On Tuesday, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump unveiled new proposals to offer tax benefits to parents trying afford costly childcare and to new mothers who want to take paid leave to be with their newborns. But as his daughter Ivanka, who was reportedly deeply involved in designing the plans, made the TV rounds to promote the plan, she wove in some lies about Trump’s opponent.
Appearing on Fox News on Tuesday evening, Ivanka claimed that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton doesn’t have any plans when it comes to childcare and paid leave. “There’s no policy on Hillary Clinton’s website pertaining to any of these issues, childcare, eldercare, or maternity leave or paternity leave for that matter,” she said. “There’s no policy that’s been articulated on how to solve the problem.”
Hillary Clinton has three different pages on her website that describe her plans for paid family leave and childcare.
Clinton, in fact, rolled out her own plans months ago. She called for paid family leave in her first speech of the campaign and unveiled her proposal to guarantee 12 weeks in January. Her plan would ensure eligible workers, mothers and fathers alike, would get two-thirds of their regular pay up to a certain cap and pay for the cost of the benefits with higher taxes on the rich. When Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2008, she also put forward a paid family leave plan.
And in May she unveiled her proposal to address the cost, quality, and availability of childcare. She has pledged to use government spending and tax breaks to make sure that no family pays more than 10 percent of its income on care. She also paired it with a proposal to increase pay for childcare providers and early childhood educators as a way to ensure quality and availability.
Ivanka wasn’t the only one to make this false claim on Tuesday night. During his speech, Donald Trump said that Clinton “has no childcare plan.”
By Wednesday morning, Ivanka’s attack line on Clinton had changed slightly.Appearing on Good Morning America, she instead said Clinton should have passed paid family leave during her years in elected office. “Respectively, Hillary Clinton has been around for decades, and there’s no policy benefitting either mothers or fathers in terms of paid leave,” Ivanka said. “Certainly she opportunity to have a concept like that.”
After confronted specifically with the fact that Clinton has proposals on her website, Ivanka added, “We have not been in public office for the last several decades and she has. She could have instituted some of those policies in that role and has not done so.”
Hillary Clinton has been near or in elected office for some time, and during that time she has paid attention to the issue of family leave. She supported her husband’s signing of the Family and Medical Leave Act into law in 1993, the first law to create any access to time off, even if it was unpaid. Getting that modicum of coverage took a huge effort and an enormous coalition to overcome staunch Republican opposition, including two vetoes from President George H.W. Bush. John Boehner (R-OH), a future Speaker of the House, called the FMLA “another example of yuppie empowerment.”
As a U.S. Senator, Clinton also pushed forward on the issue, introducing a billthat would have allocated funding to pilot programs allowing low-income mothers to care for their newborns at home.
But it is Republican opposition that has stood in the way of family leave, paid or unpaid. Democrats have twice introduced a bill that would create a national paid program, to no avail.
Ivanka was also asked about The Trump Organization’s and her own business’s policies on paid leave in both interviews, and she claimed that they both do. While her business offers eight weeks of paid leave, officials at the Trump Organization have yet to say publicly whether it offers paid family leave and there are no official materials saying that it does.
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