It's Not Too Late for Ivanka Trump to Save Herself
With Donald Trump’s campaign badly faltering after sexual assault allegations, dozens of bigoted comments from the candidate, and more than a year of mismanagement, it’s not The Donald himself who has the most to lose from an electoral loss - it’s his daughter, Ivanka. Which is why if there’s one message she should heed now, it’s this: Ivanka, you’re on a sinking ship. Let your father go down and save yourself.
When Donald Trump’s campaign kicked into full gear, I felt sorry for his eldest daughter. She was a successful businesswoman (with, of course, the significant benefit of being born rich). Her book and speaking tour did seem to be biting a little off of Sheryl Sandberg, but hey, at least she advocated for women in the workplace. She seemed like a nice, intelligent, competent person. She’s not her father, and it seemed to me that she must have been vaguely embarrassed by him. It would have been unfair to hold Ivanka accountable for her dad’s behavior and his proposed policies.
Until she started campaigning for him.
Ivanka spoke at the Republican National Convention on her father’s behalf. She appears in a campaign ad, titled “Motherhood,” which opens with the (condescending, sexist) line, “The most important job any woman can have is being a mother,” before showing Ivanka both working and playing with her children. She’s the voice of the ad, promising, “My father will change outdated labor laws, so that they support women and American families.” She goes on to promise that her dad will give working moms paid maternity leave and child tax credits. And she’s used her family’s moment in the political sun to hawk her wares - she tweeted out a link to the Ivanka Trump brand dress she wore on the convention stage, encouraging her followers to “Shop Ivanka’s look from her #RNC speech.”
Now that the Trump Train has badly derailed, Ivanka is hedging. Her brand is built on a kind of aspirational working woman’s life of which Ivanka is the model - chicly sheathed and high-heeled, manicured and blown-out, a baby on one hip and a stack of documents resting on the other, making it all look effortless. Her clothing line is priced for the young professional set who have graduated from both college and Forever21, but aren’t yet in a corner office and shopping at Barneys - dresses around $150, classic heels for $100. How inconvenient, then, that the exact woman Ivanka is targeting - young, college-educated, working the kind of job where you go into an office every day - is the same person most repulsed by and hostile to Ivanka’s father: Full-time working women under 35 prefer Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump by more than a 50-point margin.
This enormous gap seems to come from a combination of policy and personality. While Trump has never done particularly well among women (particularly the younger ones), a leaked video showing him bragging about sexual assault has further alienated women of all stripes. Many women have since come forward and said Trump’s boasts that he can “grab [women] by the pussy” and forcibly kiss them aren’t just talk; 11 women say Trump assaulted them. And Trump’s comments, made more horrific by actual assault allegations, may have particularly turned off the young women who grew up steeped in feminist critiques of rape culture and questioning the assumption that “boys will be boys.”
In a transparent attempt to have it both ways - campaign for her father while distancing herself from his misogyny-saturated campaign - Ivanka told the audience at the Fortune Most Powerful Women conference that “I’m not a surrogate. I’m a daughter.” As such, she said, “I don’t express my views on policy, with one exception” - affordable child care for working mothers. She says her father was “sincere in his apology” for his assault remarks, and that what was caught on video is “not language consistent with any conversation I’ve ever had with him, or any conversation I’ve ever overheard” - making one wonder where she’s been for the past decade, given that her father has called women pigs and dogs, and even laughed and gave the OK for Howard Stern to refer to Ivanka herself as a “piece of ass.” She insists her father is a feminist.
Some women are now boycotting Ivanka’s line. It’s a reasonable stance. Despite her insistence that she’s just a daughter, Ivanka is working to elect a man who has spent a lifetime disrespecting women and, despite promising maternity leave and a child care tax credit, would be a policy disaster. Even if we agree that his worst comments about women were before he ran for office, his worst comments about Mexicans and Muslims were after he tossed his hat in the ring, and are baked into his run. Nevertheless, Ivanka used his campaign to push not only her clothing line, but to promote her brand as an advocate for women. She tied the brand not just to the Trump name but to the Trump campaign. Now that her father is losing, it’s a bit facile for her to suggest she was just playing the role of the good daughter all along.
It’s not too late for Ivanka. Few expect the children of prominent people to disavow their parents entirely, and, despite her father’s toxicity, Ivanka is under no obligation to actively work against him. She could have stayed silent through the election and let her invisibility speak for itself, but that ship has sailed. If she wants to retake her own narrative now, she has to speak out - not against her father as a person, but against his politics. She could - and should - say that while she loves her dad and can attest to the fact that he was a good father whose best attributes don’t always shine through into the public eye, she disagrees with him on policy and his public behavior, and can no longer in good conscience support his run for office. Many Americans have loved ones we personally adore but would hate to see in positions of political power. Ivanka should bill herself as one of us.
Staking out her own ground will help Ivanka rehabilitate her image more effectively than playing the role of the dutiful daughter. Part of her persona, after all, is the ambitious, successful woman who advocates for herself in the office and at home. She undermines that when she shrugs off her real, clearly influential role in the campaign and claims instead she’s just a child obediently supporting her dad. Why should women take Ivanka’s advice on “rewriting the rules for success,” as her forthcoming book promises, if she’s an adult woman who can’t even stand up to her dad?
If Ivanka truly agrees with her father on policy and believes he is the best candidate for president, then she should stay the course (and frankly she’s earned whatever professional backlash she gets). But if she lovingly disagrees with him and is watching that filial loyalty increasingly damage her own career and image, then it’s tough to envy the position she’s in. But as any businesswoman as successful as Ivanka well knows, part of doing your job is making tough decisions. And as any mother knows, sometimes you have to draw firm boundaries instead of saying yes just because you love someone - whether the person you love is a small child or a man-size one.
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