A Trump critic inadvertently reveals too much

‘Ivanka Trump was my best friend,” begins a Vanity Fair “tell-all” essay published this week by a disgruntled childhood friend of the president’s daughter. The author, Lysandra Ohrstrom, declares that after much soul-searching and doubt, she decided to write a takedown of her ex-friend “to ensure that she really will never recover from the decision to tie her fate to her father’s”. I think she intends the mission to sound noble. It comes across as vindictive.

The article must run to well over 3,000 words, but it never really lands the knockout blow its author imagines. Its list of Ivanka’s adolescent crimes ranges from the downright strange (“she never wore a Hallowe’en costume that wasn’t flattering”) to the ignoble (letting others take the rap for teenage pranks) and the unpleasant (commenting that an Arabic necklace pendant “screams terrorist”).

But none of this is shocking. The narrative is far more revealing about its author and her milieu than its subject.

Ms Ohrstrom laments how her old friend almost became classy, but was ultimately too “Trumpian”. While her father could only win over rich Jews, Ms Ohrstrom recalls, Ivanka could charm Wasps with “old money” because she used to read The Atlantic and was “polite, refined and fun”.

Sadly, she couldn’t shake off all her crass, nouveau habits, like a fondness for Mcdonald’s and a tendency Ivanka Trump has been criticised by Lysandra Ohrstrom for standing by her father

to swear. But her biggest crime in Ms Ohrstrom’s view, aside from not replying to her needy texts, is that Ivanka never at any point denounced her own father. For this sin, the writer takes comfort in the thought that Ms Trump will now have to spend her days being admired by the sorts of people who go to Trump rallies, like “Middle American housewives”, rather than being invited to Davos and the Met Ball.

At no point does it seem to occur to Ms Ohrstrom that, if Ms Trump did indeed decide to part ways with her old set, it might have had something to do with the sense of superiority that pervades this whole article. We are instead meant to see Ms Ohrstrom as the heroine, because she lives “a more understated life of wealth and privilege” as a Leftwing, pro-palestine, ex-war reporter. She, after all, has shown the courage to reveal publicly how much she agrees with everyone else in her elite Manhattan social circle.

Cynical readers might wonder why Ms Ohrstrom chose just the moment after Donald Trump lost, and not before, to publish this irrelevant tittle-tattle, but that would surely be an unfair take on her journalistic coup. How else could we possibly have discovered not only that Ivanka Trump is vain, boastful and callous, but that the social set in which she grew up is just as bad?