Ivanka Trump Knows What It Means to Be a Modern Millennial

Then there is The Celebrity Apprentice, which just premiered its fourteenth season.

.. Plus, she says, “we have an unbelievable cast who, as my father says, just hate each other. Which is good!”

.. Donald Trump is virtually synonymous with the modern-day concept of branding.

.. The Apprentice made her famous: a 20-something real estate diva. As she herself points out, “Young professionals don’t usually have pop-culture relevance.” She started getting piles of fan mail from girls who wanted to grow up to be just like her.

.. “So, my husband’s idea of a date night somehow always involves me looking at one of his development sites.” Everyone nods knowingly.

.. And that is when she saw that there was a big hole in the market: No one was designing for the young professional woman who wants clothes with more style than Ann Taylor but not as fashion-disposable as H&M.

.. “We are targeting millennials who aspire to have very big careers, but they are also training for marathons or learning French or starting a family. Every aspect of their life is just as important to them as their careers.”

.. Me and my peers, we’re working really hard at being moms and sisters and professionals. There was a previous generation of women who rose through the ranks in an environment when work and life were highly compartmentalized. And I think now, because of technology, we’re always on.

.. It’s about empowerment and redefining what it means to be a woman in this generation.”

.. XiXi, the nanny, who is Chinese and is teaching the children to speak Mandarin.

.. “His own dreams are bold, and I love that in someone,” says Ivanka, “but he’s incredibly relaxed and calm. The world could be collapsing around him, and nothing fazes him. He’s very solution-oriented. Plus it was nice finding someone who is a genuinely good person.

.. “For me, being so close to work is everything. I get here in three minutes and give them a bath, read to them, and put them to bed, and then I go out almost every night right afterward with Jared.”

.. “I would say she is definitely the CEO of our household, whereas I’m more on the board of directors.

.. Jared’s brother, Joshua, has his own venture-capital firm and was an early investor in Instagram.

.. He is also dating Karlie Kloss

.. This gives some sense of the intersecting worlds that Jared and Ivanka travel in: fashion, finance, media, art, real estate, technology, society

.. In some ways they are the twenty-first-century analog to the It Power Couple that her parents were during the go-go eighties.

.. But I would say Jared and Ivanka are centered in a more low-key, contemporary, family way. I think they don’t need to be as sort of . . . out there in the more outlandish eighties way that my parents were.”

.. Two of the people who are often in those smaller groups are Chelsea Clinton and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky. “She’s always aware of everyone around her and ensuring that everyone is enjoying the moment,” says Chelsea. “It’s an awareness that in some ways reminds me of my dad, and his ability to increase the joy of the room.

.. “There’s not a lot of bullshit in Ivanka’s life. Living through everything that she saw as a kid, she has a very good filter on what’s real, what’s not, what’s worthwhile, and what’s not.

.. movers and shakers

.. with Judaism, it creates an amazing blueprint for family connectivity.”
“Also the ritual for us having Sabbath,” says Jared.

.. “Yeah, we observe the Sabbath,” says Ivanka, sipping her lychee martini. “From Friday to Saturday we don’t do anything but hang out with one another. We don’t make phone calls.”

.. ‘If we’re going to do Shabbos, I’m going to cook.’ She never cooked before in her life, and became a great cook. So for Friday, she’ll make dinner for just the two of us, and we turn our phones off for 25 hours.

.. And for Arabella to know that she has me, undivided, one day a week? We don’t do anything except play with each other, hang out with one another, go on walks together. Pure family.”

.. If I was married to somebody who, even if beneath the surface, didn’t like the fact that I work so hard or didn’t support my ambitions for myself or felt self-conscious about my last name . . . I think it would be very hard to build a solid foundation on that.”

How Breaking Bad Foreshadowed Trump

Ostensibly evil, White can also be seen as providing catharsis: a radical therapy. His words are mild, but his deeds tear asunder one politically correct temple after another, leaving them in ruins. Even White’s signature product, his 99.1 percent pure blue meth, and the show’s ever-present luminous green suggest a kind of detergent, a toxic agent dealing death both to the poisoners and the poisoned and thereby cleansing the earth.

.. In the final season of Breaking Bad, Walter White has to rely on neo-Nazis to kill on his behalf. And whenever we see Mexico in Breaking Bad, it is a land of murderous drug pushers who worship the Santa Muerte. Everyone else in Breaking Bad is white, and, because of his chemotherapy, White himself is literally a skinhead.

.. Trump is best understood as a man of the 1980s, and much about him recalls that bygone era: the décor of his buildings, his 1986 deal to buy Mar-a-Lago, his best-selling 1987 book The Art of the Deal, and his bouffant hairstyle. Fast-forward to 2017 and Trump’s guiding principle appears to be resetting the clock back to the Reagan era:

.. Like Walter White, Trump has imported into an elite social universe a dose of desperation from the other side of the tracks. That is their common appeal, which Cranston has spotted.

.. Something must be done. If it isn’t done quickly, even Trump may be given short shrift. And his successor would surely promise more-radical solutions. Trump’s election, then, may mark not the end but the beginning of a protracted period of upheaval.

The Death of Idealism

This presidential election is a contest between the oldest of the baby boomers. Yet Donald Trump, 70, and Hillary Clinton, 68, represent two very different decades in the formation of that generation. Donald Trump became famous as a classic 1980s type, while Hillary Clinton first attained public notice as a classic 1960s type.

.. During the Reagan years, writers celebrated capitalism not only as a wealth-generating engine but also as a moral system, a way to arouse hard work, creativity and trust.

.. A friend of mine came up to me at one of those parties and summarized the atmosphere: “Not indicted, not invited.”

.. As we saw on Monday night, Trump now represents capitalism degraded to pure selfishness. He treats other people like objects and lies with abandon. Proud to be paying no taxes while others foot the bill, proud to have profited off the housing bust that caused so much suffering, he lacks even the barest conception of civic life and his responsibilities to it.

.. When asked why she wants to be president or for any positive vision, she devolves into a list of programs. And it is never enough just to list three programs in an answer; she has to pile in an arid hodgepodge of eight or nine. This is pure interest-group liberalism — buying votes with federal money — not an inspiring image of the common good.

.. The twin revolutions of the 1960s and the 1980s liberated the individual — first socially and then economically — and weakened the community. More surprising, this boomer-versus-boomer campaign has decimated idealism.

.. Ironically, one of the tasks for those who succeed the baby boomers is to restore idealism. The great challenge of our moment is the crisis of isolation and fragmentation, the need to rebind the fabric of a society that has been torn by selfishness, cynicism, distrust and autonomy.

.. At some point there will have to be a new vocabulary and a restored anthropology, emphasizing love, friendship, faithfulness, solidarity and neighborliness that pushes people toward connection rather than distrust. Millennials, I think, want to be active in this rebinding. But inspiration certainly isn’t coming from the aging boomers now onstage.