Where was Ivanka when Donald launched his campaign? Doing what Trumps do and looking after number one
Just a few years ago Ivanka Trump reportedly had her heart set on being the US’s first female president. Now, however, she seems desperate to stay as far away from politics as possible. The former first daughter has made it clear that while Daddy may be running for office again, she has no intention of joining him on the campaign trail. She has already selflessly served the public once, you see, and the public didn’t sufficiently appreciate her sacrifices. Now it’s time for a little self-care. “I love my father very much,” Ivanka said in a statement following Donald Trump’s official 2024 announcement. “This time around, I am choosing to prioritise my children and the private life we are creating as a family. I do not plan to be involved in politics.” To really hammer things home she was conspicuously absent when Trump, surrounded by family, made his official announcement from Mar-aLago last week. Even Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, was in attendance.
Rumour has it that Trump isn’t happy his eldest daughter has decided to keep her distance. According to the New York Post, Trump spent much of Tiffany Trump’s recent wedding unsuccessfully trying to convince Ivanka, who has always been a big hit among his base, to join him for his campaign announcement – which I’m sure thrilled Tiffany, who has always seemed like the most neglected child. Ivanka, however, stood firm.
And why wouldn’t she? Ivanka may be many things, but she is not an idiot. The 41-year-old “Girlboss” entrepreneur has always spent a lot of time worrying about her personal brand. Hitching your wagon to Donald Trump at the moment? Definitely not good for the personal brand. Trump doesn’t scream “winner” right now: even many of his old allies have turned against him. The Rupert-Murdoch-owned-New York Post, for example, has spent the last couple of weeks gleefully trolling the former president. Two days after the midterms, it called him “TRUMPTY DUMPTY” on its front page. Even more humiliating was the way it chose to cover Trump’s run for president – “Florida man makes announcement” was the strapline that ran at the very bottom of the front page.
At the moment, the consensus seems to be that Trump has lost his lustre and has zero chance of becoming president again. If Ivanka decides to side with her dad now she has nothing to gain. If she keeps her distance long enough, however, there’s a possibility she’ll be able to successfully rebrand herself, and all her liberal friends who turned their backs on her will invite her to dinner parties again. It’s a well-trodden path, after all: do a bunch of odious things when you’re in politics, get booted out of power, keep a low profile for a bit, then reinvent yourself by doing some high-profile charity work or appearing on a reality TV show. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ivanka’s PR people have been busy on the phone calling Volodymyr Zelenskiy (please, just one photo op!)and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (please, just a quick appearance on the podcast),in an attempt to ready her for a re-entrance to polite society.
Speaking of odious people who have reinvented themselves: Michael Cohen, who was formerly Trump’s fixer and who has now successfully rebranded himself as a guy who gets paid to dish dirt on the Trump family on liberal cable news channels, has an interesting theory about Ivanka’s selfexile from politics. Cohen told MSNBC on Saturday that he reckons Jared and Ivanka have been working with the FBI and were the ones who informed the authorities about classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Ivanka’s involvement with the FBI, Cohen says, is why she’s not helping her father.
I don’t know whether Ivanka is snitching to the FBI or not. But you know what I am very confident saying? Ivanka is busy doing what Trumps do best: looking out for number one. At the moment, that means staying away from her dad’s drama. If Trump’s fortunes change, however, and it looks like he might actually be on his way to the White House again, I have a feeling Ivanka might suddenly reassess her interest in politics.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
imposing a de facto loyalty oath. He has demanded engineers bring him examples of their own coding work to determine their value to the company – odd, given that the code is written collectively – and he has drafted 50 Tesla employees with no obvious experience with social media software or design to look at Twitter’s code.Recently, having got into a Twitter dispute with an engineer who knew more about the platform’s performance issues than he did, he fired him by tweet.
His online behaviour makes the company look terrible. Twitter’s factchecking service humiliatingly corrected him after he falsely tweeted that Twitter “drives a massive number of clicks” to other websites, being the “biggest click driver on the internet by far”.
