Usa 2020, at Ivanka Trump's rally in Florida: "Brilliant, but he's not like his father"
Rally in one of the states in the balance for Ivanka, the political heir of the president, chasing the vote of women graduates. In the audience, even the "nodding lady" of the debate on NBC
Those who entered Ivanka Trump's rally agreed to assume "all risks" in the event of contagion from Covid, it was written on the ticket. Thus his father's electoral campaign multiplies events in this state that must win if he wants to stay in the White House, but protects himself from any complaints. At the Bayfront Amphitheater, an open-air amphitheater on the Miami coast, people sat in alternating seats, separated by "Make America Great Again" signs. But as soon as Los Tres de la Habana began singing the catchphrase "Yo voy a votar por Donald Trump" from the stage, social distancing became a distant memory. All dancing salsa on this tropical afternoon, many without masks.
There was also the girl who, when Trump was destroyed in a televised interview by Savannah Guthrie of Nbc right here in Miami, was sitting behind the president and was filmed nodding continuously: that young woman agreed with him. It is such a rare thing on TV - they explain to me - that she has become a small icon of Trumpian women, even if nobody knows her name, it is only the «nodding lady», the young lady who says yes.
Donald Trump continues to beg the women of «suburbia» to elect him: «Please like me !, I want you to like me! - He says at the rallies -. I saved your damn residential neighborhoods from crime, okay? ' But the impossible mission of trying to stop his collapse in consensus among white women graduates (in 2016 44% voted for him, now only 30% would have remained faithful to him according to the polls) is entrusted above all to Ivanka. The favorite daughter has made about twenty stops in the last month and a half, especially in the residential areas of ten states in the balance, with a softer message than that of dad. Does he call scientists "idiots" and postal voting a "scam"? She talks about ice cream, poses with children dressed for Halloween, visits local businesswomen. She tries to mobilize again what in 2016 were called the «Ivanka Voters», ladies who identified with her more than with him.
"I am a white woman with a degree and I can assure you that the president has not lost my vote," Patricia Freeman, 51, a dental hygienist in Hollywood (Florida, not California), an hour-long residential neighborhood, tells me from the front by car. "Ivanka is graceful, elegant, eloquent, she is an entrepreneur: this is what every woman should be - she sighs - and I would like to be me". In Michigan, the other day when Trump said Kamala - Joe Biden's deputy - shouldn't be president, the crowd shouted: "Ivanka!" In Sarasota, a firmly republican city, another stop for the first daughter on Tuesday in Florida, the local press writes that there were 3,500 people waiting for her in front of a marina of sailboats: mainly women. However, in Miami most of the 2,672 chairs in the Bayfront Amphitheater were empty. Daughter is not as attractive as dad. Leslie Panter, 50, who goes around Trump events with two friends ("I'm so unemployed"), explains she is not here "for Ivanka" (although "she's certainly brilliant ... as is her brother Don Jr") but "To support my president." Even Patricia shows us on her mobile phone the photos of another rally, in Georgia, where Donald Trump was instead: "I was right behind him (partially covered by a child with an orange wig, ed) and there, yes, there it was a great crowd. "
Exciting, unpredictable, "funny" - words that the ladies, who in the meantime have put their masks back in their bags, use to define him - do not apply to the daughter. Before the 30-minute speech, Ivanka grabbed a café at the Republican must-see Versailles Cuban restaurant and visited a school in Little Havana wearing a blue-striped beaded mask. She has many, combined with clothes, but when she promoted their use on social media last July, the daddy fans insulted her: "We weren't created to have that thing on your face, take it off." Deputy Governor Jeanette Nuñez in introducing her mentions a dance step, while Ivanka is stiff in her "recycled" white thousand-euro dress, the tabloids write, in the sense that she had already put it in Africa, perhaps an attempt to be less fashion given the crisis. "I have a message from my father - she begins like this -: America will never be a socialist country". Ivanka the messenger, the ambassador, but perhaps it is too early to talk about Ivanka 2024.
