This piece was originally published in Greg Olear’s newsletter Prevail.
There is something familiar about the woman in the Instagram photograph, but at first glance, she’s hard to place. She is tall, blond, perfectly coiffed, immaculately dressed, beautifully made up with cosmetics from a company she dutifully tags. Each picture is composed just so, to accentuate her best features: the long, swanlike neck; the well-toned midriff; the high, strong shoulders; the ramrod posture; and—this feels new—the gaunt cheeks and picture-perfect jawline. She’s not young—her three children, the oldest a teenager, are in many of the photos, so she has to be around 40—but nothing about her is old.
The backdrops are perfect, settings the Succession location scouts would thrill to: a lush Miami dreamscape; a glittering pool of pristine blue in some tony part of L.A.; the snowcapped slopes of Aspen; the uptown skyline from a balcony high atop some enviable Manhattan high-rise; the rocky crags of the Ibiza coastline; a sailboat-strewn harbor on some Greek island that calls to mind Homer, with all the dramatic irony that implies. And she gets around. There she is backstage at a Black Keys concert; keeping up with the Kardashians at a swank hotel opening; on a camel at the Great Pyramid.
The captions, when they appear, are well written, thoughtful, gracious, kind. There is nary of whiff of humblebragging. Gratitude oozes from every post, from every “story.” This is someone living the good life, who feels sincerely blessed to be living that good life. The woman on this Instagram page loves her friends (what few of them appear, what few of them remain). She loves her children. She loves, supports, is proud of her husband. Were it not for the unmistakable face of said husband—tanned, rested, chill, as attractive as it’s possible for him to look—we might not ever put it together that the woman in the pictures is Ivanka Trump. She appears to have transformed herself, much like Alina Habba has. She is different from the Ivanka who gazed wistfully at Justin Trudeau, who was her father’s overmatched ambassador at world events, who stood by his side as “Gloria” blasted in that tent on Jan. 6, 2021: leaner, happier, Goopier, more Paltrovian.
We might even forgive the New York Times for focusing on her appearance as she showed up to court last November for her family’s fraud trial, dressed “in a navy wool coat and navy pantsuit, a black leather tote clutched in one hand, tiny pearl studs in her ears and with her blond hair falling in soft waves around her face, the picture of gentle, pulled-together professionalism and good will.”
Ah, but the picture of gentle, pulled-together professionalism and good will is not gentle, pulled-together professionalism and good will. It’s a picture. That’s all it is.
Ivanka’s Instagram feed is an alternate reality. It’s what her life would have been like if her loutish old man had never been president, had lost in 2016, had never gone into politics, had never sold himself to the Russian mob, had dropped dead of a massive coronary on the set of Home Alone 2. This is a rose-colored fantasy world she’s trying so hard to make real. If she didn’t care about the public perception of her, why would she bother?
Ivanka Trump benefited enormously from her father being in office—by some estimates, as much as $640 million (not counting her husband’s $2 billion parting gift from MbS). And for the four horrific years of his presidency, she was uniquely positioned to stop Donald Trump and failed to do so. Worse, she remains uniquely positioned to stop Donald Trump and fails to do so.
Given that she was a registered Democrat in 2016, Ivanka could have elected not to participate in her father’s campaign. Instead, she and her husband lent their full-throated support. She introduced him when he formally announced his candidacy. She endorsed him. She made appearances on his behalf. She did radio ads for him. She gave the speech at the RNC just before his. She did not waiver in her support even after the Access Hollywood tape dropped.
After her father’s election, Ivanka was on the executive board of the Trump transition team, despite a dearth of relevant work experience. She approved of his decision to purge Chris Christie—who as the U.S. attorney for New Jersey had negotiated her father-in-law’s plea deal, sending him to prison for two years—from his role as chair of the transition team; indeed, she usurped him at one of the meetings, at which she offered the traitor Mike Flynn his pick of plum jobs because of his “amazing loyalty” to Trump (but not, needless to say, to the country).
When Trump began his presidency with the Muslim ban, she did nothing. When protestors gathered by the hundreds of thousands in D.C.—and millions around the world—at the Women’s March, she said nothing. During the entire confirmation process of the odious alleged sexual assailant Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, she sat on her hands. And she just watched, dumb, as her father politicized and monetized the pandemic, and as her ghoulish husband tried and failed to implement a viable pandemic response. (Although, to be fair, there is a photo on her Instagram page of her getting vaccinated, wearing a stylish mask.)
