The Parallel Universe of Ivanka Trump, America's Dissociated Princess
The Trumps
The Parallel Universe of Ivanka Trump, America’s Dissociated Princess
It’s a stunning misread of this turbulent moment for one of the most privileged and powerful people in the nation to tell students about how important it is to listen to her, when she should be doing the listening.
By Emily Jane Fox
June 9, 2020
It happened for the first time just about a week into Donald Trump’s first term into office. The new commander in chief signed an executive order banning individuals from seven majority-Muslim countries from traveling to the United States on a Friday evening. Families were immediately separated and people were detained at airports. By Saturday evening, college students feared for the future of their education. Parents worried that they wouldn’t be able to see their children. Lawyers rushed to file lawsuits over the policy. Americans, already heavy-hearted, boiled over with worry about what America under Trump would turn into. And Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and senior adviser, posted a photo of herself in a $4,990 metallic gown, tucked into her husband’s tuxedo-ed arm as they headed out to the annual Alfalfa Club dinner. The world was burning, it seemed, live, on television, and Ivanka was tuned into an entirely different channel.
She felt terrible, people around her told me at the time. She had been observing Shabbat all evening Friday into Saturday, and had been unaware of the controversy her father had created, they said.
The excuses and the remorse dwindled over time, though the incidents of how Ivanka ran on an entirely different track from the most controversial and offensive pieces of her father’s administration, of which she is a senior and central member, continued. Like when she went on a spring break ski trip when her father tried to repeal Obamacare, or on a couples trip to Vermont in the midst of the Charlottesville protests. Or when Ivanka would frequently post professionally edited videos of herself on trips overseas or to factories around the country while the president fanned flames over immigration, Russian interference, Joe Biden, impeachment, and so on and on and on. As the global pandemic gripped the nation and parents grappled with working from home without childcare or schools in session, along with economic uncertainty, unemployment rising, and the weight of explaining this all to cooped up children, President Trump played down the virus’s impact and Ivanka posted a years-old photo of her and her children leaning on throw pillows scattered across a floor, under sheets arranged as a makeshift tent. “Staying home today w/ kids?,” she tweeted. “Plan living room camp out! Throw a bedsheet over some taped together brooms. Plan a menu & ‘pack’ sandwiches, salads (S’mores optional) A fun activity that also brings family together for a meal!” A little less than two weeks later, she tweeted a video of herself, bare faced and stripped of the staged-ness of the tent photograph, urging Americans to follow shelter-in-place orders. “Those lucky enough to be in a position to stay at home, please, please do so,” she said into the camera. “Each and every one of us plays a role in slowing the spread.” Days later, she and her family ignored federal orders asking Americans to avoid discretionary travel, as they left Washington for another one of their family homes, on her father’s golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, to celebrate Passover.
Ivanka’s ability to operate on this otherworldly separate track—both from the president and from the everyday realities and rules that surround most Americans—was both an asset to the kind of power she cared about and a contrast from her father. She ignored the harsher realities of the administration she was part of by creating a distinct narrative that she could market to those who were open to buying it as a way to both aid her father and whatever role she would ultimately decide to take on once he leaves the White House. It is a kind of impulse control and compartmentalization that the elder Trump does not possess. Her father is temperamentally unable not to dwell on and rave about exactly what is on his mind or the public consciousness at that precise moment, even when it’s in his obvious political interest to do so. Last Friday, with the nation in the midst of its worst unrest in decades, he sent out hundreds of tweets. On Tuesday, with his advisers, as Axios reported, pushing him to find a calming message of unity, he suggested in a tweet that the elderly activist who was pushed down by police in Buffalo and remains in a serious condition may have “fell harder than was pushed.”
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