The good news that “76 percent of Americans now say that racial and ethnic discrimination is a big problem in the United States,” according to a Monmouth poll, is bad news for Donald Trump’s adult spawn who shot to prominence on daddy’s racist lie that the first Black president was born in Kenya.
This sea change in the moral universe—with a majority of Americans now saying that police are more likely to use excessive force with a Black person than a white one, up from just one-third four years ago—leaves the little Trumps on a sticky wicket. They have successfully ridden their father’s enormous red-tie-tails to a place of power in the Republican party he’s remade in his bloated image.
Now that the country is voicing its disapproval and as Trump reportedly has baby-snatching racist Stephen Miller preparing a speech on “race and unity,” the question looms: What happens to these brats if their dad isn’t running the country next year, but is tweeting furiously about the people trying to lock him up?
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As the president tweets about how a 75-year-old protester shoved to the ground by Buffalo police and now in critical condition was an antifa super secret agent, that question is only becoming more immediate and urgent for Ivanka, who’s long been the “socially acceptable” Trump kid.
She’s the one who doesn’t say the racist stuff out loud. She's the one who talks about “inclusion” and “diversity.” She is also the one who reportedly cooked up the moronic idea of daddy walking over to the church and holding up a bible to show “strength,” or at least an ability to walk. Ivanka is obsessed with optics, and while she may not look like the enabler of her father’s horrendous policies, she often attempts to give them a respectable flourish.
Like most women in Trumpworld, Ivanka doesn’t have much agency; she’s largely decorative. She was the one who carried in her $1,540 MaxMara bag the bible (“family bible” the president was asked; “a bible,” he replied) that daddy held up on his Monday stroll to church last week, or at least to stand outside it after the protesters had been beaten and tear-gassed away. She also ran sweatshops in her previous incarnation but her brand has always been this weird McKinsey double-speak faux feminism.
After a week of the most important and historic worldwide anti-racism protests of my lifetime, Wichita State University Tech canceled Ivanka’s commencement speech. Could it have been her father’s “When the looting starts the shooting starts” tweet? Could it have been her father’s long history of racism? Or was she canceled because she had no business giving the address in the first place? It’s impossible to know.
The school released a statement: “In light of the social justice issues brought forth by George Floyd’s death, I understand and take responsibility that the timing of the announcement was insensitive,” WSU’s president said. “I’m sorry that was never the intent, and I want you to know I have heard you and we are responding.”
Ivanka blamed “cancel culture,” and since Trump children have no bone spurs when it comes to culture wars, she jumped right in dressed like an Eva Peron with a smart updo and large “statement earrings.” Of course, since it was Ivanka the earrings were really the only statement. Ivanka said of her canceling, “Our nation’s campuses should be bastions of free speech. Cancel culture and viewpoint discrimination are antithetical to academia. Listening to one another is important now more than ever.” She then had The Hill release a smattering of her address, “I’ve found that my greatest personal growth has arisen from times of discomfort and uncertainty.” Many, many people found it completely tone deaf and the hashtag #ByeIvanka trended.
As American streets are filled with people begging the police not to murder unarmed Black Americans, the president’s daughter felt the need to share how she deals with imaginary oppression, or, as her dad calls it, the invisible enemy.
Then on Monday, her husband Jared Kushner held a law enforcement round table where he announced that “the law enforcement community heard the cries from the community, saw the injustices in the system that needed to be fixed and they responded by coming together to fix it.” In typical Jared fashion he was a bit light on any actual accomplishments and by light, I mean, he solved this like he’s achieved peace in the Middle East.
As for failsons Junior and Eric, they’ve been trying to lay low since Junior shared a meme that called Biden a pedophile and Eric called the coronavirus a Democratic hoax which will be gone “magically” by November. (Maybe he was thinking about his dad’s tweets about how Ebola and Obama were going to kill us all in 2014, or the caravan coming for America in 2018, before those threats “magically” went away after the election.)
But Junior was back in the news yesterday when we learned that his trip to hunt semi-endangered Mongolian sheep cost us taxpayers $76,859.36 in Secret Service protection. And Junior is still tweeting his outrage at the media and Joe Biden. At least the boys still have the weird mobbed-up family real estate business to come back to.
Back to Javanka, the couple face a very visible enemy if they retreat back to Manhattan, where members of the high society they left behind to make America whatever the fuck this is again are finally speaking up about their old friends. Not even Instagram is safe now, despite Mark Zuckerburg’s best efforts, as editor and actress Tavi Gevinson wrote Karlie Kloss, Ivanka’s sister-in-law, that Karlie makes “a show of championing girls’ coding and other causes while only politely disowning your family in public.”
If the alt-right-adjacent princess of the kingdom of tone-deaf really is canceled after November, she’ll have plenty of time for the “greatest personal growth.”
