No One Woman Should Have All That Power

Even by the standards of the Ridiculous Ivanka Trump Puff Piece Industrial Complex, this is ridiculous:

If you’ll forgive me for getting a little nitpicky, I’d say the one minor flaw in this assertion is that Ivanka Trump doesn’t have any power. And as Brian Beutler observes, the idea of Ivanka as a MODERATING INFLUENCE was always a fraud in any case:

Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and an adviser to him, has only made a few of her political views explicit. The policy objective most closely associated with her is subsidizing childcare costs for affluent-rather-than-poor families. She has also spearheaded a global fund to support female entrepreneurs that—goals aside—has all the trappings of a pay-to-play scam of the sort that her father pretended to be offended by on the campaign trail, and that would make the founders of the Clinton Foundation blush.

But we’re otherwise encouraged to infer Ivanka’s political beliefs from branding exercises like her new book, Women Who Work, or through anonymous White House leaks to friendly journalists.

So without putting anything on the line for the environment in any symbolic or material way, she reaps reputational benefits from reports claiming she “wants to make climate change … one of her signature issues.” Without publicly denouncing her father’s plan to undo Obama-era LGBT protections, anonymous sources credit her with changing his mind. And without committing outright to the cause of gender equality, she derives the assumption that someone who supports Women Who Work™ must also support readily available contraception, so that fewer women see their careers derailed by unplanned pregnancies.

To those who say her support for her father’s bigoted political career makes her “complicit” in his wrongdoing, and belies a transparent, image-oriented, profit-seeking ruse, Ivanka Trump pleads for leniency.

[…]

It may be Ivanka’s tragic circumstance that she was born to an ethically vacant parent, and that forging a bond with him required making herself in his self-image. But it is our tragic circumstance that the man in question is a moral obscenity, a mental flyspeck, a fraud, and president of the United States. In the context of his presidency, her commitment to their relationship requires her to piss down our backs and tell us it’s raining.

Even if I’m wrong about that, the best we can say about her brief tenure as a political operative is that she’s awful at it, the kind of source whom reporters would normally take pride in disdaining, except that she’s the president’s wealthy, glamorous daughter. But every political reporter will at some point find that such “well-placed” anonymous sources aren’t necessarily sources worth listening to. They lie, or they bullshit, or they think they know more than they do, or they self-deal one news clip at a time. Or some combination thereof. That’s Ivanka. If she weren’t her father’s daughter, he’d call her a loser. For the press to give her more credit than that is an abdication of their professional responsibility to the public.

TL; DR:

The Nanny in reruns is a more powerful Jewish woman than Ivanka Trump.

— emily nussbaum (@emilynussbaum) June 3, 2017

The clock’s ticking, I just count the hours.