I've spoken to women who were destroyed by Trump. The Marie Yovanovitch rumors don't surprise me

The tranche of Lev Parnas text messages and letters revealed the way in which this administration deals with its unruly female servants

Marie Yovanovitch said she never expected the treatment she received at the hands of the Trump administration (Getty)

On Tuesday, the Democratic Congress dumped a tranche of Lev Parnas text messages, letters, and photos. In this enormous document dump we learned some wacky, wild and deeply disturbing stuff, the most upsetting of which was that 61-year-old Masha Yovanovitch was being “tracked” by Giuliani and Lev Parnas. There were more nefarious hints, too, about what they were plotting, including Hyde’s assertion that "you can do anything in Ukraine with money."

Now we don’t really know what any of this means, though Ukraine has decided to open an investigation into the surveillance. It’s hard to know what this will amount to as a lot of “evidence” in Trumpworld just turns out to be bravado; there’s nothing that Trumpists love more than nicknames and the threat of violence. But it’s still important to point out that these text messages illustrate a pattern which is all too common in this administration — especially where women are concerned.

Ukrainian ambassador Masha Yovanovitch is most famous for her November 15 Congressional testimony, which was met with live-tweeting from the president of the United States.

“Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad,” tweeted the president as Yovanovitch was testifying before Congress. Of course, Yovanovitch was placed in those “bad” places because they were hardship posts, places that needed a seasoned state department employee. At one point Masha opined, “I do wonder why it was necessary to smear my reputation.” And perhaps that’s the most striking thing that happens to the female public servants of Trumpworld. Again and again, we see women who, because they refused to deviate from their jobs and do the bidding of Trump or Giuliani, are smeared and ruined, destroyed and discarded. Their life of service is used as a punchline, as a tweet, as anecdote in the Federalist or the Gateway Pundit or some other arm of the MAGA media.

If one of these women is supremely unlucky, they will end up mocked on a Fox News opinion show like Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity. If that happens, their email inboxes will be flooded with death threats and their social media will be clogged with expletive-riddled messages. Few of these women went into the state department or the FBI with the thought that someday they’d be used as a prop in the president’s war against both women and democracy itself. Few of us could have predicted that the dysfunctional misogynist haze of Trumpism would coat and cover all aspects of government.

During that same November testimony, national security advisor Fiona Hill accused Republicans of believing “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.” She also instructed Republicans that “in the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.”

Hill had worked in government service since 2006. She had served under both Presidents Bush and Obama. In a normal government, Hill would have worked on the National Security Council, maybe written a book or two, and eventually just faded into the enormous mechanism that is the federal government — but she was a competent non-partisan civil servant who refused to go along with the scheming, so she had to be destroyed.

During her closed-door testimony, Hill said, “I was very sensitized to this issue because in the whole first year at the NSC, people, myself included, were being accused of being Soros moles. And, indeed, I'm out on InfoWars again with Roger Stone, Alex Jones purporting that… from the very beginning I've been involved in a George Soros-led conspiracy.” Since Hill testified, Alex Jones has suggested she should be punished for doing so and made use of the phrase “indict the whore.”

When I interviewed FBI lawyer Lisa Page in December, she described to me what it was like when a friend would text her to tell her the president was talking about her at a rally again. Here was this FBI employee who had morphed into a presidential prop. It was almost like the president was an obsessive stalker, bringing her up as a punching bag whenever he needed a distraction from whatever particular malfeasance he was perpetrating at the time. Lisa was just an FBI lawyer — she wasn’t a celebrity. She was a hardworking government employee like Hill and Yovanovitch.

"The notion that American citizens and others were monitoring Ambassador Yovanovitch's movements for unknown purposes is disturbing," Yovanovitch’s lawyer Lawrence S. Robbins said in reaction to the Parnas leaks. He may find it disturbing, but I doubt he finds it surprising, because this is what happens to women who try to survive in Trump’s state department. Misogyny is a vein that runs deeply through the administration, and it infects most aspects of Trumpism. Federal employees find themselves with targets on their backs, and those targets are twice as large for women.

The misogyny of Trumpism is so baked in that it’s often an unnoticed driving force in a lot of things the administration does. At best women in positions of influence are treated like children (Ivanka, Hope Hicks) or wives (Elaine Chao); at worst they are treated like harpies. And the more women are punished for refusing to go along with the new status quo, the more Trump’s government achieves its goal of kneecapping the federal government, clearing the way for more prejudice to continue.