Ivanka Trump wants you to know she's just like you. Before 7am, she's most often to be found at home in a dressing gown smeared with avocado puree. She has to schedule "working lunches" with her daughter Arabella (5) if she wants to see her.
Every day, three-year-old son Joseph gets a 20-minute slot to play cars on the floor. Husband Jared Kushner, himself a senior adviser to the president, gets a date night once a fortnight, even when she doesn’t feel like it. There are days when life is so hectic she doesn’t even get to meditate, for pity’s sake.
Aside from the $740 million (€678 million) fortune, the White House job, the jewellery and apparel lines, this 35-year-old heiress literally could not be more normal.
You don't have to have read this book or her previous one to recognise that Trump is not like you
Trump's latest salvo in the campaign to convince the world that she is, okay, if not exactly like you; more like a millennial mash-up of Gwyneth Paltrow, Sheryl Sandberg and Michelle Obama, comes in the form of a book, Women who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success, published this week.
She is a Trump, so it’s no surprise that her attempts to “debunk the superwoman myth” and show the world that she is just another harassed working mother, with cereal in her hair and muffin crumbs in her designer handbag, betray what might charitably be called a lack of self-awareness.
Rewriting the rules? That’s for sure. The book’s promise is that, if you fork out $14.56, you too can benefit from her “curated best thinking” to learn how to “thoughtfully architect” a “blueprint for a life” that is “both chaotic and amazing”.
Having a multimillion-dollar family business to give you a leg up would help too, of course.
Her life tips include things like developing a “passion framework”, writing a “bullet journal”, crafting a “family mission statement” and remembering that “Long term, we aren’t remembered for how late we stayed at the office [or] how many buildings we developed.”
The book’s big call to action is to tell us to abandon the hope of a work-life balance, and instead accept that life happens in phases and some phases “will just be crazy” – a timely notion, some might say, three months into her father’s presidency.
Like no one else
You don't have to have read this book or her previous one, The Trump Card: Playing to Win in Work and Life – in which she describes the awful time she was forced to fly coach to France as the moment she knew she'd have to make her own money – to recognise that Trump is not like you.
She’s not even like Gwyneth Paltrow or Sheryl Sandberg or Michelle Obama.
She doesn't need training, a salary, a title or a clear portfolio, just like she doesn't need to explain herself to anybody, other than her father
A multimillionaire heiress with no political experience, she now sits in on meetings with foreign dignitaries, and jets off to Europe for meetings with Angela Merkel. She enjoys national security clearance and an office at the White House.
According to officials quoted in the New York Times, she plans to start reviewing executive orders before they are published. Her attorney described her role to Politico as "serving as her father's eyes and ears", which sounds like a great job for someone living in Stalinist Russia.
To many observers – including, most recently, the German foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel – this looks a lot like nepotism. The White House insists the arrangement does not violate federal nepotism laws, since she gets no salary – a protest that serves only to underline just how far removed from anything that might remotely be defined as “normal” her life is. She doesn’t need training, a salary, a title or a clear portfolio, just like she doesn’t need to explain herself to anybody, other than her father.
Trump shrugs off any questions about her position with a slow blink of those Bambi eyes and a swish of that honey blonde hair. She appears to share her father’s conviction in each of their own tremendous intellectual capability.
Statements like “anyone who knows me knows I will outwork anyone” and “I’m an entrepreneur who is devoted to creating solutions to problems” are peppered throughout the book. On the subject of ethics, she has said airily that she would “voluntarily follow all ethics laws placed on government employees.”
As the acceptable face of the Trump empire – yet one who shares all of its delusions, sense of entitlement and conviction that the normal rules don’t apply – she’s potentially an even greater menace than her father.
With Donald Trump, at least, what you see is what you get. He comes across like a misogynist, narcissistic boor with a poor grasp of nuance or history, because he is a misogynist, narcissistic boor with a poor grasp of nuance or history.
