Outside the paywall:
It’s a stunning misread of this turbulent moment for one of the most privileged and powerful people in the nation to tell students about how important it is to listen to her, when she should be doing the listening.
It happened for the first time just about a week into Donald Trump’s first term into office. The new commander in chief signed an executive order banning individuals from seven majority-Muslim countries from traveling to the United States on a Friday evening. Families were immediately separated and people were detained at airports. By Saturday evening, college students feared for the future of their education. Parents worried that they wouldn’t be able to see their children. Lawyers rushed to file lawsuits over the policy. Americans, already heavy-hearted, boiled over with worry about what America under Trump would turn into. And Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and senior adviser, posted a photo of herself in a $4,990 metallic gown, tucked into her husband’s tuxedo-ed arm as they headed out to the annual Alfalfa Club dinner. The world was burning, it seemed, live, on television, and Ivanka was tuned into an entirely different channel.
She felt terrible, people around her told me at the time. She had been observing Shabbat all evening Friday into Saturday, and had been unaware of the controversy her father had created, they said.
The excuses and the remorse dwindled over time, though the incidents of how Ivanka ran on an entirely different track from the most controversial and offensive pieces of her father’s administration, of which she is a senior and central member, continued. Like when she went on a spring break ski trip when her father tried to repeal Obamacare, or on a couples trip to Vermont in the midst of the Charlottesville protests. Or when Ivanka would frequently post professionally edited videos of herself on trips overseas or to factories around the country while the president fanned flames over immigration, Russian interference, Joe Biden, impeachment, and so on and on and on. As the global pandemic gripped the nation and parents grappled with working from home without childcare or schools in session, along with economic uncertainty, unemployment rising, and the weight of explaining this all to cooped up children, President Trump played down the virus’s impact and Ivanka posted a years-old photo of her and her children leaning on throw pillows scattered across a floor, under sheets arranged as a makeshift tent. “Staying home today w/ kids?,” she tweeted. “Plan living room camp out! Throw a bedsheet over some taped together brooms. Plan a menu & ‘pack’ sandwiches, salads (S’mores optional) A fun activity that also brings family together for a meal!” A little less than two weeks later, she tweeted a video of herself, bare faced and stripped of the staged-ness of the tent photograph, urging Americans to follow shelter-in-place orders. “Those lucky enough to be in a position to stay at home, please, please do so,” she said into the camera. “Each and every one of us plays a role in slowing the spread.” Days later, she and her family ignored federal orders asking Americans to avoid discretionary travel, as they left Washington for another one of their family homes, on her father’s golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, to celebrate Passover.
Ivanka’s ability to operate on this otherworldly separate track—both from the president and from the everyday realities and rules that surround most Americans—was both an asset to the kind of power she cared about and a contrast from her father. She ignored the harsher realities of the administration she was part of by creating a distinct narrative that she could market to those who were open to buying it as a way to both aid her father and whatever role she would ultimately decide to take on once he leaves the White House. It is a kind of impulse control and compartmentalization that the elder Trump does not possess. Her father is temperamentally unable not to dwell on and rave about exactly what is on his mind or the public consciousness at that precise moment, even when it’s in his obvious political interest to do so.
Last Friday, with the nation in the midst of its worst unrest in decades, he sent out hundreds of tweets. On Tuesday, with his advisers, as Axios reported, pushing him to find a calming message of unity, he suggested in a tweet that the elderly activist who was pushed down by police in Buffalo and remains in a serious condition may have “fell harder than was pushed.”
Her dissociative ability played out again over the weekend. The controversy unfolded on Thursday, when Wichita State University Tech decided it would not air a speech that Ivanka had prerecorded for its virtual graduation ceremony on Saturday. The school made the decision after students and staff condemned the White House’s response to the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. Ivanka had been asked to deliver the address in February, and she recorded the address, which largely talked about coronavirus and did not address matters of race, before the protests began.
