Posted on 03/27/2017 1:14:54 PM PDT by drewh
The idea of Ivanka Trump as a secret progressive operative, embedded and awaiting activation, was always an illusion at odds with the material evidence. On the campaign trail, she was deployed as the genteel good cop to her father’s uncouth — and unashamedly racist and sexist — bad lieutenant. It was an image almost solely built on the superficial appeal of pastel dresses and quasi-liberal aphorisms, coupled with the long-standing typecasting of rich, telegenic, media-trained white women as inherently trustworthy. Take away the hollow rhetoric, and it’s clear that Ivanka is a loyalist wolf in her own fashion line’s sensible sophisticate cloaking. Like every other aspect of her dad’s campaign, the marketing of Ivanka as a force for good behind enemy lines is a lie that withers upon contact with observable reality.
Even as she has publicly stated support for feminist-lite tenets about workplace equality and closing the gender wage gap — as if capitalism will solve this whole sexism thing — Ivanka has never shown much interest in social justice as a passion or a hobby. When her father’s misogyny has been on full display, Ivanka has has mostly remained mum. She initially said nothing when the elder Trump went on a full-scale attack against Megyn Kelly, a sexist battle the candidate launched (he might have noticed if he recognized irony) when the then-Fox Host pointed out his history of sexist name calling. Pressed on the issue, Ivanka defended her father by claiming he was “not gender specific in his criticism of people,” a confusing defense considering he’d labeled Kelly a “bimbo” and suggested that menstruation had made her crazy. “Look, my father is very blunt,” Ivanka said in an interview with CNN, helping promote the dangerous idea that Trump’s violent, bigoted speech is just honest straight talk. “He’s very direct . . . I don’t think that he’s gender-targeted at all.”
A year later, when Trump was busted bragging about sex acts on an unearthed 2005 Access Hollywood video, Ivanka called his words “clearly inappropriate and offensive,” but made sure to give him undue credit for “acknowledg[ing] this fact with an immediate apology to [her] family and a national conversation emerged about the triggering effect of his campaign on millions of survivors of sexual abuse. Ivanka addressed none of those issues, but remained on the campaign trail, essentially serving as a rebranding agent — the crude term here is “cleanup woman” — for her dad, overwriting his hate speech with soaring rhetoric. She pulled out all the stops with her Republican National Convention speech, in which she called her father “colorblind and gender neutral,” lauded his “empathy and generosity towards others” and claimed that she and he would fight together on behalf of women. If she hadn’t already called her father “a feminist” a year prior, it would have been the most unbelievable remarks she’d given to date.
Perhaps the biggest problem with labeling Ivanka complicit in her father’s agenda — as a recent Saturday Night Live commercial parody did — is that the term isn’t a rigorous enough indictment of the president’s daughter and her role in this administration. She has cynically leveraged every aspect of her public self to get her father into office where he could assemble the most white and male cabinet in nearly four decades. She has put a well-coiffed, photogenic face on her father’s policies. This is a man who bragged about grabbing women by the crotch, yet Ivanka wants us to believe he made her, so he can’t be all bad. There is no denying that you cannot choose your family.
Ivanka is her father’s daughter, and and like him, she has consistently looked out for number one, with her family close behind. “[M]y focus is to ensure that these successes continue for the next generation of Trumps,” she writes in her 2010 book “The Trump Card: Playing to Win in Work and Life”. “After all . . .we play to win.” In “The Trump Card“, Ivanka writes that appearing on the Celebrity Apprentice gave her the chance “to integrate my role at the Trump Organization with my television persona in such a way that it reinforced my jewelry brand.” She’s still applying that lesson. By keeping her carefully manicured image intact and pretending that her father is an adorably gruff, rough-around-the-edges beta version of herself, she’s now using his presidency to advance her bottom line. After her RNC speech, Ivanka tweeted a link directing shoppers to buy her $138 dress. Despite boycotts and being dropped by several retailers, her father’s move to the White House has provided endless dividends for his oldest daughter, reportedly driving Ivanka’s sales up to record levels. As the de facto First Lady, Ivanka is profiting off her position in a way Melania admits she hoped to do.