It was reportedly Ivanka’s idea to have the photo-op of her father, holding a Bible, in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Lafayette Square. Right after the cops tear-gassed Black Lives Matter protesters to clear them from the site she’d picked out, Ivanka personally transferred the prop Bible from her designer handbag to her father’s tiny hands.
And there was Ivanka on Jan. 6, in the tent with her father before his big speech urging his MAGA horde to march on the Capitol, standing down and standing by, while Laura Branigan sang truth bombs: Feel your innocence slipping away. Don’t believe it’s comin’ back soon.
Later, the House Jan. 6 committee, in its executive summary, would conclude that “Ivanka Trump was not as forthcoming as Cipollone and others about President Trump’s conduct,” showing “a lack of full recollection of certain issues.”
Ivanka is herself a Donald Trump victim, of course: all the times he said he wanted to “date” her. All his ravings about her hotness. All the photos of the two of them in inappropriate poses. The fact that, when she was 15, he routed her to a modeling agency run by one of his cronies, John Casablancas, a notorious Humbert Humbert. (The girl in those old modeling photos looks nothing like the woman in the Instagram feed—but she does bear a striking resemblance to her own teenage daughter.) It is difficult not to feel sympathy for her. The media certainly did—certainly does.
During the campaign and the transition and throughout Trump’s term in office, Ivanka presented herself, and her monstrous predator of a father, as a champion of women’s rights. In April of 2017, acting as her father’s surrogate, Ivanka flew to Berlin to participate in a women’s panel. As she touted her old man’s alleged feminist leanings—with a straight face!—the crowd giggled, hissed, and booed. The Germans recognized the bullshit right away, but for eight years and counting, the U.S. media has generally played along.
The ever-obsequious Chris Cillizza, her drooling admirer, took the Berliners to task for the Bronx cheer:
You can hate Donald Trump’s views on and treatment of women—and lots of people do! But, to expect Ivanka Trump to publicly condemn her father or his record on women’s issues is a bridge too far. It’s impossible for us to know what Ivanka Trump does (or doesn’t do) to influence her father’s views behind the scenes. And, because of that—and the fact that she is his daughter!—booing her for defending her dad is poor form.
Cillizza’s sycophancy was extreme, but his sympathetic portrayal of Ivanka was typical. And he was right about one thing: It was unrealistic to expect Ivanka to speak out against her horrible father. Not because she was his daughter, though—because she was his victim, and, ultimately, his willing and eager accomplice.
During the Trump years, plenty of families were torn apart because sons and daughters spoke out against MAGA moms and dads; because grandchildren estranged themselves from Trump-loving grandmothers and grandfathers; because uncles and cousins and brothers went Q-crazy. There are entire books written about this. There are documentaries. It’s a national tragedy. Why should Ivanka Trump be spared the familial pain felt by so many Americans? Because her wretched father was its author? Really? Boo fucking hoo.
How total is the hold her bestial pops has on her? Since her mother died, Ivanka has posted old photos of Ivana on her Instagram page: during the holidays, on Mother’s Day, on the anniversary of her death—each photo accompanied by a lovely written tribute. In real life, by contrast, she allowed her father to bury her mother on a fucking golf course, ostensibly for tax purposes. If that doesn’t rouse your fighting spirit, nothing will.
The tragedy in all of this is that Ivanka speaking out against Donald would have mattered. Ivanka speaking out would have had real power. Ivanka speaking out would have saved lives. Yes, there was a price she would have had to pay for speaking out—her father is a petty, vengeful fuck—but there is also a cost for staying silent. All those preventable COVID deaths brought on by Trump’s and Jared Kushner’s negligent mismanagement of the pandemic response? The officers who died on Jan. 6? All the pregnant women with inviable pregnancies who can’t get abortions? All the teenage rape victims in the red states? That blood is on her hands too. And no amount of the fancy beauty products she touts on her Instagram page will wash it off.
Looking again at that page, I wonder why it exists. Why she bothers. What need is being served here. Does the curated content represent how she really thinks and feels? Is it wish fulfillment—her own little Nirvan(k)a? A sort of penance, where by reading all the nasty comments under every post she assuages some of her guilt, as a zealot whips himself bloody to atone for sin? Does it help her live with herself somehow? Or is she just shallowly trying to get back into the good graces of the elite set she ran with before her father’s presidency ruined her cushy life? Is the whole enterprise just more cynical gaslighting?
“That was always her role in the family White House drama,” says that New York Times fashion piece, “the rational actor, there to talk some restraint into her more bombastic, action-man dad.”
Was that her role? Or was that, too, all for show?
