TRUMP FAMILY ETHOS
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Posted:Dec 19, 2019 12:32 pm
Last Updated:Jan 1, 2022 2:25 pm 3459 Views
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By Jia Tolentino, November 29, 20 New Yorker
Ivanka Trump’s 2009 self- book, “The Trump Card,” opens with an unlikely sentence: “ business, as in life, nothing is ever handed you.” Ivanka quickly adds caveats. “Yes, I’ve had the great good fortune be born into a life of wealth and privilege, with a name to match,” she writes. “Yes, I’ve had every opportunity, every advantage. And yes, I’ve chosen to build career on a foundation built by father and grandfather.” Still, she insists, she and her brothers didn’t attain their positions in their father’s company “by any kind of birthright or foregone conclusion.”
The cognitive dissonance on display here might prompt a reader who wishes preserve her sanity close the book immediately. But “The Trump Card” is instructive, if not as a manual for young women interested in “playing win in work and life,” as the subtitle advertises, then as a telling portrait of the Trump-family ethos, an attitude appears quite unkind even when presented by Ivanka, its best salesman, in the years preceding her father’s political rise.
Ivanka spends much of “The Trump Card” massaging the difficulty in her premise. What can a woman born with a silver spoon in her mouth teach people who use plastic forks eat salads at their desks? answer this question, Ivanka employs an audacious strategy: all of her advantages have actually been handicaps, she says. When she was appointed the board of directors Trump Entertainment Resorts, age twenty-five, the situation was “stacked all the way against .” Her last name, her looks, her youth, her privilege have all colluded make people underestimate her. And when she is overestimated—when people believe she has an “inherent understanding of all things related real estate and finance,” because her father is Donald Trump—this, too, “can be a big disadvantage.”
This messy argument comes with correspondingly messy metaphors. “We’ve all got our own baggage,” Ivanka writes, before explaining what she means by baggage: “Whatever we do, whatever our backgrounds, we’ve all had some kind of advantage on the way.” Ivanka compares herself to a runner positioned on the outside track, whose head start at the beginning is just an illusion. “In truth, the only advantage is psychological; each runner ends up covering the same ground by the end of the race.” Soon, though—by page nine—she has grown tired of pretending to be her reader’s equal. “Did I have an edge, getting started in business?” she asks. “No question. But get over it. And read on.”
Ivanka is now thirty-five, and she has evolved since the days of “The Trump Card.” She got married to Jared Kushner and gave birth to three ; while she is as blond and beautiful and patrician as ever, her personal aesthetic is now less socialite and more life-style-blogger--C.E.O. Through her “Women Who Work” brand, she has marketed herself as a cross between Gwyneth Paltrow and Sheryl Sandberg. (Her second book, “Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success,” is slated for March, 20.) Throughout her father’s unhinged Presidential campaign, she was easily his best surrogate; she is so poised she could soften her father’s persona just by standing near him. A of news items might have clung other women the same position—old lingerie photos in men’s magazines, peculiar hearsay having to do with comments about “mulatto cock”—never stuck. Ivanka is white, wealthy, and beautiful, and these attributes often pass as moral virtues. “Classiness” does, too, although it’s often just a kind of gracefulness deployed as a weapon or a shield.
Ivanka’s aesthetic differences from her father are often parsed as political differences, and she has made the most of such misperceptions. A friend of hers told Vogue in February, 20, the half of America hates Donald Trump loves Ivanka—“because she’s not him!” a November 2nd piece for BuzzFeed titled “Meet the Ivanka Voter,” Anne Helen Petersen identified a type of suburban white woman who supported Trump vague alignment with his . The Ivanka voter, she wrote, “does not think of herself as racist,” and “describes herself as ‘socially moderate.’ ” She shops at department stores carry the Ivanka Trump Collection, and she didn’t put a Trump sign on her lawn. The Ivanka voter wasn’t comfortable explicitly endorsing Trump’s rhetoric, but, then again, neither was Ivanka. And if Ivanka stood to benefit from a Trump Administration, then surely the Ivanka voter would benefit, too.
But Ivanka, like her father, is concerned with personal profit. Her alignment with him on this matter is the basis of “The Trump Card,” in which she writes, in one section, “Gosh, I sound like father, don’t I? But ’s what you get from this particular ’s .” The book is unmistakably aimed women—the title is written hot pink on the cover, which also features a blurb from Anna Wintour—but its few gender-specific sections aren’t pitched in the empowerment-heavy tone one might expect. In fact, they sound like Donald Trump. In a section about sexual harassment, Ivanka recounts the catcalls she got from construction workers growing up, then explains these men would catcall anyone “as long as she was chromosomally correct.” She advises “separating the real harassment from the benign behavior seems come with the territory.”
