The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Ivanka Trump
A life of failing upwards, paved by a road of white lies and white privilege, has allowed the favored first daughter to reign supreme.
It must be tough to be Ivanka Trump. As the favored daughter of an openly racist president, and as a woman with a nebulous, nepotistic, and unpaid job as a senior adviser to that man, she is uniquely ill-equipped to condemn white supremacy, the very system that has fueled her unlikely rise to power. Yet there she was Monday, weighing in on the horrific mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, tweeting about the “evil that must be destroyed” to a chorus of guffaws. Has she met her father?
Being unqualified has never stopped Ivanka before. She’s been floated for jobs ranging from U.N. ambassador to the head of the World Bank, despite the fact that she is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with the New York Attorney General’s Office seeking to ban her for one year from so much as sitting on the board of a charity, following “persistent illegal conduct” at the now defunct Trump Foundation. Her eponymous clothing line (also defunct) managed to get tossed out of Nordstrom, the friendliest, most customer service–oriented retailer in America. Her partner in a fine-jewelry line (also defunct) is reportedly caught up in a $100 million money-laundering scheme in Dubai.
Despite her abysmal track record, Ivanka continues to fail upward, the Peter Principle in blonde. Just last month, the internet was howling over a video clip showing her attempt to insert herself into a conversation with world leaders at the G-20 summit in Japan, leading to the trending hashtag #UnwantedIvanka. As one of her friends told Vanessa Grigoriadis of New York magazine and the new podcast Tabloid: The Making of Ivanka Trump, Ivanka “really has no idea she’s privileged. She genuinely thinks she’s earned everything she has.”
In February, President Donald Trump incorrectly credited Ivanka with creating “millions of jobs,” a claim that the Washington Post gave three out of four Pinocchios. The only jobs Ivanka could possibly have created are in the Chinese government’s trademark office, which has been busy greenlighting 39 of her applications—for products ranging from fashion gear to voting machines—over the course of the past year. (So much for Made in the USA.) So what does Ivanka’s ever-changing portfolio of government duties have to do with racism and self-awareness?
Like a grown-up Veruca Salt with a security clearance, Ivanka Trump wants the world, and she wants it now. She is the human embodiment of white privilege, reeking of complicity, as Saturday Night Live so aptly conveyed in a spoof of a fragrance ad. She’s so white that the racists who comprise a significant portion of her father’s “base” don’t seem to care that she converted to Judaism. Literally everything about Ivanka is white, including the cover of her poorly selling 2017 book, Women Who Work, containing dull observations and often misattributed quotes about gender equality. Her new dog, named Winter and hailed on Instagram as “the newest member of the Kushner family,” has sparkling blue eyes and fur as white as snow. Her voice, with its sleep-inducing ASMR inflections, sounds like white noise. Some have pointed out that she seems to adapt her eye color—from brown to blue, using colored contacts—when interacting with her father.
When she was appointed to a senior White House position, many hoped that Ivanka would act as a much-heralded “moderating influence,” tempering her father’s worst instincts and gently guiding him to do the right thing. After all, before setting up shop in the West Wing, she and her husband, Jared Kushner, were New York Democrats who ran with an elite East Coast crowd. But she’s been wildly ineffective at that too. “My father has never listened to me about—anything!” she is quoted as saying in Grigoriadis’s piece. If the president doesn’t take her advice about anything, then what exactly is she doing?
She’s providing cover, publicly positioning herself “as a more palatable simulacrum of her father,” as Emily Jane Fox wrote for Vanity Fair, while quietly pursuing her own ambitions. Following President Trump’s shocking statement that there were “very fine people on both sides” after a violent neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Ivanka defended him to economic adviser Gary Cohn, saying “he didn’t mean any of it,” and insisting her dad isn’t a racist, according to Vicky Ward’s book Kushner, Inc. (The White House dismissed Ward’s book.) Like her father, Ivanka is a gifted liar, going on the record to say her father had “no involvement” pushing through her and Jared’s security clearances, despite serious red flags from intelligence officials. A few weeks later, the New York Times confirmed that the president was, in fact, very much involved. She has cozied up to corrupt oligarchs in Azerbaijan, where the unopened Trump Tower Baku stands as a glittering monument to funny business. She praises oppressive, murderous regimes like Saudi Arabia and criticizes the American media, casting herself as a perpetual victim of a “vicious” press.
Despite her fuzzy mandate as an adviser focused on women’s-empowerment issues, Ivanka still hasn’t commented on her father’s tweet suggesting that four female members of Congress, all women of color, "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." When she was asked whether she believed any of the women who had accused President Trump of sexual assault, Ivanka said she didn’t believe any of them—and then told the reporter that it was “pretty inappropriate” to address the topic with her. Amid horrific reports about the conditions of migrant children at the border, she’s been largely silent, though reportedly asking privately, “Daddy, what are we doing about this?”
Unfortunately, Ivanka’s enormous sense of entitlement makes her the perfect stateswoman for our corrupt age. She has an ideal job for her skillset and personality: chief enabler. She smiles blandly, wears pretty dresses, offers platitudes about women’s empowerment, and plays diplomat like White House Barbie or a “frum Donatella Versace,” as Grigoriadis put it. And that’s exactly what makes her so dangerous. A recent poll showed that Ivanka had higher net favorability ratings than her father in swing states, meaning that, once again, she could be the “secret weapon,” the calm con artist, who helps her father win in 2020. She has even said she harbors ambitions to be the first female president. God help us.
As regular Americans struggle to keep from falling into society’s ever fraying safety net—thanks to her father’s policies—Ivanka just keeps rising to the level of her own incompetence, and her incompetence knows no bounds. The glass ceiling cannot hold her. If she really wanted to make a difference after last week’s horrific attacks, she could have done something. Instead of offering anodyne denunciations of white supremacy and blaming mental illness, she could have advocated for common-sense gun laws, like banning the types of semi-automatic assault rifles that were used in Dayton and El Paso. But she hasn’t. And she won’t.
Part of Ivanka’s mass delusion is that she’s a critical cog in the wheels of Democracy. Given her track record, why should anybody be interested in what she has to say about anything? The ultimate privilege, of course, is confidently assuming that people care.
