This morning, the news came out that a feisty German crowd hissed when Ivanka Trump tried to defend her father’s execrable at best record on women’s rights, and she was grilled with questions that she answered with platitudes.
That’s right: a German crowd booed American Jewish celeb Ivanka Trump for hypocrisy, and their sentiment was exactly on point, matters of decorum aside.
Oh, the irony.
But here’s the problem with Ivanka, and I think Kveller readers will agree with me on this one. Despite occasional mild amusement or horror, there’s never really anything new of substance here: the story is the same every single time.
In fact, as an editor, there’s a part of me that just wants to create a template for an Ivanka Trump article. it would go like this:
Headline: Ivanka Trump Says Thing, Is Hypocrite
Article: Ivanka Trump has said a Thing. She has talked about Women’s Empowerment and “Working Women” and used buzzwords like “Thrive” and “Perserverance” and “Regardless of Gender.”
Disturbingly, her father’s policies haven’t just been neutral towards women, they’ve been really damaging [Insert reference to his on-the-record comments about sexual assault, his attack on women’s healthcare from maternity coverage to abortion to international aid, or his cozying up to blatant, crude misogynists like Bill O’Reilly and Ted Nugent].
So by defending his record on women’s rights, declaring he can’t be a sexist because he’s nice to her, promoting her own milquetoast, brand-enhancing feminism-lite book when given a platform beside serious politicians because of nepotism, Ivanka is making the problem worse.
Therefore the Thing Ivanka has said, or done, or announced, isn’t very empowering at all!
In fact, she’s a hypocrite.
Ivanka, denounce your dad’s policies and we’ll take you seriously.
The thesis of the article is always the same and it always will be the same: “Ivanka, denounce your dad’s policies and we’ll take you seriously.” But Ivanka doesn’t actually want us to take her seriously. She doesn’t want to champion women, or mothers, or really anything beyond the shallowest end of the pool (#womenwhowork #fashion #empowerment #amazingjourney #gratitude #workforcedevelopment #shoes). She doesn’t want to make the world a better place (look at her problematic policy proposals.)
What Ivanka wants is to get richer.
So she’ll keep shilling and smiling and providing an excuse for racist white women to support her dad, and we bloggers will keep fulminating, and honestly, the whole thing is tedious as hell.
And that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? Because it wears us down, seeing this happen over and over again, and our outrage gets thinner, and harder to maintain.
And she’s still up there talking about how her dad is a #champion of #families who #thrive, and softening the edge of the Trump administration’s brutal policies that, as Nick Kristof noted in the Times this week, will leave thousands of women dead.