It’s been decades since a President has come into office with adult , and, least among modern Presidents, none of those had Ivanka’s public profile. ( 76, the twenty-six-year-old Chip Carter left an eight-thousand-dollar mobile home Georgia when he stumped for his father on the road.) Ivanka will likely continue trying project some distance from her father’s politics—recently, she separated her own social-media accounts from the accounts of the Ivanka Trump life-style brand. But the illusion will be imperfect: her jewelry company sent a press release about the bracelet Ivanka wore on “60 Minutes” after her father’s election; she was photographed meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister the week after the election; and she sat in on a with the Argentinian President. She will have, and presumably use, every opportunity enrich the family company, of which she remains an executive vice-president. This is the definition of corruption, but as laundered through Ivanka—who’s been tweeting about banana bread and posting photos of her —it won’t look so bad.
For anyone who still finds Ivanka to be a cipher, “The Trump Card” provides a surprisingly clear indication of her instincts, particularly when she discusses her childhood. She offers a story about being forced, by her , fly coach the south of France as the moment she realized she needed make her own . She has a sour sense of humor: she describes attending the élite prep school Choate Rosemary Hall as an opportunity “ look the world from a whole new angle. Even if it meant living in a building named for someone else!”
When Ivanka was a , she got frustrated because she couldn’t set up a lemonade stand Trump Tower. “We had no such advantages,” she writes, meaning, in this case, an ordinary home on an ordinary street. She and her brothers finally tried to lemonade their summer place Connecticut, but their neighborhood was so ritzy there was no foot traffic. “As good fortune would have it, we had a bodyguard summer,” she writes. They persuaded their bodyguard lemonade, and then their driver, and then the maids, who “dug deep for their spare change.” The lesson, she says, is the “made the best of a bad situation.” another early business story, she and her brothers made Native American arrowheads, buried them the woods, dug them up while playing with their friends, and sold the arrowheads their friends for five dollars each.
“The Trump Card” contains other illuminating surprises. Chapters are separated by short essays called “Bulletins from Blackberry,” featuring advice from Ivanka’s mentors. One of these, “On Being Positive,” is by Roger Ailes, who was recently ousted from Fox after being exposed as a serial sexual harasser. “If you listen to negative people, you’ll get a migraine,” Ailes writes. In a passage about technology and distraction, Ivanka writes her father “has no patience for . . . electronic gadgets.” She advises her readers behave on social media: “It’s only a matter of time before some political candidate or high-level appointee is bounced from contention because he or she has been ‘tagged’ in an inappropriate photo.” And then, in a line ’s somewhat shocking come across now: “ friend Andrew Cuomo, New York’s great attorney general, tells e- is the key prosecuting just about everyone these days.”
For , though, the book’s most revealing remark arrives after Ivanka recalls a boxing match in Atlantic City, in which Mike Tyson knocked Michael Spinks in ninety-one seconds. The crowd, having a lot of and expecting more action, grew angry. Donald Trump got into the ring to calm it down, impressing his seven-year-old . “ electric night Atlantic City made realize it isn’t enough win a transaction,” she writes, all these years later. “You have be able look the other guy the eye and know there is value the deal on the other end, too—unless, of course, you’re a onetime seller and just going for the gold.”
The book does not have an acknowledgments section
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IN DURANCE
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Posted:Nov 25, 2019 9:38 am
Last Updated:Jan 1, 2022 2:34 pm 3290 Views
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In Durance, by Ezra Pound -
I am homesick after mine own kind,
Oh I know there are folk about , friendly faces,
But I am homesick after mine own kind.
'These our pictures'! Oh well,
They reach not, touch some edge or ,
But reach not and all life's become
One flame, reaches not beyond
heart's own hearth,
Or hides among the ashes there for thee.
Thee'? Oh, 'Thee' is who cometh first
of mine own soul-kin,
For I am homesick after mine own kind
And ordinary people touch me not.
And I am homesick
After mine own kind know, and feel
And have some breath for beauty and the arts.
Aye, I am wistful for kin of the spirit
And have none about save the shadows
When come they, surging of power, 'DAEMON,'
'Quasi KALOUN.' S.T. says Beauty is most , a
'calling the soul'.
Well then, so they, the swirlers of the mist of soul,
They come mewards, bearing old magic.
But for all , I am homesick after mine own kind
And would meet kindred even as I am,
Flesh-shrouded bearing the secret.
'All they with strange sadness'
Have the earth mockery, and are kind all,
fellows, aye I know the glory
Of th' unbounded ones, but ye, hide
As I hide most the while
And burst forth the windows only whiles or whiles
For love, or hope or beauty or for power,
Then smoulder, with the lids half closed
And are untouched by echoes of the world.
Oh ye, fellows: with the seas between us some be,
Purple and sapphire for the silver shafts
Of sun and spray all shattered at the bows;
And some the hills hold off,
The little hills east of us, though here we
Have damp and plain be our shutting in.
And yet soul sings ‘Up!' and we are one.
Yea thou, and Thou, and THOU, and all kin
whom breast and arms are ever warm,
For I love ye as the wind the trees
holds their blossoms and their leaves cure
And calls the utmost singing from the boughs
without him, save the aspen, were as dumb
Still shade, and bade no whisper speak the birds of how
'Beyond, beyond, beyond, there lies . . .'
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