Vol. 183: Sympathy for Ivanka

What she shares with Graham Platner

Admit it: Don’t you just love to hate Ivanka Trump?

“Trump’s favorite child, Ivanka,” Virginia Heffernan hyperventilated in the Los Angeles Times in 2018, “holds an indeterminate public-facing position in the White House— or in real estate, or maybe fashion…. It’s impossible to keep track of all the gangsters Ivanka has palled around with. But what’s truly damning are the shady real-estate projects she has made rise and go forth.”

Frank Bruni said something similar in the New York Times three years ago: Ivanka, he wrote, has “a special talent, a preternatural discipline, for pausing at every pivotal crossroads and making a coldblooded, single-minded assessment: How do I navigate this to maximum advantage for me?”

Well, yes. It’s easy to despise this woman with her striking looks, voluptuous body, and extensive connections whose every material need seems to have been handed to her on a silver platter. Despite her lack of political experience, Ivanka at age 35 became an unofficial advisor in her father’s first presidential administration. Two months later, she became an official paid employee in his administration.

“She traipsed after him to Washington,” Bruni noted. “She traipsed after him to meetings with European leaders. She even traipsed after him to the demilitarized zone.” When Ivanka hawked her Ivanka Trump clothing, sunglasses, handbags, and perfumes, Kellyanne Conway plugged her brand from the White House briefing room. Meanwhile, Ivanka hung out with faux celebrities like Kim Kardashian and cultivated real estate deals with tycoons who craved access to her father.

‘A piece of ass’

All true. And yet…

Have you ever paused to wonder— really, seriously wonder—what it must have been like to grow up as Donald Trump’s daughter? A daughter whose dad almost certainly suffers from narcissistic personality disorder? Specifically, the daughter of a man whose narcissism plays out on a global stage? Consider:

— In 1990, when he was married to Ivanka’s mother, Donald Trump conducted an adulterous affair with Marla Maples. Worse, he bragged about it to the New York gossip columnists. The story made the front page of the New York Post, along with Donald’s claim (apparently false) that Marla had told her friends that Donald had given her “the best sex I ever had.” Ivanka was eight years old at the time.

— That same year, during a divorce deposition, Ivanka’s mother accused Trump of raping her. She later withdrew the comment, saying she meant instead that she had felt a lack of tenderness. Whatever. Ivanka was nine.

— In 2003, Trump told the shock-jock Howard Stern’s radio show, “You know who’s one of the great beauties of the world, according to everybody? And I helped create her. Ivanka.” Trump specifically rated Ivanka as a “ten,” while evaluating other celebrities as only “sixes and sevens.” She was 22 at the time.

— In a 2004 interview, Stern— playing his customary role of agent provocateur— asked Trump if he could call Ivanka “a piece of ass.” Trump replied, “Yeah.” Ivanka was 23.

— During a March 2006 appearance with Ivanka on “The View,” Trump remarked, “I’ve said that if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I would be dating her.” It does not appear to have occurred to Trump that he was then newly married to Melania Knauss, his third wife.

— In 2005, while bantering with NBC entertainment reporter Billy Bush of “Access Hollywood,” Trump indicated he might start kissing a woman that he and Bush were about to meet. “I did try and fuck her,” Trump said. “She was married.” Then he added, “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful— I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

This taped conversation was made public in October 2016, during Trump’s first presidential campaign. It strikes me as nothing more than male locker-room banter. But the whole world heard it. Including, of course, Ivanka.

— In 2023 a civil jury in New York concluded that in 1996 Trump had sexually attacked the writer E. Jean Carroll in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York. At that time, Trump was married to his second wife, Marla Maples. Thus Ivanka, who was 42 when the verdict was delivered, became aware of an incident that occurred when she was 15.

Of course, I haven’t mentioned the many other claims of sexual harassment and assault lodged against Trump, not to mention his payment of hush money to the porn actress Stormy Daniels.

Conversion to Judaism

What’s a daughter to do with such a dad? Most daughters with problem fathers would seek some sort of private relief. Maybe therapy, with or without the father. But no such private option exists with Donald Trump, whose every move is public.

After actively campaigning for her father in 2016 and 2020, Ivanka announced in 2023 that she would step back from politics to prioritize her children and family life. “While I will always love and support my father, going forward I will do so outside the political arena,” she said, in what struck me as a not entirely successful effort to resolve her impossible situation.

More important, Ivanka’s conversion to Judaism in 2009 and her marriage that year to Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jew, strikes me as an effort to carve out a safe, structured space where her father— whose real and imagined sex life included fantasies of dating his own daughter— couldn’t intrude. (Trump was raised his in his Scottish-born mother’s Presbyterian faith, but in October 2020 he declared that he no longer identified as Presbyterian and now considers himself a nondenominational Christian. In any case, he’s not exactly a defender of the faith.)

Not that Orthodox Jews are necessarily any more virtuous than Presbyterians. In 2005, Jared’s father Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. Among other things, Charles admitted to hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, arranging to film a sexual encounter between the two and send the tape to his sister to intimidate her. Not the sort of issue Maimonides ever grappled with.

The case for Platner

Look, I’m as tempted as you are to crack wise about these people. Everybody needs a good laugh, and what better target than a converted Jewish princess whose latest venture is a $1.5 billion luxury hotel and resort on an abandoned island off the coast of Albania where she says she swam from a friend’s boat and “hiked barefoot all the way to the top,” notwithstanding that the island is clogged with bramble, seeded with mines, crawling with snakes, and so stony that even its beaches— which are covered with pebbles, not sand—are difficult to walk on shoeless?

But here’s my bottom line: In a million years, would you want to trade places with Ivanka Trump? Really?

I harbor similar feelings about Graham Platner, the recently dumped Democratic candidate for U.S. Senator from Maine. Is he a jerk? In many respects, yes. A drunk with a Nazi tattoo? Yes. A philanderer and a rapist? Probably. Would he make a good Senator? Probably not.

On the other hand, Platner served three combat tours in Iraq for the Marine Corps and one tour in Afghanistan for the U.S. Army. That is, over a period of eight years he put his body at the disposal of our nation’s elected officials, which is more than I can say for myself (not to mention Susan Collins or Donald Trump).

Platner has said that he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder because of his military service, which seems likely, since he receives full military disability benefits. Do we owe him something more? Does he have something to contribute to the national dialogue? These are good questions without easy answers. In any case, I hesitate to look down my nose at such a person, given what he’s been through. That goes for Ivanka, too.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com