Dear Commons Community,
Maureen Dowd analyzes Ivanka’s Trump’s persona in her column this morning, and does not paint a pretty picture of the first daughter who will never “return to her perch as a Manhattan society darling.” Dowd excoriates Ivanka for not commenting on the horror of the immigrant crisis manufactured by her father President Trump and his deplorables in the White House. Dowd references Emily Jane Fox, author of a new book, “Born Trump,” who recently commented:
“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…”
“It just shows how fake Ivanka is,” Fox continued. “She’s crafted this whole image of herself that’s not actually her. And the real her is cooler, slightly more interesting, funnier. 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 she put out there.
“What you’re seeing now is the unmasking. She can’t control the narrative anymore because she’s so inauthentic. It has really come back to bite her.”
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, all while he callously used helpless kids as hostages to get his wall.
Melania bizarrely wore a jacket on her trip to a child detention center at the border that turned into the 2018 version of the George H.W. Bush “Message: I care” moment. Her $39 Zara jacket read, “I Really Don’t Care. Do U?” And yet again, it wasn’t clear whom she was trolling — most likely, as her husband tweeted, the press, which criticized her for wearing stilettos on the way to a good-will mission to a hurricane-ravaged Texas. Which means the first lady is like her husband in one unfortunate respect: In times of national turmoil, she makes it about herself.
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.”
How sadly wrong Ivanka was. She has become exposed as a charlatan, pretending to be classy, intelligent, and dignified but who wallows in the same “swamp” as her father.
Tony
