As Saturday's CNN Newsroom with Fredricka Whitfield devoted a segment to the issue of women becoming more politically active after Donald Trump became President, CNN's Jodi Enda never applied a "liberal" label to the left-wing causes supported by recent women protesters even as she asserted that the current Congress is "quite conservative."
At about 11:50 a.m. ET, referring to an article Enda posted on CNN.com, host Whitfield began by posing: "Well, first, let me ask you about this headline. Why do you say that President Trump is the best and worst thing to happen to modern American feminism?"
Enda began by recalling:
Well, certainly feminists are not happy with President Trump both for his behavior and for his policies, and some of the proposals that he's put forth. But he has uniquely galvanized American women to come out in force in a way that no President has before him.
So it started with the Women's March the day after the inauguration where millions of women not only in the United States but around the world protested President Trump. There were about half a million in Washington, which was the largest location, but there were hundreds of thousands in other large cities all around the world and in small cities.
Generically referring to "women," she continued:
Women went home, and they started to organize. Women who never were involved in politics or in political action before joined huddles, which are local community organizations, where they can take action, put their ideas together, contact their legislators, and try to get some things done.
After applying no "liberal" label to women who particularly support left-wing causes, she was quick to label Congress as "quite conservative" as she added:
This is going to be a very tough battle, and they know this because not only do they have a President in office who was not fighting for most of the things that feminists would like him to fight for, but the Republican Congress is quite conservative, and they are scaling back on some of the initiatives that women support -- things like Medicaid, which will be cut if President Trump's proposed budget goes through -- two-thirds of Medicaid recipients are women.
Things like abortion rights, birth control, housing assistance, public education -- all are things that women are fighting for. And we just don't know what the end result will be.
A bit later -- without acknowledging that many women are conservative and oppose abortion -- Enda again brought up support for abortion rights:
One thing that's interesting is that millennial women who never were all that involved in the women's movement before have come out in droves. These are the women who are affected by things like birth control -- which is covered under Obamacare and could be scaled back -- or abortion rights.
So women have not seen from Ivanka Trump the kind of advances they want, yet she is putting forth some proposals that would help some women -- and I think that feminists appreciate that -- but they want her to go much farther.