However, nothing about Musk’s conduct suggests that the Twitter chaos is primarily about business. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Musk’s takeover was encouraged not just by the deposed executive Jack Dorsey but also by a network of rightwing libertarian billionaires close to Musk, including PayPal founder Peter Thiel. They argued that Twitter would be better run as a privately owned business.
One reason for the libertarians’ interest in Musk, says the WSJ, may have been his political evolution. Although he was once a centrist who backed Andrew Yang, he vehemently rejected the banning of Trump, believed that Twitter’s content moderation policies were being driven by politics, and claimed that Twitter was “far-left-biased”. (This is quite untrue: Twitter’s own internal research found that it amplified rightwing content.) He has become a purveyor of disinformation, for example on Covid-19, and the attack on Paul Pelosi (husband of House speaker Nancy Pelosi). As Twitter CEO, he used the platform to encourage voters to support the Republicans in the US midterm elections and, when they lost, spread a conspiracy theory that Sam Bankman-Fried laundered money for the Democrats. He is, though hardly a Trumper, cheerfully adjacent to the culture war politics of the American far right.
This would suggest that the billionaire takeover was, in part, a political move aimed at “disrupting” communications networks that the American right has repeatedly claimed are biased against it. Twitter, as a political entity, punches well above its business weight. In its early days, it thrived on its association with the Obama White House, and its presumed role in “Twitter revolutions” (a phrase minted by the state department). It was seen as a means of projecting US influence abroad. It didn’t cause those revolutions any more than it did the Trump presidency, or Black Lives Matter, but it was central to those political battles because of the way activists, politicians and reporters used the platform. Despite having many fewer users than Facebook or TikTok, it was and remains a powerful tool for shaping public discourse. Whoever controls it, whether or not they know what they’re doing, wields real political power.
Despite what Musk thinks, Twitter’s old board didn’t wield this power for the left, or even for liberals. Their content moderation policies evolved over time to placate advertisers and governments. They did not want to get rid of the various fascist microcelebrities and far-right disinfotainers, let alone the lucrative big beasts of the far right such as Trump and Alex Jones: they were forced to. Now, under Musk’s oneman rule, Twitter is being realigned. This is partly for Musk’s own recreation. He likes to “trigger the libs” and laps up the purveyors of incitement, disinformation and far-right propaganda on his platform. But it’s also to rebalance online information ecologies further in favour of the right.
The reinstatement of Trump’s account will not bring back the days when the former president was worth $2bn to Twitter in a single year. But it is indicative of where Musk wants to take the platform.
Richard Seymour is a political activist and author; his latest book is The Twittering Machine
to reports that senior figures in the government were mooting a “Swissstyle” arrangement with the EU.
The terminology is unhelpful. Even the Swiss don’t like having a Swissstyle relationship with the EU. It is a mess of multiple treaties. The core transaction is single market access, in exchange for which Switzerland pays into the European budget, while taking regulatory dictation and accepting free movement of people – the three unforgivable curses of submission to Brussels in Eurosceptic lore.
Sunak’s government wants something more nebulous that might ease friction in trade, but on terms that can’t be portrayed as a betrayal of Brexit. Keir Starmer wants the same thing, not from any ideological conviction but in the belief that the safest profile for Labour to have in any European debate is a low one, on the sidelines of Tory dysfunction.
That might be politically expedient, but it makes the opposition complicit in the most persistent and pernicious Brexit myth – denying the imbalance of power between Britain and a bloc of 27 countries on its doorstep.
Ignorance or wilful misrepresentation of the single market was the binding thread in a triple fallacy in the economic case for leaving the EU. First, Europe was dismissed as the dotard of the global economy, sclerotic and declining. The real prize was therefore trade deals with rising powers further afield. Second, Britain wouldn’t lose the benefits of the single market anyway, because EU businesses would lobby to retain access to UK consumers. Third, the cost of regulatory compliance with EU rules was greater than any benefit of membership.
Sunak cited all three in an article explaining his decision to vote leave in 2016. Europe’s share of the global economy was shrinking relative to other continents, he explained. “Canada, South Korea and South Africa all trade freely with Europe without surrendering their independence. As one of Europe’s largest customers, I see no sensible reason why we could not achieve a similar agreement.” Also, “excessive red tape” stifled every British business, even the ones that don’t export to the continent.