It seems that Ivanka has long exhibited a tendency to view business and ethics through the same prism as her father.
I asked someone else who has known both Ivanka and [her husband and Trump senior advisor] Jared [Kushner] for years why they had thrown their lot in with Donald so whole-heartedly. “Power, power, power, power,” he speculated. “Jared’s got plenty of money, but the only way he can separate himself from his family is power. They’re a great match because that’s also what Ivanka is after.” Ivanka and Jared appear to have made the calculation that, even with some bad press, the exposure provided by a presidential run will only make them more influential over time. “It’s in the Trump DNA to capitalize on every opportunity,” said someone who knows Ivanka both personally and professionally. “And Ivanka is taking this as an opportunity to build her brand with millions upon millions of people looking.”
The irony of all this is the feminism that Ivanka has upheld is steadfastly retrograde and classist, perpetuating an image of womanly success as a kind that requires they both do and have it all. You can see it in her fashion line’s Women Who Work campaign, which also happens to be the name of her forthcoming book. She measures women — and here she pretty much only means white women; the rest of us barely enter the picture except as occasional tokens — by the same yardstick used by the patriarchy and, not coincidentally, her father. Success is being rich, thin, attractive, the boss (at the office and in bed) and never once letting the difficulty of juggling it all make you bitchy. According to the rules of her brand of consumerist feminism, the first rule of fighting sexism — aside from living up to its every impossible expectations — is to never complain about sexism. In the “Trump Card” she suggests, for example, “separating the real [sexual] harassment from the benign behavior that seems to come with the territory.” Learn to take unwanted advances as compliments, ladies!
“Frankly, I think the biggest message that Ivanka is espousing is that, sure, women can get a seat at the table … if they’ve already got a hefty leg up and they pander to the men above them,” Teagan Walsh-Davis, co-artistic director of The Jades theater group, told the Chicago Tribune. “I can certainly appreciate the idea of using your privilege for good…But her goals seem to be a lot more shortsighted. When she talks about advocating for working women, she’s talking about women who are already successful. She’s seeing ‘working women’ as a monolith of her own class. In her mind, it’s mostly women who have already made it. In the family leave plan she’s tried to propose, most of the tax benefits go to families earning over $100k a year.”
Trump voters get a lot of richly deserved derision for gullibly swallowing Trump lies despite all contradictory indications. The same might be said of Ivanka among (white) liberals, who’ve endlessly given her chance after chance, in the hope that the feminist glimmers they’ve seen will fully shine. It’s not that 45 isn’t listening to his daughter, who is pleading with her father to do the right thing. The reality is, Ivanka and her dad are on the same selfish page. Despite all her up-with-women talk, Ivanka reportedly required a full court press to offer maternity leave to employees. In her new role in the White House — which makes her a high-ranking member of her father’s administration, but with no actual title so as to skirt anti-nepotism laws.
She’ll keep putting out empty, faux-enlightened statements for as long as it serves the administration and her brand, which she still controls and has refused to put in a blind trust, conflicts of interest be damned. The goal is to keep a line open between the White House and the Trump Organization, and to keep downplaying the threat of this administration by outright lying about it in soothing tones. Ivanka is feigining innocence. She is the 53 percent of white women — the ones who voted for Trump even though they knew deal but like the benefits of white patriarchy. Like those women, Ivanka has signed on to do the bidding of that system in exchange for personal gain.
It’s more of the same that we’ve seen from Trump’s team, and a reason to stay weary. Ivanka is a key part of the strategy. Start recognizing her as such.
Do you expected to ONLY read positive, fawning articles about Trump and family? I come here to read it all,, the good, bad and the ugly. Reading only positive stuff would be boring indeed!
sun tzu said it best: If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
Yes ... comments and articles. But hardly the same faux outrage that we’re seeing about Ivanka moving in.
I think it's real.
only because of the sharp comparison between Anything the Dems have of the feminine gender!
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