to their salaries.

Ivanka serves up pie-in-the-sky

Boasting of her father’s supposed support for working women at the W20 summit in Germany early in the week, Ivanka Trump succeeded only in drawing attention to the nigh-unto-useless proposals she has advanced on his behalf for working families who struggle with maternity leave and childcare expenses.

Trump’s maternity leave proposal – on which Ivanka has been partnering with Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-TN – would allow up to six weeks of leave for new parents. But its $500 billion ten-year price tag isn’t likely to find many buyers in a GOP-controlled Congress, so the plan is already considered by many to be DOA.

And his childcare plan has been widely panned as a gift to the rich. It offers a tax deduction for childcare costs for anyone earning less than $250,000 ($500,000 for married couples). But getting a tax deduction requires families to pay income taxes to use the deduction – eliminating millions of working families that pay nothing in federal taxes because they earn too little.

It’s different for high earners. Experts at the Tax Policy Center project that 70% of the benefits would go to families that earn $100,000 or more, and 25% to those earning $200,000 or more – leaving just 5% to be divvied up among millions of lower-income American families that do qualify.

Even his proposed dependent care savings account would be useless to many. It would allow families to save up to $2,000 per year tax-free in a DCSA to pay for child or elder care. But lower-income families looking for help with these costs would find it just about impossible to put any money into such an account.

Nikki gets the good-ole-boy treatment

And the highest-ranking woman in Trump’s administration was not so subtly put in her place on two occasions during the week.

After press reports noted the significantly higher public profile of Nikki Haley, Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, than that of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the president seemed intent on reining her in.

His first poke: a “joking” comment when Haley brought 14 colleagues from the U.N. Security Council to a White House lunch meeting with Trump.

“Now, does everybody like Nikki?” he asked. “Because if you don’t, otherwise, she can easily be replaced.”

Working women recognize that behavior as a weakly veiled demonstration of male power over women in an organization – as well as a reminder that women are expected to be “nice” if they hope to succeed. Nikki had better be “liked” by her U.N. colleagues – she’d better not be too assertive – or she’s out.

The second rejoinder came late in the week, when the State Department – Tillerson’s turf – announced that Haley is now expected to have any remarks she makes to be cleared by State before she utters them. Her comments should be cleared with Washington, the announcement declared, “if they are substantively different from the [State-written] building blocks, or if they are on a high-profile issue such as Syria, Iran, Israel-Palestine, or the D.P.R.K. [North Korea].”

While that prior approval certainly makes sense on a policy level, it is strikingly obvious that Haley is the only person being ordered – and publicly – to request State’s okay to speak her mind.

If the Trump administration is concerned about its representatives speaking in concert, that’s fine.  But if its objective truly were consistent messaging, Tillerson’s State Department would demand the same review process of every administration official, not just the one forceful, outspoken woman on the team. And it would include Trump himself – to ensure that his words, including his notorious 3 a.m. tweets, are consistent with his own administration’s policy pronouncements.

If it wasn’t already crystal clear before Trump’s 100^th day dawned, it is now: America’s missed opportunity to elect its first woman president is having significant, lasting, and negative impacts on American women, their lives, their families and their careers.