Is There Nothing MAGA Won’t Blame Women For?

Even in the immediate aftermath of tragedy, the attacks on women in the workplace continue.

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Within an hour of the horrific assassination attempt on Donald Trump, some of his supporters had a suspect in mind. Not an extremely troubled 20-year-old whose mother and father - like way too many American parents - let him play around with a deadly weapon. 

Nope. The immediate and “true” culprits were women in the Secret Service who were supposedly hired thanks to a federal Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program in effect at the agency. 

The female agent front and center hustling the fist-pumping Trump was immediately thrust into the spotlight. What the hell was a woman doing on stage beside Donald Trump without stiletto heels? Then, within an hour of the shooting, Xitter was flooded with the official photograph of a different woman, captioned with calls for her immediate dismissal. 

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle was portrayed as the incompetent “diversity hire” put in charge of what natural law and order - according to this thinking - would leave to the men. 

We’re used to this by now, of course. Witness the show trial organized by the House Oversight Committee in which three female university presidents were grilled for hours about their supposed leniency toward anti-semitism. Two of them were ultimately out of their jobs. It’s very hard to imagine the same House committee treating a gaggle of male college presidents the same way they treated their female counterparts.

Christopher Rufo has made himself rich and famous by attacking DEI. He was first out of the gate with an extended essay blaming the Trump rally shooting on females in the workforce. 

The day after the shooting, he published a little analysis piece titled “A Compromised Secret Service, the agency has sacrificed its basic mission on the altar of DEI” noting the - to him - unusual number of women in the group of agents who rushed to shield the candidate:

Why so many female agents? The answer, unfortunately, is the same as in many other institutions: DEI. The Secret Service has highlighted 'diversity' as a key priority and its director, Kimberly Cheatle, hired by President Biden in 2022, has pledged to increase dramatically the number of women in the ranks.

So now the official policy of the Secret Service is to hire, and promote ‘woman, LGBT, Native Americans, and other identity groups’ as a higher priority than the absolute brute strength needed to protect a president or candidate. … To say it plainly: there is no need for women in a president's security detail. The Secret Service is an elite institution that can funnel down a large number of candidates to select the few who will protect the president. The best candidates—the strongest and fastest, the best marksmen—will be men. That's just reality.

Rufo is an experienced anti-DEI campaigner – he’s written books on it and is the go-to guy for all things affirmative action. But he’s not alone. 

Testosterone-soaked MAGA influencer Dan Bongino fulminated on his podcast: "Amid all the chaos weaves the thread of another story, one that reveals a mounting problem in our political life. A surprising number of the Secret Service agents protecting the former president were women. And, according to video recordings of the scene, many did not acquit themselves favorably."

It’s true that the Secret Service made a colossal, unforgivable mistake in not covering the rooftop from which Matthew Thomas Crooks fired his dad’s AR-15. But that part of the debacle - the decision-making behind how to deploy security - is not available on video. 

What Bongino and the rest of us can see on video is that there were women in Trump’s security detail. And that seems to be something that bothers them most.

One is front and center in the iconic bloody-ear fight fight fight photo snapped by Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci. Bongino concedes that this woman "did act bravely” when she got in front of his body, but complains that she was too short to provide much valuable protection:

Scene one: after President Trump ducks, a group of agents leaps to him and protects him with their bodies. A female agent who rushes to the stage acts bravely, without a doubt, but the point of the 'huddle' is to protect the president. The agent was much shorter than President Trump, leaving his head and neck exposed after he stood up.

Bongino fails to appreciate that by leaving the candidate’s head and neck exposed, this short female agent actually deserves a media-messaging medal, maybe even an Clio, the trophy they give to extremely effective advertisements. Had she been the towering manly hulk Bongino and the rest of these men fantasize over, the now-iconic photo of Trump might never have happened.

Blaming women and/or people of color when things go south comes way too easily for a swath of the public cultured to believe that the only competent individuals in America are white men. “DEI” has been a MAGA rallying cry for the last few years, code, like “woke,” for resentment over nonwhites and women in positions of power. 

Some criticisms of the implementation of specific DEI programs could be valid. But the actual record of epic failures by white men privileged by nothing but birth into positions of power is too long for me to fit in this newsletter. 

The reality is that most - probably all - military and economic disasters in the nation’s history and most corporate debacles can be traced to white men at the top making terrible decisions. 

Here’s a preliminary list of the men who ultimately proved unqualified, but who benefited from the default DEI program. Let’s call it the Dangerous Entitled Inadequate (I was torn between Inadequate and Idiot) program. This is the actual hiring program that the U.S. government and its corporations have relied on since time immemorial. 

Dangerous Entitled Inadequate hires in my lifetime include the following:

W. and his generals who ran that colossal and devastating folly, the Iraq War. 

Donald Trump during the pandemic (and at the Trump Org, presiding over multiple bankruptcies). 

“General” Mike Flynn, now out of the closet as a Q-anon lunatic, after years at the top levels of the Pentagon wreaking god knows what on the planet.

The men who ran Boeing into the ground for profits, dispensing with the lives of hundreds of people in the process. 

Enron’s “smartest guys in the room.” 

Robert McNamara and other Vietnam War planners.

BP’s cost-cutting executives who gave us the Gulf oil spill.

The genius inventors of credit default swaps before the 2008 crash.

I could go on. I welcome readers to add names. 

The Trump-era assault on women in the workplace has curtailed a long trend toward increasing that participation, despite numerous studies showing that businesses with women in leadership do as well or better on almost all metrics. As I wrote last week and previously here, the open, unapologetic backlash against women in power and against girls empowered to make independent choices is the great hallmark of the MAGA moment.

[Correction: Changed Obie to Clio above.]