Ivanka: my new soap opera fave

In chilly times it’s good to have a nightly soap opera that ducks and dives, swerves, backtracks, and astounds, so you don’t know whether to laugh or cry or cringe, and wring your soggy (common cold) hanky at every cliffhanger. You go to bed happy.

We like Killing Eve at our place, especially the psychopath’s wardrobe, but nothing equals The Trump Report, the daily catalogue of Donald’s doings, and those of his family.

There was a time when I worked on TV dramas, at the heart of which there’s the need for a conflict, usually between individuals, businesses or families. That’s not the case here, where the American president, his eldest daughter and her husband are joined in a love-fest no chainsaw could separate.

It’s a nepotism thing, a practice we usually associate with foreign dynasties and crime syndicates. Its roots are in paranoia, distrust of strangers and people laughing at you behind your back. As any hillbilly will tell you, kin are the only folk to trust.

Trump chucks his hired henchmen out of the cot regularly, but never Ivanka or Jared Kushner, whose power can only be guessed at from this distance. His wife is yanked out of seclusion whenever it seems apt to have a credible adult relationship with a woman, but Melania’s simmering dislike of him is one of the subtler delights of the show.

We see little of their young son, a pawn in their game, I like to think, shielded by his mother from too much association with a father he never looks at ease with. There are animals who eat their young, and he knows it.

There’s no budget limit on The Trump Show. Action happens all over the world, in which Ivanka and Jared, uniquely qualified by genetics and marriage, are given leading roles representing the USA. When you voted for Donald, you voted for the lot of them, as happens in family businesses.

There was a golden moment this past week in the Ivanka storyline. Her father has touted her as a possible future US president, which sells her short, I suspect. Why not Queen of the World? I study her as she evolves. Her long blonde hair, ironed immaculately straight, must come courtesy of a maid touring everywhere with her. Ivanka favours baby pink, and sometimes baby blue, and ballet slippers. She has a wide smile full of sparkling, luminous white death to rival Simon Cowell’s, and I’m keen to know if she ever wore braces because there’s a hint of an overbite. All of which qualifies her for high office.

The quality in her that I suspect Trump values more than any of this is the impression that she’s a hair-flicking bimbo, one of the cool girls at an elite school rather than a boring brainbox. And so the golden moment kicked in at the G20 summit, when Ivanka lined up centre front, in signature baby pink, for the group portrait of world leaders with her wide, toothy smile.

Later, video of her showed the plot point where she stepped, uninvited, into Britain’s Theresa May, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, and World Bank head Christine Lagarde’s conversation, to contribute an observation about something – the defence force? being male-dominated? – with her cheesiest try-hard smile, the sort of smile that made men, long ago, invent male chauvinism. The look on Lagarde’s face, one to savour, speaks many volumes.

But to be fair, Ivanka has told us she turned down Lagarde’s job, because it would look like nepotism. Such restraint, you’ll admit, is a quality seldom seen in a TV drama, but this one’s a breakthrough. I haven’t even started on Kushner.