Try to Contain Your Surprise: White House’s Gender Pay Gap Tripled Under Trump

Do you know what happens when you elect a man whose most notable claim of action to fix gender issues is affording his daughter the same nepotistic advantages as his sons? That’s right! You get a massive pay gap between men and women in the White House, according to an analysis from a think tank.

It’s a conservative think tank, too, so feel free to check your liberal conspiracy theories at the door. The American Enterprise Institute found that ever since Donald Trump took office, the median salary for women in the White House is $72,650, while the median for men is $115,000. This likely has a lot to do with the fact that Trump’s top staffers are overwhelmingly male—74% of them, compared to 52% when President Obama was in office (in 2015, specifically).

That’s not a great excuse, since women being passed over for high-paying jobs is as much an issue as equal pay for doing the same job as men. It’s kind of hard to do equal work for equal pay when you’re not even given equal work. It’s also bad compared to the rest of the country, where the pay gap is 17%, compared to the 37% difference among Trump’s staff—also much higher than the Obama administration’s 11% last year, more than tripling it. The Washington Post also points out that it seems to be unusually high for the White House even when analyzing all the way back to 2003.

We just don’t know how anyone could be surprised by this. When the best defense of Trump’s rampant, well-documented sexism is basically that, hey, at least he’s hired more than zero women, this had to be expected. He already rolled back protections for women working for federal contractors, in case there was any doubt about where his priorities lie, no matter what feeble excuses his diehard supporters offer as he proves us right time and time again.

Maybe, maybe that—and his entire disgusting history—has something to do with this handshake fail, which is the medicine you need after another bout of upsetting Trump information:

I love that this failed Trump handshake in Poland is already a gif. Thank you, millennials. pic.twitter.com/5Kwm3eBMac

— OhNoSheTwitnt (@OhNoSheTwitnt) July 6, 2017

(via Mediaite, image: Ildar vector / Shutterstock.com)

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