First Lady vs First Daughter Who is Trump’s real right-hand woman?
Review As Melania Trump shies away from her historic title, the president’s daughter, Ivanka, is unusually assuming control, says
Nothing is normal in the court of King Donald. The queen, Melania, reportedly doesn’t enjoy being queen. The princess, Ivanka, is taking her place. The arrangement is unusual but very Trump: a mix of melodrama and improvisation.
The president was forced to defend his wife at his infamous anti-press press conference last week. “I’ve known her a long time,” he said, “Melania’s going to be outstanding.” But according to magazine – an American version of – the First Lady feels “isolated and unprepared… secretly miserable”. Her stylist gossiped: “This life wasn’t her dream. It was Donald’s.” Melania has chosen to stay in New York City, where her 10-year-old son, Barron, still goes to school, rather than move to the White House. Her $100 million apartment on Fifth Avenue is probably much more luxurious. It’s reported that visitors are asked to wear medical shoe covers to avoid scuffing the marble floor.
Ivanka Trump, meanwhile, has no official title and yet is performing functions classically associated with the First Lady. Melania, who has taken an unusually long time to assemble her team, failed to accompany the wife of the Japanese prime minister on a visit to Washington; the visit of Benjamin Netanyahu was the first time she has officially hosted anyone. Her office has delayed the public tours of the White House until March. Her chosen cause is cyberbullying, yet it’s unclear what she’s going to do about it. Cynics say she could start by shutting down her husband’s Twitter account.
This is not what Americans expect of a First Lady. To be clear, the position has no constitutional definition, and Melania can be as visible or invisible as she wishes. Jane Pierce, the unstable wife of President Franklin Pierce, spent two years hidden in the White House writing letters to her dead son.
But that was the 1850s and in recent decades the demands of 24/7 media have forced the First Lady to emerge as a serious political operator. She is not just a campaigner for prettier highways or a redecorator of the White House.
Dr Lauren A Wright, author of describes contemporary first ladies as “team players” helping to make their husbands appear more “transparent, relatable… The popularity of the First Lady has been higher than that of the president in every year since 1993.” Seen primarily as a wife or mother – an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances – they can reach parts of the electorate that politicians can’t.
“The media allows them to control their own narrative,” explains Dr Wright. Michelle Obama, for instance, limited her appearances to awards ceremonies and chat shows – heavily scripted encounters in which no tricky questions were asked and she could talk about her pet projects, which sometimes complemented her husband’s agenda. The First Lady is the soft sell of administration policy.
The job can be unpleasant. Michelle Obama described it as like “living in a cave”. Nevertheless, she understood its importance and rose to the occasion. Melania, by contrast, seems reluctant.
The explanation probably lies in her unusual route to office. Most first ladies have done the job before, serving as the wife of a congressman or governor, and many of them came from patrician families steeped in public service. Melania Knauss is an immigrant from Slovenia who married an American real-estate mogul in 2005. She is also an intensely private person who questioned her husband’s decision to run. Talking to the Trump said that she had asked him: “We have such a great life. Why do you want to do this?” He replied: “I sort of have to do it, I think.”
The experience has been a downer. There have been insults and innuendo; she sued a newspaper for wrongly claiming she’d worked as an escort. These allegations were unequivocally denied and subsequently retracted. I witnessed the speech that Melania gave at the Republican convention that was plagiarised from another by Michelle Obama. The humiliation was palpable.
A candidate’s wife making a mistake is common, says Dr Wright: “Normally there will be a gaffe. Then she will become more rehearsed.” Instead, Melania retreated from the campaign trail. She took office with an approval rating of just 47 per cent.
Ivanka polled higher, at 49 per cent. She takes after her mother. Trump’s first wife, Ivana, was a business partner who helped to decorate and manage his properties. Daughter Ivanka was later turned into a star by her father’s reality TV show, – it created an image of a twentysomething whizz kid, a millennial mother who could combine babies with business. Books followed; a line of apparel and accessories, too. And her influence within the family’s political project can’t be overstated. Ivanka brought a dash of feminism to the convention. Ivanka helped pick Mike Pence as the running mate.
Now the First Daughter is operating almost as a part-time First Lady. She has escorted her father on official visits, held dinners with prominent persons, pushed her agenda of female empowerment and documented the whole thing on social media. That’s left her a hostage to fortune. Last week, she was photographed looking at the handsome prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, as if lost in thought. Online wags suggested that she was imagining them alone.
There’s precedent for Ivanka supplanting Melania. Jane Pierce’s duties were carried out by her aunt and best friend – and, as Dr Wright says: “It’s better to have someone who enjoys the role performing it … The American public can sniff out when someone is just pretending.”
The only downside for Ivanka is that she faces the same contagion of her personal brand that Melania has endured. The campaign provided free advertising for her line, Ivankamania. After speaking at the convention, she tweeted: “Shop Ivanka’s look from her #RNC speech.” The look, called the “Ivanka Trump Sleeveless Studded Sheath Dress”, went for just $138 and sold out on its website and at the department store Nordstrom. But now Nordstrom and other retailers have dropped the Ivanka brand, citing falling sales that might be thanks to a boycott. Mounting ranks of protesters are calling her a “fake feminist”. If she is the effective First Lady then she’s presiding over a shift in perceptions of that office. Everything associated with Trump is controversial – even a role hitherto defined by being utterly inoffensive.
Ultimately, this is what happens when you elect a businessman with no prior experience of office. The decades normally spent in careful preparation are missing. Mistakes are made, traditions undone. The campaigning never stops because Trump has no familiarity with governing. And the beleaguered president retreats into an inner circle of his family so small and personal that it even seems to exclude his wife – a woman who signed up to life with Donald, not with President Trump.