Way out of her depth

Ivanka Trump is in Berlin to participate in an international summit on women’s entrepreneurship, just as if she were an important and knowledgeable person, as opposed to being a crass fashion marketer who is the daughter of the most incompetent president in US history.

She shouldn’t be there. She shouldn’t be in the administration and she shouldn’t be at this summit. She has no relevant qualifications, and she helps to enable her loathsome destructive father. She uses her father’s position to market her mediocre derivative fashion objects. She’s sleazy and corrupt as well as ignorant. She shouldn’t be there.

But on her first international trip as an official representative of the United States, the first daughter was put on the spot about her father’s attitudes toward women, booed and hissed at by the crowd, and grilled by the moderator about what, exactly, her role is in President Donald Trump’s administration.

“You’re the first daughter of the United States, and you’re also an assistant to the president,” said the moderator, WirtschaftsWoche editor-in-chief Miriam Meckel. “The German audience is not that familiar with the concept of a first daughter. I’d like to ask you, what is your role, and who are you representing, your father as president of the United States, the American people, or your business?”

We’re just as unfamiliar. “First daughter” isn’t a thing. Johnson didn’t make his daughters part of his administration. Bush junior didn’t make his daughters part of his administration. There’s a rule against nepotism in the White House which Trump is ignoring.

“Certainly not the latter,” Trump said. “I’m rather unfamiliar with this role as well. … It has been a little under 100 days, and it has just been a remarkable and incredible journey.”

She’s lying about “not the latter.” She’s been promoting her business herself, and Trump and his people have been promoting it for her. She owns shares in that hotel down the street from the White House. She’s just lying to deny that.

And yes, she’s unfamiliar with the “role,” and that’s why she shouldn’t be in it. She has no relevant education or experience.

She did not define what her new role as a senior White House official entailed but said she cares “very much about empowering women in the workplace” and defined her goal as enacting “incremental positive change. That is my goal. This is very early for me; I’m listening, learning.”

Right, and she also hopes to instrumentalize the outputs and operationalize the motivizors. In other words she has no ideas whatever and is just blathering. She shouldn’t be there. It’s “early” for her because she shouldn’t be there. A presidential administration shouldn’t be high school for top officials. She could be an intern if she weren’t a relative of the president, but she certainly could not be a top official with an office in the West Wing. She shouldn’t be there.

Trump, who was deeply involved with her father’s campaign and has been instrumental in his administration in the first three months in office, positioned herself as someone who is still in humbling listening-tour mode.

That’s no good. That’s all wrong. The job she has is not one for an apprentice. Top jobs in government are not supposed to be doled out to novices for on the job training. They’re supposed to go to experienced educated people who don’t need beginner’s lessons.

But she was booed and hissed at by the majority-women audience at the conference when she lauded her father for supporting paid-leave policies. “I’m very proud of my father’s advocacy,” she said, calling him “a tremendous champion of supporting families and enabling them to thrive.”

Yeah, fuck that. That’s the pussy-grabber she’s praising there. Fuck that. She shouldn’t be there.

Meckel, the moderator, pushed her to address the vocal disapproval from the audience.

“You hear the reaction from the audience,” she said. “I need to address one more point — some attitudes toward women your father has displayed might leave one questioning whether he’s such an empowerer for women.”

The pussy-grabber attitude? The attitude to Elizabeth Warren? The attitude to Hillary Clinton? The attitude to Alicia Machado? To name just a few of the many? So yeah, fuck off, Ivanka. You’re enabling a misogynist sexist bullying shit.

“I’ve certainly heard the criticism from the media, that’s been perpetuated,” she said, drawing laughs from the audience.

It’s on Daddy’s twitter feed, Ivanka. “The media” didn’t put it there.

And despite being invited to attend the panel by Merkel in her role as a senior White House official, she defended her father from her vantage point of loyal daughter — a crouch familiar from when she was confronted by uncomfortable questions about her father on the campaign.

“As a daughter, I can speak on a very personal level,” Ivanka Trump said. “I grew up in a house where there was no barrier to what I could accomplish beyond my own perseverance and tenacity. That’s not an easy thing to do; he provided that for us.”

That doesn’t matter. We don’t care. He was comparatively decent to his daughter; duly noted, but that makes no difference whatsoever to how he treats women in general. It’s staggeringly narcissistic to try to tell us it does.

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