It is clear from those arguments that Sunak’s understanding of the single market was limited to the repertoire of dogmatic ditties that a thrusting young Tory learns to sing if he wants to be selected as the parliamentary candidate in a safe seat. Ministerial colleagues and officials in the Treasury say that his grasp of the issue was later enriched by the experience of serving as chancellor. By then, Brexit was a fait accompli.
As a notorious spreadsheet nerd, Sunak cannot ignore the data showing exclusion from EU markets as a drag on Britain’s economic performance. Since he and his chancellor used Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts as the basis for the fiscal consolidation announced in last week’s autumn statement, it is reasonable to surmise that both men accept also the OBR’s conclusion, published the same day, that Brexit has had “a significant adverse impact on UK trade”. Jeremy Hunt doesn’t admit the connection in public, preferring to blame Russia and the legacy of the pandemic for Britain’s economic woes. Those are factors, but the UK is also forecast by the OECD to have a longer and deeper recession than any other G7 country, none of which has elected to sabotage its own closest trading partnership.
Full-frontal acknowledgment of that fact is taboo, so it leaks out of government sideways. Hence last weekend’s rumour of a Swiss pivot in the direction of travel. But any hint of heresy stirs the inquisitorial zeal of Tory MPs, requiring a public vow of piety. “I believe in Brexit,” Sunak said on Monday, going on to insist that no alignment with EU rules would happen under his leadership. That is because “regulatory freedom” is the key that will unlock benefits of emancipation from Brussels that autonomy in trade deals has mysteriously failed to deliver.
This – the third fallacy – is the sturdiest pillar of Eurosceptic faith, and the one to which Sunak clings tightest. As a candidate for the leadership over the summer, he promised to review or repeal 2,400 legacy EU laws, carried over into British statute post-Brexit, and to do it within 100 days of taking office. (A video promoting the pledge showed Sunak feeding documents into a shredder to the strains of Ode to Joy.) It was a wildly implausible pledge, now sensibly abandoned. The only way to get through the task would be to dedicate most of Whitehall to sifting EU laws full-time, or to scrap them without even trying to understand what they do, and whether they might be useful or popular.
Liz Truss’s version of the same project is a bill already introduced to the Commons, setting a target of December 2023 and including a “sunset clause” to automatically vaporise any EU rules that haven’t been reviewed in time. (There is an option to extend the deadline.) Trade unions and NGOs fear incineration of social and environmental protections in an ideological wildfire. Businesses say they don’t need or want a great regulatory upheaval, which just adds to uncertainty and deters investment. There are hints that the government is heeding that complaint and preparing to dilute the bill.
Monomaniac obsession with purging the legacy of Brussels bureaucracy threatens to suffocate growth more than the regulation itself, much of which existed to harmonise rules so British goods could flow unimpeded around the continent. Replacing EU standards with British ones is neither a domestic liberation nor much of a magnet for international investment, since anyone trading in both jurisdictions would have to comply with both sets of rules. It hardly matters if the UK regime is notionally more competitive (or just plain lax). There is no escaping the gravitational field of the single market.
The prime minister’s pragmatic side might prompt him to postpone lighting the bonfire of red tape. But he dare not douse the dream. It is what keeps the Brexit believers warm in delusion when cold economic winds blow ever harder in their faces. That is more comfort than the rest of us have.
Nothing remains of the Brexit case that Sunak himself once made. He claims to believe still, although his tone sounds more pleading than passionate – an affirmation of faith by someone who cannot ignore evidence; a leader divorced from any good policy options, trying not to be a total stranger to reality while living apart from the facts.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
90s interest-rate crisis saying: “You’re worried about 5%? Come back to me when you’ve weathered 16% and spent 10 years frozen in negative equity.” It makes no discursive sense, since “Who had it worse?” is a dead end and just generates resentment. But it makes emotional sense: empathising in a real way is quite hard work. It generates all these feelings such as impotence and sadness, and I hate those. It’s so much easier if you start from a baseline of: “Well, that is a young person, and they are flakier than us.” Sometimes you need someone to sing it to you before you remember.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist