By Maureen Dowd
Opinion Columnist
Image
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
well-coiffed 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? What will happen to her
if Michael Cohen flips? Did she know she was as out as an outcast Edith
Wharton character, doomed never to return to her privileged perch as a
Manhattan society darling?
“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 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.
Introducing
him at the 2016 Republican convention, Ivanka assured the crowd that he
had “empathy and generosity,” as well as “kindness and compassion.”
Even then, before all the horrors that would follow, it seemed like fan fiction. As a former top Trump administration official recently told me, “Donald Trump is the meanest man I’ve ever met.”
Ivanka’s
quest to have a brand that both complemented and contrasted with her
father was quixotic. After her panic when he left her mother for Marla
Maples — Ivanka worried she wouldn’t be able to keep the Trump name, and
called him constantly — she spent her life fashioning herself,
“Vertigo”-style, into his ideal.
But,
of course, no matter how hard Ivanka tried, Donald Trump thought she
could be even more ideal. When she was a model, Fox writes, her father
“suggested to friends that breast implants might help her along. One
friend recalled getting a frantic call from Maryanne Trump, Donald’s
sister, urging him to talk Donald out of letting her get plastic surgery
that young. ‘It’ll ruin her,’ she said into the phone. When his friend
confronted him about it, he denied that she was getting implants. At the
end of the call, he asked, ‘Why not, though?’”
In
some ways, Ivanka succeeded in being a Mini-Me. By 16, she trademarked
her name with the intention of using it for everything from bras to brow
liner to scrub masks. “There is a distinct genetic quality to Ivanka’s
preternatural ability to self-promote,” Fox writes. And certainly she
has cashed in on the Oval, minting money at the Trump International Hotel in Washington and other confluence-of-interest endeavors.
But
Ivanka ran into split-screen 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 the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. (“Daddy’s Little
Ghoul,” screamed The Daily News cover.)
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.
Her
father is the all-consuming maw, what Fox calls “an infinite pit of need
— a time-sucking vampire who fed off those around him to sustain his
own vanity.”
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 any
more.
Ivanka backed up the
president’s fake narrative that it was Congress’s fault. When Daddy
finally 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.
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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR11 of the New York edition with the headline: Ivanka and Vodka, on the Rocks. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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