First of all: Many, many people could "do better" than Ivanka Trump on "the women's issues." Then again, nearly every job Ivanka has been considered for is wildly inappropriate; as author/journalist Kurt Eichenwald noted, even that "blind trust" spot would likely require her to receive high-level intelligence briefings. (The problem here is that even knowing which deals create conflicts of interest would require her to have more information on U.S. foreign policy than any private citizen should.) No matter what her title is, Ivanka's essential role remains the same: to integrate a very specific vision of exceptionalist white womanhood into the Trump brand and presidency. By presenting a very specific type of exceptional success, she is the Trump presidency's built-in excuse for failing the rest of us.

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Her work isn't feminism, but femvertising.

Patriarchy has always had room for the Exceptional Woman—the one woman smart enough, sweet enough, strong enough, soft enough, pure enough, sexy enough to satisfy all of our culture's contradictory demands on women, and thus make it to the top of a sexist system on merit alone. Patriarchy needs that woman. She provides men with an excuse to blame women for their own pain and struggles while simultaneously assuring women that sexism only needs to be outwitted to be overcome. She tells us that the system is survivable for women—you simply have to be the right kind of woman.

Exceptional Women don't exist in real life. No one is unaffected by sexism; no woman, no matter how well-behaved, is ever safe. But some women, by dint of privilege and good luck, are fairly convincing avatars. This year's Exceptional Woman is Ivanka Trump, and she's such a convincing Exceptional Woman that she's helped make a self-confessed sexual predator who ran the most openly misogynist presidential campaign in modern history palatable to a large number of Americans.

Of course, Trumpism is unsurvivable for women who do not happen to be exceptional Ivankas. "Being the best mother you can be" probably doesn't sound aspirational to a woman who's lost her birth control due to the repeal of Obamacare and can't abort her resulting pregnancy due to increased state abortion restrictions, lack of federal funding, and/or the overturning of Roe. The support staff who provide Ivanka's soothing greige lifestyle—domestic and child care workers who are predominantly female—will not find their work-life balance enhanced by child care proposals that don't cover the cost of caring for their own children, or by the lack of a livable minimum wage.

The goal of Trumpism is not to benefit women. The goal is to benefit one woman, Ivanka, or the one type of woman she represents. She provides her father with a human credential and downplays his sexism; in exchange, she gains an invaluable boost for her aspirational lifestyle brand (only $10,800 for the bracelet Ivanka wore on 60 Minutes!) and the opportunity to charge strangers $50,000 for a "coffee chat," thus proving that women really can succeed after all. We're not meant to benefit from her; we're meant to look at her, and think about how we can be more like her. We're meant to blame ourselves for falling short, as we have with every other Exceptional Woman to date. Ivanka is the Disney princess; we're the peasant chorus members who watch, and serve, and sigh at her pretty hair. Hell, maybe we'll even pitch in some background vocals on a few of the big musical numbers. Peasants always do, in those movies, even though they're probably all starving.

The Republican party wants you to get to know President-elect Donald Trump's new nominee for Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, but not everything about him.

The official "Meet Steven Mnuchin" biography on the Republican party's website leaves out the fact that Mnuchin worked at Goldman Sachs for 17 years.

Here's the key passage from the GOP website:

"President-elect Trump will nominate Steven Mnuchin to serve as the next Secretary of the Treasury and the principal economic advisor. Mr. Mnuchin has decades of experience with financial and monetary matters. His experience includes serving as finance director of President-elect Trump’s campaign, Former CEO of Dune Capital Management, and co-founder of RatPac-Dune Entertainment which produced films such as Avatar, American Sniper, and X-Men."

While it does cite "experience with financial and monetary matters," the biography leaves out the fact that Mnuchin worked at a bank which Trump railed against during the campaign.

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All she knew is that the woman looked to be in her 30s and had short black hair streaked with purple.

And that this mystery woman was incredibly tender and compassionate with Mott when she was at her grief-stricken worst in the middle of a store aisle on the morning of Black Friday. You know the scene: Typical behavior on the High Holy American shopping day after Thanksgiving is to stampede directly to some cheap plastic thing and trample everything and everybody in the way.

But Mott was graced by a more serene fellow shopper at 6:25 a.m. in the middle of Mills Fleet Farm in Ankeny, just as she received a devastating phone call.

Mott wasn’t there on a shopping spree; she only needed a pair of dog beds for her German shepherds, especially her decrepit 12-year-old pooch, Killer, whose bones ache on her hardwood floors.

