Under the Barbie doll exterior
A former friend of the Princess’s confirms that she’s as loathsome as she seems to us peasants.
Donals Trump’s daughter was obsessed with status and used to blame classmates for her infractions of school rules while projecting a refined persona, Lysandra Ohrstrom, who was a maid of honour at her wedding, claimed in Vanity Fair.
“She had the Trump radar for status, money, and power, and her dad’s instinct to throw others under the bus to save herself,” alleged Ohrstrom, who described Ivanka, 39, as her best friend growing up.
…
Beneath her polish, the future president’s daughter occasionally betrayed “rougher, more Trumpian edges”, she wrote. “Ivanka would regularly relay stories of teachers or observers who had commented that she had the most innate talent they had ever seen for whatever new pursuit she was taking up.”
We can tell. She radiates conceit and overconfidence.
Ohrstrom said she had written the article to show the true Ivanka, despite the risk of being branded a hypocritical, privileged elitist looking to capitalise on her first family connection.
“Although friends and family have warned that this article won’t be received the way I want, I think it’s past time that one of the many critics from Ivanka’s childhood comes forward – if only to ensure that she really will never recover from the decision to tie her fate to her father’s.”
I share that fierce hope that the princess never recovers.
Ivanka had spent her career projecting a more polished and intellectual version of the Trump brand, blending millennial feminism with a “mythical narrative” of business acumen, but this dissolved when she endorsed her father’s policies and judicial nominations, said Ohrstrom. “I’ve watched as Ivanka has laid waste to the image she worked so hard to build.”
And now it’s all over. I hope she’s miserable.
The article claims that Donald Trump paid close attention to the attractiveness of his daughter and her friends when they were teenagers. “He would barely acknowledge me except to ask if Ivanka was the prettiest or the most popular girl in our grade. Before I learned that the Trumps have no sense of humor about themselves, I remember answering honestly that she was probably in the top five. “Who’s prettier than Ivanka?” I recall him asking once with genuine confusion, before correctly naming the two girls I’d had in mind.”
And to top it all they won’t leave.
Yup, she’s as loathsome as the rest. As for Donald, it’s one thing for a middle aged man to be aware that his daughter and her friends are attractive. It’s quite another thing to have spent so much time mulling it over that you’ve ranked them and to then be discussing this with the teenage girls. Combined with other anecdotes and interviews, I think we can safely describe Donald’s attitudes toward women generally as bad and towards young women as screamingly problematic.
Isn’t that just a hair-raising detail?
I wonder if it’s coincidence that my novel for National Novel Writing Month includes a man sexually abusing his own daughter…maybe my subconscious was working on me.
I’m so sick of Trump. But it could be worse. I have a friend who is literally sick…diagnosed today with COVID. I blame him at least in part.
Oof,sorry to hear that.
iknklast, sorry to hear about your friend.
I do hope they make a full recovery. I’m looking forward to discussions of Trump passing into the field of history – the documentation of the massive harm he has done to the American experiment and how even in that he is not unique or even the prime motivator, but just an example of the sickness that exists within society and occasionally breaks out like a plague.
Ophelia, whenever I regret the baser elements of my nature*, I cheer myself up by looking at the well publicised behaviour of so many influential and supposedly great men, and saying, ‘well at least I’m not that much of an arsehole.’
* Hey, nobodies perfect all the time.
I take it that their expensive school wasn’t big on maths:
If she had two girls in mind prettier than Ivanka, wouldn’t that put the princess in the top three? Yes, technically the top three are in the top five by definition, but still.
That said, to treat his daughter’s school as little more than a beauty pageant (and likely as a potential source of future lovers to boot) with himself as sole judge is just skin-crawlingly skeevy. Sadly, Dirty Donnie is far from being the only man who thinks that way, though even most of them would no doubt shy away from actually discussing it with their daughters and daughters’ friends. It takes a real lack of a sense of shame to do that, I think, but then Donnie’s relationship with the princess has never seemed to be what one could call healthy or normal. It does make one wonder how he acted around them if the princess ever held sleepovers for her friends when he was home – and how many friends refused a second invite.
‘a more polished and intellectual version’ Intellectual?? I have probably not been paying close enough attention, but don’t recall a single thing about Ivanka that has anything to do with ‘intellectualism’. I don’t even know where she went to school, or if she has a degree (I suppose I’ll go look it up now).
