"Snobby and bossy". She talks about the friend of Ivanka Trump: "I thought she would be the moderate voice of the White House"
Lysandra Ohrstrom, an American reporter and her former schoolmate, paints a merciless portrait of the president's daughter on Vanity Fair
We had loved each other so much. One time. Then the friendship ended. Ivanka Trump and Lysandra Ohrstrom, 38, an American freelance journalist expert on the Middle East, were inseparable from the early 1990s through the first decade of the second millennium.
The bond between the reporter who writes for The Observer and the Huffington Post, and the daughter of the president of the United States begins on the desks of Chapin, a girls' school on the Upper East Side, and since then they have always been together on vacation, traveling to Europe , shopping with dad's credit card (who complained about alimony he was passing to his mother) and nightlife adventures in New York clubs. Then their paths parted.
Now Ohrstrom makes a merciless portrait of her on Vanity Fair describing the evolution of Ivanka, from a girl with her defects, but nice, intelligent and funny to the current one: "snob" and "bully".
Trips to Atlantic City, sneaking off to London—as a child, Ivanka was fun, loyal, exciting. But she always had the Trump radar for status. Lysandra Ohrstrom recounts watching her former best friend torch democracy. https://t.co/8D9H1tKjQQ
— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) November 17, 2020
"Little by little, our differences have divided us - she reads in the article -: 'Why do you tell me to read a book about the fucking poor?' she asked me once — then there was a moment, right after university, when Ivanka embraced the path her father had outlined for her. "
A path that led her to "throw away the sophisticated image that she had painstakingly built in contrast to her father's nouveau riche" and to give up her ambition to conquer Manhattan in a more elegant way than Trump to establish herself as an idol and model of "white millennial" women.
A path that led her to the White House, where "I thought she would be the moderate voice of the administration," instead embraced the Make America Great Again and the paternal values of status, money and power, Ohrstro says disappointed.
From uniforms with green checked kilts ("the shorter they were the more popular") to the grunge suits they roamed in Manhattan, the boys and girls from the prestigious school they attended lived in sumptuous homes in the city's most upscale neighborhoods.
"Donald Trump", she says, "barely recognized me but asked me if Ivanka was the prettiest or most popular girl in our class." Although he did not remember the name, Trump "had a photographic memory of my body", Ivanka's ex-friend still remembers when in Mar-a-Lago Donald Jr stole half of her sandwich from her plate and Trump, looking Ivanka scolding her brother, said, "He's doing her a favor," referring to her weight.
For more than a decade they have been "more sisters than best friends". "Of course, Ivanka loved talking about herself and was shamelessly vain, but she was also funny, loyal and, let's face it, quite exciting."
The friendship between the two comes to an end in 2009 shortly after being the bridesmaid at Ivanka's wedding to Jared Kushner under the weight of increasingly evident differences. Once, as part of a discussion on social housing, Ivanka flatly dismissed her friend: "I can't talk to you about these things, you're a Marxist." The strongest attack, however, was on the chain with her name in Arabic, says Ohrstrom, who she has never hidden that she is pro-Palestinian. "I hate her. How does your Jewish boyfriend feel when you have sex and he sees the chain? How do you wear it?", Ivanka told her.
"In private," Vanity Fair reads, "I have had countless conversations with friends who grew up with Ivanka about how upset they are that she has not publicly opposed Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court, or any of the more repugnant policies. of his father. But in public we remained silent because that's what they taught us. "
The friendship finally breaks down when Ivanka proves too "busy" and she doesn't find the time to ask Ohrstrom about her new job.
"For me this was the end," admits Ohrstrom, convinced that Ivanka would make a grave mistake in returning to New York after the White House. "You should go to Florida, to Palm Beach, where white supremacism is a must and misdeeds are forgiven if you have money ...".