“In light of the social justice issues brought forth by George Floyd’s death, I understand and take responsibility that the timing of the announcement was insensitive,” Sheree Utash, the school’s president, wrote in a statement on Thursday, not long after Ivanka’s congratulatory address was announced. “The college stands with those who fight injustice and advocate for social equity, and we’re profoundly proud of the diversity and social change being brought forth by our students, alumni, faculty, and staff. In my heart, my highest priority has always been to support our students and our community, and we will do so on Saturday.” Ivanka decided to release the taped address on her own Twitter account, where in the days since Floyd’s murder, she has also tweeted to express sympathy to his family and all those hurting, as well as to promote her father’s economic agenda, a farming initiative, and to wish Vice President Mike Pence a happy birthday by posting a photo of the two of them waving together. “Our nation’s campuses should be bastions of free speech. Cancel culture and viewpoint discrimination are antithetical to academia,” she posted on Friday.
“Listening to one another is important now more than ever!” In the video itself, she called students “wartime graduates” and focused almost entirely on the global pandemic, giving them three pieces of advice that she’s found helpful, particularly as COVID-19 persisted: to replace handshakes with phone calls or kind thoughts, to make a resolution to either pick up new habits or get rid of destructive ones, and forge new paths as economic uncertainty rears. Toward the end, she told graduates, “I’ve found that my greatest personal growth has arisen from times of discomfort and uncertainty.”
Immediately, her remarks caught ire online, and the hashtag #ByeIvanka trended. Part of what hit a nerve was her blaming “cancel culture” as the reason why students would not want to hear from a member of the Trump administration on a day that’s supposed to be about them and their accomplishments. Firstly, what were diverse students from the middle of the country going to learn from Ivanka Trump, a white, rich White House-advising first daughter, about racial protests and police brutality? And secondly, you get “canceled” for a comment, not for a full presidential term. Students were not shutting her or her ideas out without hearing them from her or because they blindly hate her or her father, as she intimated. Her ideas are impossible to shut out, because she is one of the most powerful people in this country. They already knew how Ivanka responded to this moment, and that response was enough to understand where she stood.
And where she stood was so clear, because it was intentionally, internationally televised. She was part of a brain trust that had urged her father to hold a photo op outside of St. John’s church, across from the White House, last week. She had reportedly urged him to pose with a Bible—a Bible that she handed him from her now iconic bright white $1,540 Max Mara purse—for a media opportunity that required law enforcement officers to clear peaceful protesters from the area with riot gear and chemical irritants.
Students at WSU Tech had already listened to her, and they rejected it.
That is not cancel culture. That is the American political system at work. Ivanka didn’t address the movement, which will define this moment and a generation, in her speech. She had recorded it before the protests started.
Of course, she could have rerecorded it to address these ideas, but she put it out into the world as she’d originally recorded it, without any mention of the issue most pressing and sensitive at that moment. With a flag behind her, speaking of personal growth through difficulty in that well-modulated voice, she seemed to be in a completely different world.
Ivanka’s two-tracked-ness is, on one level, tactical. She has had to appear ignorant of the most egregious decisions her father has made in order to work in the areas she has wanted to work on, and she’s remained one of Trump’s longest-serving staffers by keeping mostly quiet if she has, in fact, disagreed with him. But after the protests of last week, ignorance may no longer be a viable approach. Those black squares that everyone posted last week, as small of a step as they were, were meant to connote that white allies were aware of their ignorance and wanted to show that they were listening, willing to open their eyes and minds and ears to learn what they did not know. Gestures are liable to be closely interrogated. The Bible stunt—as with many previous such maneuvers, that Trump pulled at Ivanka’s suggestion—was the height of the performative gesture without any kind of substantive change or deep reflection that protesters have been rallying against.
It’s at that moment that Ivanka, the most powerful and privileged among us, asked students struggling in this moment to listen to her. She told them that they could learn from her. That hearing her commencement congratulations could lead to their greatest moments of personal growth. Maybe she is more like her father than I thought.
-Emily Jane Fox
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