CAN IVANKA TRUMP HELP? DOES SHE EVEN WANT TO?

Ivanka, Ivanka, Ivanka. Fifty days into the flailing presidency of Donald Trump, the nation turns its anxious eyes to the First Daughter.

To those alarmed by this impulsive president, Ivanka Trump is the great hope. On climate change, abortion, health care, family paid leave, samesex rights and other issues that a conservative administration might ignore, misread or mismanage, she is hailed as a voice of reason.

She is the moderate among the radicals, Jacobins, Leninists and others who deny global warming, embrace white nationalism, distrust Muslims, see “carnage” and conspiracy everywhere and want to blow up the federal government — and Iran and North Korea, too.

It’s hard being Ivanka Trump: the president’s favourite child, wife of a senior presidential counsellor, chatelaine of Pennsylvania Avenue, avatar of style, eminence blond.

Leave it to the historical plaque in front of her barricaded home at 2449 Tracy Place NW. Set in the hollow of a former fire call box, an artistic rendering recalls “the women of influence” who have lived nearby: Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, Eleanor Roosevelt, Edith Galt Wilson, Shirley Temple Black, Sandra Day O’Connor.

Now the depth of Ivanka’s influence is the question here. To a president of no fixed ideological address, access and affection are power. Ivanka has both.

Advisers come and go. The maniacal Mike Flynn is gone; the fact-free Kellyanne Conway and the dissembling Sean Spicer may be next.

Ivanka is forever. Nepotism does that. As Bill Clinton could not fire Hillary, Donald cannot fire Ivanka.

You know you matter when Saturday Night Live makes you its latest target. “Every man knows her name,” intoned the moderator last week. “Every woman knows her face.”

As the emblem of a perfume called “Complicit,” the SNL portrayal of Ivanka is devastating. When she looks in the mirror, she sees her pouting father applying lipstick.

The point is that first daughter turns a blind eye to her father’s demagoguery, nativism, racism and misogyny. “Complicit,” it says. “The fragrance for the woman who could stop all this … but won’t.”

To the resistance, however, she is a collaborator — fated to have her clothes torn and her hair shorn by vengeful mob of partisans on the streets of Washington the day after Trump is toppled, as if this were Petain’s France.

So, is she complicit? Or can she thwart her father’s harshest impulses and blunt his worst policies?

Does she want to? Unlike her husband, Jared Kushner, she has no office in the West Wing. It is not clear what she wants out of her father, other than to sell her eponymous line of jewelry and clothing.

This is a woman of beauty and grace who has led a life of privilege.

Compassion? There isn’t much sign of it beyond innocuous tweets on women and children. She is an orthodox Jew who tolerated her father’s coded use of prejudicial language in the campaign and his tepid response to growing anti-Semitism in the United States.

Empathy? Watch her during Trump’s recent speech to Congress, seated beside Carryn Owens, widow of a soldier killed in a raid in Yemen in January.

For an agonizing three minutes and 56 seconds, he exploits Owens, defending the operation, saluting the length of the applause.

An aloof Ivanka eyes the sobbing widow stonily. Beyond touching her once or twice, Ivanka does not cry, hug or hold her.

How un-American.

And yet Lady Ivanka is seen as the country’s big-hearted saviour. The Canadian government thinks that charming her can persuade her father to soften his opposition to the climate change treaty.

It’s why we proposed the bilateral council of women entrepreneurs and shrewdly put her in charge in that splashy show at the White House when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited.

Here’s an early test for Ivanka: let’s see if she can save Planned Parenthood from Republicans who want to defund it because they associate it with abortion.

Perhaps she will. Perhaps she won’t.

If she is a woman of influence, there is no scent of it yet.