That’s when the call came in from the nursing home on the south side of Des Moines where her mom lived.

“Angel, honey,” said the nurse on the phone, “your mom passed away.”

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“Hoping you nice people can help me find a lady. I was out shopping on Black Friday at six in the morning at Mills Fleet Farm in Ankeny. In the middle of shopping I got a phone call that my mom had passed away. I sat down on the shelf in the aisle and must've bawled for several minutes. Some nice lady with black hair (I think) and purple highlights, sat down with me and hugged me for about five minutes. She cried with me. I would just like to thank her very much. Not one person stopped to see if I was OK. But her and her sister did and I appreciate that more than they'll ever know! My mom was my best friend. I felt like my heart was ripped out of my chest. She was only 57. I'm only 31, I still need my momma!”

The wait is over: President-elect Donald Trump finally announced his nominee for secretary of state Tuesday morning: Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil CEO and official "friend" of Russia.

In June 2013, Tillerson and other oil company executives were awarded the Order of Friendship by President Vladimir Putin—a high honor previously bestowed upon a former basketball coach in Ohio and a Russian art collector in Minnesota. Tillerson received the award after signing an agreement in 2011 with OAO Rosneft, a Russian state-owned oil company that gave ExxonMobil and Rosneft access to Russia's rich Arctic energy resources. (That relationship became more complicated when the United States slapped Russia with sanctions over its annexation of Crimea and interference in Ukraine in 2014.)

It started with a simple idea: that dignity and hygiene are inextricably linked. Doniece Sandoval was convinced homeless people deserve both, so ideas turned to action.

With the help of Google, an early investor that has donated $800,000 to date, Sandoval converted a defunct San Francisco city bus two years ago into a mobile shower unit for the homeless. She then turned the idea into a nonprofit, Lava Mae. Now, out of 5,000 entrants, she's the first recipient of the newly-formed KIND Foundation's $500,000 grand prize, for "transforming her community through kindness."

Lava Mae has upgraded from its first city bus — it now has commercial shower trailers that still offer what the people it serves said they wanted most: privacy and safety. While the original concept had six shower stalls to account for quantity, Lava Mae buses have two full, private bathrooms, one of which is large enough to accommodate wheelchairs.

The organization, which is currently expanding to Los Angeles, hasn't stopped at showers alone — its latest effort is the "pop-up care village," a pilot program featured in the video above in partnership with Project Homeless Connect and a small army of volunteers.

At the most recent pop-up in San Francisco on Nov. 29, in addition to the mobile shower bus, people experiencing homelessness could sign up for a free haircut with volunteers from Fellow Barber, and shop at a free "street store," where every guest could take up to 10 donated items.

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Indeed, a day before the Politico piece hailing Heitkamp as the likely pick, Trump had veered in a quite different direction, announcing a new member of the team overseeing the transition of the USDA: Brian Klippenstein, executive director of a group called Protect the Harvest. The brainchild of Forest Lucas—a right-wing oil magnate and cattle rancher who has himself emerged as a contender to serve as Trump's secretary of the interior—Protect the Harvest seems to exist mainly to troll the Humane Society of the United States.

On its website, Protect the Harvest warns that HSUS seeks to "put an end to animal ownership." This is nonsense—the Humane Society is by no means coming for your furry friend. Its website features "tools you need to help the pets in your home and beyond." I asked Paul Shapiro, vice president for farm-animal protection at HSUS, whether his group opposes the keeping of pets. "That would certainly be news to the vast numbers of our staff who bring their dogs to work here," he replied.

Protect the Harvest's real beef with HSUS appears to be that the group promotes legislation that curtails some of the harsher aspects of factory-scale animal farming. The two groups recently clashed over a Massachusetts ballot measure this fall to ban tight cages in egg and pork production. Lucas personally donated nearly $200,0000 to defeat the measure, and Klippenstein actively campaigned against it. The measure passed with overwhelming support on Nov. 8.

Protect the Harvest's zeal to fight regulation of animal farming extends even to "puppy mills"—large facilities that churn out dogs like factory farms churn out pigs. Back in 2010, the year Protect the Harvest was founded, it vigorously opposed a Missouri ballot measure to "require large-scale dog breeding operations to provide each dog under their care with sufficient food, clean water, housing and space; necessary veterinary care; regular exercise and adequate rest between breeding cycles"; and "prohibit any breeder from having more than 50 breeding dogs for the purpose of selling their puppies as pets."

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So basically, we've got a two-time industry lobbyist and an anti-animal-welfare zealot teaming up to choose the next USDA chief.