Nobody’s buying Ivanka’s savior routine at this point
Maureen Dowd
It was Ivanka’s nightmare.
Sipping vodka under chandeliers in a cool private club on the Lower East Side, the New York elite — the very ones Ivanka’s father scorned at a rally a few days ago for looking down on him even though he has “a much better apartment” and is “smarter” and “richer” — were shaking their wellcoiffed heads over the fall of the first daughter.
Why had she stayed mute for so many days about the torment her father was inflicting on thousands of immigrant children?
“It’s really easy for someone whose sole job in the White House is women and children to issue a statement — even Melania did it,” Emily Jane Fox said in an interview after her new book, “Born Trump,” was celebrated by her editors at Vanity Fair on Tuesday night at the Ludlow House.
“It just shows how fake Ivanka is,” Fox continued. “She’s crafted this whole image that’s not her. And the real her is cooler, slightly more interesting. She curses like a sailor.
She partied a lot when she was younger. She flashed a hot dog vendor when she was in eighth grade. She chain-smoked. Which is so opposite of the image.
“What you’re seeing now is the unmasking.”
The twisted Trump family dynamic was on lurid display this past week, hitting a Marie Antoinette high point as the echoes of sobbing children snatched from parents fleeing violence collided with images of a whining, pampered child-president bragging about his crowd size and his bank account while callously using kids as hostages to get his wall.
The 36-year-old Ivanka has fallen far from the days when she tried to stage her father’s inaugural to echo Camelot, perhaps with dynastic presidential dreams herself. “She was infatuated with the Kennedys,” Fox said.
She tried to present her brand as luminous, caring and classy — a champion of women and children with a carefully curated image over the years on Instagram, in a blog and in books. Amid the dark hailstorm of her father, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, she sold herself as the sunny morning — the one who would temper her father’s retrogressive and sometimes wretched moves.
But Ivanka ran into splitscreen trouble with her gauzy and glam mommy-of-the-year Instagram posts during the refugee ban, the migrant crisis and the Palestinians dying at the Israeli border during her visit to Jerusalem.
Despite her stated desire to look out for children, Ivanka was never going to be able to control the ultimate wild child. An authentic jerk trumps an inauthentic brand ambassador.
The president told House Republicans the other day that his daughter had asked him, “Daddy, what are we doing about this?” noting that she was concerned about the heartbreaking images. But nobody is buying her blond savior routine anymore.
Ivanka backed up the president’s fake narrative that it was Congress’ fault. When Daddy ended the pitiless policy that he imposed, she congratulated him on Twitter for white knighting it and urged Congress to “find a lasting solution.”
The Trump family, of course, was seeing the problem as optics, not as a barbaric flouting of American values.
It makes sense. Donald and Ivanka are consumed with protecting their own brands. America’s? Not so much.