Gateway Trump
Ivanka, though, is different. With her "fake feminism" and carefully curated Instagram feed, she's a gateway Trump: the palatable face of a thuggish movement, a woman who gave other women permission to vote for her father.
Her reinvention as a feminist was a ploy cooked up in the boardroom a few years ago to make her more relatable and flog more shoes, when her team spotted an opportunity to capitalise on the success of Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In movement. Women Who Work was the result.
Her husband Jared comes across in the book as a cross between Yoda and Gordon Gekko
During the campaign she was wheeled out to talk about her father’s support for women and even, hilariously, called him – a man who grabs ’em by the pussy and boasts that he has never done any childcare whatsoever – a feminist.
The New York Times published an intriguing insider account this week of what happened when that now-famous 'pussy' video emerged. Ivanka pushed for her father to issue a full apology, but he refused. Her "eyes welled with tears, her face reddened, and she hurried out in frustration". Publicly, however, she said nothing.
If she doesn't see an incompatibility between his unashamed misogyny and her role as a champion for working women, it may be because her ideology is what the Daily Show's Trevor Noah has dubbed "fake feminism": a feminism that talks a lot about equality, but sits comfortably in the shadows of a crude, aggressive hyper-masculinity. Writing about sexual harassment in The Trump Card, she says women must learn to figure out when "a hoot or holler is indeed a form of harassment and when it's merely a good-natured tease".
Surrogate First Lady
For all her talk of empowerment, she was happy to step back from her position within the family business and as chief executive of her own company, to take on a job without a title and become a kind of surrogate First Lady, while husband Jared – who comes across in the book as a cross between Yoda and Gordon Gekko, described as “one of the most positive, proactive, and solution-oriented people I’ve ever met” and “the calm, soothing voice of reason” – got the White House job with the title.
Post-election, her role as the antidote to her father’s more unhinged, reactionary outpourings is even more crucial. These days, she talks about being a “moderating force” and peppers her Instagram account with photos of black women posing with her book.
She says her focus is on gender inequality, and that she will create a federal paid leave programme for men and women, more affordable childcare and a global fund for female entrepreneurs. Whether her determination to “advocate for working women” evolves into more than flogging books full of advice about “drafting personal mission statements” remains to be seen.
"Complicit: The fragrance for the woman who could stop all of this but won't"
In reality, her most important role is as the acceptable face of the angry rednecks chanting “lock her up” at rallies; the coat of designer grey paint masking the rot. She is, if you like, a neo-Trump – the modern, media-friendly wing of the movement.
But for all that she adopts Hillary’s ideas as her own, for all her “thoughtfully architected” approachability, she is still, at heart, her father’s daughter, and his most trusted confidante. Whatever the difference in their approaches, they share at least two common goals: self-enrichment and self-aggrandisement.
Not everyone is buying it. As a recent Saturday Night Live sketch starring Scarlett Johansson as Ivanka Trump in a fake perfume ad put it, "Complicit: The fragrance for the woman who could stop all of this but won't."
Two weeks ago at a summit in Berlin, when Ivanka started to talk about all her father had done to support women, she was booed.
Several of the women quoted in her book have come out this week to say they did not feel comfortable being associated with her. The founder of Girls Who Code, Reshma Saujani, a daughter of refugees, tweeted at her: “Don’t use my story in #WomenWhoWork unless you are going to stop being #complicit.”
Jane Goodall said she hadn’t been aware her quote would be used, and pointed out that the Trump administration had put wildlife, national monuments, clean air and clean water in jeopardy.
Banker-turned-baker Umber Ahmad told the New York Times she now feels uneasy about being included in it, adding "the only test is whether she is able to achieve something other than personal gain".
As a Trump, Ivanka won’t be easily deterred by such scepticism. She’ll go on flogging necklaces and gabbing about “rewriting the rules for success” and “the importance of women having a seat at the table”.
But in her case, it was Daddy who put her there.