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so out of her depth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanka_Trump#/media/File:Christine_Lagarde,_Angela_Merkel,_and_Ivanka_Trump_at_the_W20_Conference_Gala_Dinner.jpg
[Answer: BA in economics from Wharton, and literally zero ‘accomplishments’ that might even remotely be classified as ‘intellectual.’]
Gossipy “books” about privileged socialites have to be extraordinarily boring. Of course Ivanka is loyal to her father, of course she has succumbed to the trappings of privilege, of course they are all arrogant braggarts, of course they have said stupid, mean things, of course social status is the currency they worship. Lysandra betrays her own agenda, pretending to be concerned about “the risk of being branded” blah blah blah. How would Lysandra spend any time writing such a thing and not be seen as a spiteful opportunist.
Under the Barbie exterior is a hard, plastic interior.
If you like to read about social climbing, Vanity Fair had an article about who can bear being photographed with the Ivanka and husband.
““They’ll be welcomed back by people who know the Trumps are as close as they’ll get to power,” one former friend told me. “But everyone with self-respect, a career, morals, respect for democracy, or who doesn’t want their friends to shame them both in private and public will steer clear.” As another longtime former acquaintance explained, “They will probably be welcomed by real estate types and that group of Upper East Side and Palm Beach families that read about themselves in Quest magazine but don’t matter.”
“There will always be private dinner parties for them to attend, but they will be the entertainment,” this person continued. “And Ivanka is no Princess Margaret and Jared is not the Duke of Windsor regaling guests with amusing bon mots to a captive audience. No one wants to hear about Sarah Huckabee’s pies or Steve Bannon’s shirts.””
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/11/for-jared-and-ivanka-post-white-house-future-is-an-island-alone
Tom Wolfe would have made quite an entertaining if nasty novel about social and power climbing/falling. Anthony Trollope would have made a better one.
Re #6, I suspect “top five” implies “I can think of two off the top of my head, and I would probably be able to come up with a couple more if I gave it some thought”.
“Our chief weapon is surprise…surprise and fear…fear and surprise…. Our two weapons are fear and surprise…and ruthless efficiency…. Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency…and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope…. Our *four*…no… *Amongst* our weapons…”
Of course, regarding that top five and math, I sometimes give multiple choice questions (not many MC on any test) that ask the students which of the following are one of the two or one of the three [fill in parameter] here, and they can choose as many as they like. It is not unusual for students to choose as many as five or six when you have something that includes a set of only two or three.
Numbers confuse most people, and certainly teens are susceptible even if their school has a good math program (ours does). Most of my students are confused when they work percentages, come up with percentages totaling several hundred (or thousand) percent, and I explain that it cannot be more than 100.
So even if she only had two in mind, I don’t see that as anything speaking to her math abilities so much as just the fact that numbers cause people’s eyes to glaze over (for little reason that I can see, other than having been told from birth that math is hard).
I am reminded, too, of such phrasing as “no more than three to five”; so you mean “no more than five”, then? What’s the point of the “three”? It doesn’t add any information.
And also, “top five” doesn’t mean “exactly fifth place”. “Top five” means simply “in places one through five”. 3rd place is consistent with that.
All that to say I don’t think she said anything wrong.
I’m surprised she had any people in mind. I’m more surprised that DJT was so concerned about evaluating and ranking his daughter’s looks, as well as that of other young women.
Really? That didn’t surprise me at all. I think it’s perfectly consistent with the Trump we have seen over the past five- or should that be three to five? ;-) years.
“Surprised” was an error. I meant “bothered”. I agree it’s not surprising at all.
Sackbut, maybe I was being a tad pedantic with my criticism but I do tend to get picky when shallow, superficial people turn on others for their shallow superficiality. Lysandra Ohrstrom was clearly comfortable enough with Ivanka’s awfulness to remain a close friend into adulthood, close enough to be maid of honour at Ivanka’s wedding, so what changed? I suspect that like many in that class of people, the friendship was about as genuine as the gold in Trump Towers. Ohrstrom was a ‘friend for benefits’; being seen with the ‘right’ people, being around people who can open doors for her.
It’s the things that raised her profile in society that she valued, the friendship was a means to an end as Ohrstrom showed with her story. Now that the princess is being seen by the ‘right’ people to be tainted – perhaps irrevocably – and all of her social climbing has come to nought, leaving her back where she began, Ohrstrom is publically distancing herself. She’s done exactly what the Trumps do; as soon as a supposed friend is of no more use then the ties are severed and tales are told.
