After Donald Trump raved, meanderingly, that “both sides” were responsible for the racist violence in Charlottesville in which a woman was killed after protesting white supremacy, Ivanka Trump resumed her vacation.
In a Financial Times profile on the ineffectual First Daughter, political correspondent Courtney Weaver writes that after tweeting once in condemnation of the KKK demonstration, Ivanka and her slender, mouselike husband, Jared, left for Vermont for vacation, at which point Trump held the aforementioned press conference.
In Vermont, Kushner got on the phone and tried to mitigate the situation. Ivanka, meanwhile, attempted to do what she had come on vacation to do: tune out. She cracked open a book. She did not watch her father’s press conference as it happened. A few days later, she saw a short documentary that Vice News had made about the white nationalists behind the march. In one scene, a neo-Nazi organiser addresses Ivanka and her husband directly, making a leering comment about the hideousness of the president “[giving] his daughter to a Jew.”
For Ivanka, the documentary made Charlottesville hit home in a way that other White House controversies had not. “Seeing those images and hearing [Ivanka’s] name invoked later on obviously made it very personal,” someone familiar with her thinking told me. Still, she made no additional public comments.
Ivanka explains her silence, about this and other progressive causes to which she was once seen as sympathetic, as part of the long game.
“To voice dissent publicly would mean I’m not part of the team. When you’re part of a team, you’re part of a team,” she told FT. “That doesn’t mean everyone in the White House has homogeneous views—we don’t, and I think that’s good and healthy—but that doesn’t mean we’re publicly undermining [each other] and the administration.”
Isn’t there an old saying—like, “And then they came for me and I was okay because I was part of a team of amoral, opportunistic plutocrats?” I can’t remember, because I’ve just had a stroke!!!
Read the whole profile to learn exactly how little Ivanka is committed to beyond her own success.
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Still here. Still without airbrushing. Still with teeth.
