Ivan Trump’s Terrible Book Helps Explain the Trump-Family Ethos
till, she insists, she and her brothers didn’t attain their positions in their father’s company “by any kind of birthright or foregone conclusion.”
.. To answer this question, Ivanka employs an audacious strategy: all of her advantages have actually been handicaps, she says. When she was appointed to the board of directors at Trump Entertainment Resorts, at age twenty-five, the situation was “stacked all the way against me.” Her last name, her looks, her youth, her privilege have all colluded to make people underestimate her. And when she is overestimated—when people believe that she has an “inherent understanding of all things related to real estate and finance,” because her father is Donald Trump—this, too, “can be a big disadvantage.”
.. Ivanka compares herself to a runner positioned on the outside track, whose head start at the beginning is just an illusion.
.. “Did I have an edge, getting started in business?” she asks. “No question. But get over it. And read on.”
.. she has marketed herself as a cross between Gwyneth Paltrow and Sheryl Sandberg.
.. her jewelry company sent out 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 call with the Argentinian President. She will have, and presumably use, every opportunity to 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 children—it won’t look so bad.
.. She offers a story about being forced, by her mother, to fly coach to the south of France as the moment she realized she needed to make her own money.
.. “My friend Andrew Cuomo, New York’s great attorney general, tells me that e-mail is the key to prosecuting just about everyone these days.”