While her father struggles to deflect investigations into his close relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Ivanka Trump is—according to her own Instagram caption—“Feeling good 🩷.”
To prove the point this week, the first daughter, 43, shared multiple pics of herself in a princess pink corset and matching trousers with cutouts at the waist, created by Australian designer Alex Perry, who has also dressed Kim Kardashian. Ivanka’s expression is serious as she poses in profile, staring out a window, with a look that’s equally gauzy and gaudy.
In post after post on social media, Ivanka showcases her flowing blond Mar-a-Lago locks, long legs, toned midriff and ample chest. She swans in fancy British hotels, on gondolas in Venice and on Manhattan rooftops. Gone are the Davos power sheaths and blunt business bob from her time as White House senior adviser.
Instead, Ivanka has slipped into something a little more comfortable—the role of a hot trad wife.
A survey of her social media reveals that the first daughter is focusing on the three Fs: fashion, fitness, and family. Children may be starving in Sudan and Gaza, but Ivanka wants you to know that her three kids are having a blast—the good kind, not the kind that Ukrainian kids are experiencing from Russian drones.
Ivanka’s curated images come across as both out of time and out of touch. The same is true of the advice she shares. She recently reposted a marketing expert who insisted that the “secret weapon for life” is to stay calm, not complain, and “most of all, be steady.”
Given her father’s TACO tendencies, Ivanka’s post is either completely clueless or an epic troll.
Nothing unpleasant happens in Ivankaland. A week ago, when her father was in Scotland ranting about windmills and how he “never had the privilege” of going to Jeffrey Epstein’s island, Ivanka struck a pensive pose from what appeared to be the grand staircase of the elegant Raffles Hotel in London. With a poetic lilt that her father does not possess, Ivanka added the caption, “Evening pending.”
Evening… in this economy? Only the very wealthy can afford an evening.
Based on the lighting, settings and unnatural poses, Ivanka’s fashion photos appear to be shot by professionals. It’s model behavior but what is she selling? Maybe Ivanka gets the clothing free in exchange for promotion. If that’s the case, she’s meant to mark her posts as “branded content.” It’s more likely that she herself is the product, with thoughts to someday publishing a knockoff of her stepmother’s best-selling book Melania.
Or maybe these thirst traps are Ivanka’s attempts to flaunt her revenge body at scale. From bikinis to little black dresses with more cheeky cutouts, this mother of three wants the world to know that she has never looked hotter.
The message seems obvious: since she broke up with America, she is having the time of her life. The subtext seems obvious, too: “This is what you had… and this is what you’re missing.”
Ivanka’s turn from politics began in November 2022, when Donald Trump announced a third run for the White House. In response, Ivanka stated that she was stepping back from the campaign and choosing to “prioritize my young children and the private life we are creating as a family.”
But she isn’t that interested in keeping her “private life” private. At the start of July, Ivanka posted 20 photos with the caption: ”Bye, June ! 👋” The virtual scrapbook kicked off with her and husband Jared Kushner in a Venetian gondola on their way to celebrate Jeff Bezos’ public happy ending. It concluded with Trump and Kushner floating in a different gondola while wearing different outfits at the same wedding.
Ivanka wasn’t always a woman of leisure. During the first Trump presidency, she headed up the White House Office of Economic Initiatives and Entrepreneurship. Her qualifications: she was CEO of a high-end jewelry business and a mid-end fashion line which she juggled with—in her words—“a role leading The Trump Organization.”
But entrepreneurship is so 2020. Still, the decision not to work outside the home might surprise 2017 Ivanka, who literally wrote the book Women Who Work with the objective of inspiring women to “architect a life” of success. In the book’s introduction, she insisted: “The time to change the narrative around women and work once and for all is overdue; in fact, it’s become my life’s mission.”
Granted, “my life’s mission” sounds better than “my five-maybe-six-year mission.” And, of course, a woman is allowed to shift her priorities, but Ivanka did a fast one-eighty. Her businesses did a fast one-eighty, too. The jewelry and fashion companies went under within a year of Women Who Work’s publication. Even Ivanka’s flagship website, IvankaTrump.com, which launched in late 2014, shuttered in the summer of 2018.
On top of that, Ivanka is no longer listed on The Trump Organization website, although she has returned to work on real estate deals with her husband. The couple recently acquired an Albanian island which they plan to develop into a luxury resort.
Although Ivanka is open to visiting her father in the Oval Office, politics remain off limits. As she explained on the Him & Her Show podcast back in January, it’s “a very dark, negative business. And some people love, like, the gladiator aspect of it. You know, the fight. That was never me.”
But it was her. Ivanka shouldn’t be allowed to indulge in revisionist history and distance herself from Trumpism when she was integral to her father’s political success. Without his daughter’s loud support, Donald Trump might not have been able to overcome accusations of sexual harassment and assault from more than 20 women. Would the “grab ’em by the p---y” tape have been so readily dismissed if his poised and pretty daughter hadn’t assured America at the 2016 Republican National Convention, “Throughout my entire life, I have witnessed his empathy and generosity towards others, especially those who are suffering?”
In that same speech, Ivanka Trump insisted that she would fight alongside her father “for policies that allow women with children to thrive.” So where was she when his first administration separated more than 5,500 children, including infants, from their parents at the US-Mexican border? His current administration recently pushed through cutbacks in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) which will make it harder for children from low-income families to receive school meals.
The same day that Senate Republicans voted to approve these cuts, Ivanka took to Instagram. But instead of voicing her support for American children facing food scarcity, she posted a photo of one of her sons chowing down on pasta.
