Standing up for daddy
to highlight her father’s empowerment credentials to Berlin conference on women.
At times like this, she must realise with mounting clarity the extent to which he is an international leper of a leader.
She reminded her openly scornful audience of the thousands of women who had worked with and for him.
Perhaps not so much the 15 or so who have accused him of sexual assault and sexual harassment. Liars all, he would have us add.
Nor those women among his campaign staff who toiled away alongside men were paid one-third more than them.
Nor those outside his own personal payroll, but working in the field of, say, women’s reproductive rights. Funding for which he has cut.
Ivanka has found her father personally empowering: ‘‘There was no difference for me and my brothers’’.
Well, perhaps that slight difference that emerged when, admiring her curvature, he said that if she wasn’t his daughter ‘‘perhaps I’d be dating her’’.
Trump’s most famous comment on women and power is that when you’re a star you can grab them by the genitals.
It’s not uncommon for family members of political leaders to struggle to defend, or even react appropriately to, the misdeeds of their loved ones.
There was something profoundly unimpressive about the way Hillary Clinton, when she was First Lady, tried to get folksy about her husband’s infidelities with such supposedly chucklesome lines as: ‘‘He’s a hard dog to keep on the porch’’.
For her part, Ivanka makes a weak case on behalf of her father. There are reasons for that and they reflect badly on him, rather than her.
She would be wiser to remember the extent to which, justifiably or not, her family wealth can work against her message.
As Arwa Mahdawi wrote in The Guardian, she is a wonderful example of what women can achieve with just perserverance, tenacity and millions of inherited dollars.
Ivanka Trump speaks of trying, herself, to be a force for ‘‘incremental positive change’’ for women in the US economy.
The single most useful thing she could do is work on her dad.