They’re all as bad as each other, and I cannot stand people like that.
Also, you said ‘I’m surprised she had any people in mind.’ I’m not. That’s how superficial people rate other people. I doubt that any of the Trump/Ohrstrom circle at school welcomed any girl who wasn’t another Barbie clone, and popularity would have been in direct relation to attractiveness. I’d go so far as to say that if asked, Orhstrum could have reeled off the top twenty in ranked order.
Actually, the fact that she named only two girls more attractive than Ivanka very strongly suggests that Ivanka was ‘officially’ rated by the group as third prettiest, so maybe I wasn’t being pedantic after all. :-))
Edith Wharton would have had fun with Ivanka as well, as she did with Undine Spragg.
What novelist would call their heroine “Ivanka Trump”?
For what it’s worth, I went to a school that was a small-town version of Chapin – small but rich town, that is. Princeton is an oddity in being both the home of a top-tier Ivy League university and a commuter town serving both New York and Philadelphia. It’s a weird mix of rich people and academics. Maybe Manhattan girls’ schools are massively different from others, and/or maybe things have changed enormously in the two centuries since I was there, but with that in mind…I can say it wasn’t the done thing there to be Ivanka-like. The richer girls didn’t stand out as such. The place was very academic. We were there to work, not to show off our mink socks.
It’s my impression that Chapin and its rivals are similarly academic. I kind of doubt that Ivanka got away with being as princessy and vapid there as she does in our house.
Well I can’t say anything about American schools, but here I’ve heard the schoolgirls are far more concerned with looks and social presentation than they were 20 or 30 years ago. It’s the Instagram generation.
Yes, I can believe that.
God it’s depressing.
AoS, I was the one being pedantic, my apologies. I had unpleasant memories of an ex-friend arguing ferociously with me that “a couple” meant exactly two, always, and “a few” meant exactly three, always.
You are right, I really shouldn’t be surprised she thought of a couple of people.
Sackbut, I’ve had a similar albeit less acrimonious runnimg argument with a friend who cannot understand that asking for a number between one and ten is not the same thing as asking for a number from one to ten. If I had a penny for each time I’ve explained that the former is two through to nine, the latter is one through to ten, I’d have close to a pound now.
I must put in my cents between one and three:
If Ivanka was the third-prettiest girl in the set, that puts her squarely in the middle of the top five.
As for students there to learn at your school, Ophelia, I am surprised to hear, and happy for you, that kids were there to learn oh so long ago. It must have been a special school.
Back between zero and one century ago, when I had had enough of my local public school, my mother took me on a tour of boarding schools, and I was disappointed to notice how little they thought of academics and how much they thought of sports. The guides wanted to show me their sporting facilities and fields, and when I asked to sit in on a class, they typically told me that wasn’t done. The admissions counselors seemed to care more about my size than my test scores.
I do recall, from the mists of time, that one could generally tell how wealthy a kid was by how poorly he or she dressed. The poor kids were careful to wear clean and new clothes, and the rich kids dressed in tatters.
As for the increased concern for looks and social presentation, yes, it is there, and unevenly distributed to boot. It seems to plague the girls more than the boys. The boys’ ferocious policing of each others’ attire seems limited to whether a particular type of shoe is “gay,” or whether a particular type or pattern of shirt is “gay.” So the boys end up identically slobbish. The girls have undergone a race to expose the bottom, and there’s an awful lot of bleach out there. I hear from mothers that girls lose nights sobbing over whether they have sufficient “thigh gap.” It’s no wonder some girls seek a way out of that competition, and succumb to the online grooming of the trans cult. They boys who succumb always remind me of the conviction of Margaret Mead in Hair:
It’s gotten worse for the kids, no doubt. My son tells me about how boys are afraid to speak in class because they’ll be excoriated for their -isms by the woke police.
It was a special school, and partly wasted on me. I was going to say almost entirely wasted, but then remembered the early grounding in French which means I can still read it pretty easily, and the English teachers who were not wasted on me, and the Latin which wasn’t as wasted on me as I thought at the time, and the history teachers…so in short I did get a lot out of it but not as much as I should have. But yeah. As I’ve mentioned before, we benefited, without realizing it, from the fact that brilliant women with PhDs couldn’t get hired at universities so they taught in schools like ours.
It was 100% white though. One.hundred.percent.