Ivanka Trump Wrote a Painfully Oblivious Book for Basically No One
Source: The New Yorker
Ivanka Trump Wrote a Painfully Oblivious Book for Basically No One
By Jia Tolentino 05:00 P.M
Ivanka Trump, a daughter of and aide to the man whose election drove women to mount the largest protest in American history, has published a new book. It’s about how women can best achieve personal satisfaction and professional success. This is an ill-advised endeavor, in theory. In practice, it is an even worse idea than it seems.
In the preface to the book—titled “Women Who Work,” after an “initiative” she launched, in 2014—Ivanka emphasizes that she wrote it before Donald Trump became President. She has since announced that she will donate the profits and refrain from publicizing the book “through a promotional tour or media appearances,” in the hopes of avoiding the appearance of ethical conflicts. (Instead, she has been shilling for the book on Twitter, where she has nearly four million followers.) Nonetheless, it is immediately obvious that circumstances have gotten entirely away from her. When Ivanka published her first book, “The Trump Card,” she was twenty-eight, and her air of oblivious diligence was a reasonable fit for her position as a hardworking heiress, the favored child of a celebrity tycoon. Now that her father is the President and she has assumed a post in the White House, it feels downright perverse to watch her devote breathless attention to the self-actualization processes at work in the lives of wealthy women while studiously ignoring the political forces that shape even those lives.
“Women Who Work” is mostly composed of artless jargon (“All women benefit immeasurably by architecting their lives”) and inspirational quotes you might find by Googling “inspirational quotes.” Her exhortations feel even emptier than usual in light of Trump’s stated policy goals. “We must fight for ourselves, for our rights not just as workers but also as women,” Ivanka writes, and, elsewhere, “Honor yourself by exploring the kind of life you deserve.” The imagined audience for the book is so rarefied that Ivanka confidently calls paying bills and buying groceries “not enormously impactful” to one’s daily productivity. Her nannies are mentioned twice, if you count the acknowledgments; no other household help is alluded to at all. On the book’s second-to-last page, she finally, briefly mentions the need for paid leave and affordable childcare.
The notion that Ivanka’s reticence on political issues conceals an innate goodness and a sort of strategic genius that can only be deployed behind the scenes has been crumbling since November. As I wrote last year in a piece about her previous book, Ivanka possesses a type of beauty that often passes as moral uprightness; she speaks carefully, making some portion of her audience believe that she must act carefully, too. But “Women Who Work” should put an end to the idea that Ivanka is particularly self-aware. In the book’s third paragraph, she assesses her father’s Presidential run by saying, “I have grown tremendously as a person.” Later, she laments not “treating myself to a massage or making much time for self-care” during the campaign. She warns the reader of the dangers of one’s inner circle turning into an echo chamber.
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Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/ivanka-trump-wrote-a-painfully-oblivious-book-for-basically-no-one
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