This Is Ivanka Trump, the Political Ad

By Prachi Gupta | October 29, 2018 | 3:40pm

News Politics

Republicans know what Democrats are still trying to deny: suburban white women are a loyal part of their base. On Monday, in an ad created in a lab by fusing Ivanka Trump’s International Women’s Day e-cards with a copy of Lean In and decades of redlining, Donald Trump’s campaign team urges white suburban women to vote Republican with empty messages of empowerment.

Except Donald Trump appears nowhere in the ad. Instead, we see a mother and her daughter in their green, tree-lined suburb. The 60-second commercial is called “We can’t go back,” seemingly usurped from civil rights slogans, “We won’t go back.” The white woman’s plight in the video is unemployment and a fear of diminishing opportunities for her white children. When she narrates: “There’s opportunity and more security to invest in the ones that matter,” I half expect her to say, “by which I mean, white people.” As the woman looks at her white daughter playing the violin, the narrator warns: “But this could all go away if we don’t remember what we came from.”