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.”
Ivanka Trump’s Presence at Meeting With Japan’s Leader Raises Questions
The potential for conflicts of interest between President-elect Donald J. Trump and his family’s business ventures emerged again Thursday evening, when a photograph was distributed that showed his daughter Ivanka at a meeting between Mr. Trump and the prime minister of Japan.
.. She serves as vice president of development and acquisitions for the Trump Organization, and the company’s website says one of her “primary focuses has been to bring the Trump Hotel brand to global markets.”
.. The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial on Friday, went so far as to urge Mr. Trump to sell off all his hotels, golf courses and other assets, and then take that cash and turn it over to a blind trust, as that would be the only way to avoid all possible conflicts.
To understand the Trump presidency, we must decipher Ivanka
The next morning, a sales representative from her jewelry line sent out a notice to journalists that the aforementioned gold bangle was Ivanka’s “favorite.” It could be purchased for $10,800 through the Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry website. Daughter-slash-businesswoman? Businesswoman-slash-presidential adviser?
.. What do we make of her? What is her endgame, when she insists that she is not a political person, while advocating for politically divisive causes, like equal wages for women and paid maternity leave? When, while working on the transition team for the highest office in the land, she is simultaneously posting videos online of her with her officemates
What Ivanka Trump Can’t Sell
Ms. Trump describes herself as a feminist, and while her feminism might not be a type that Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem would recognize, it’s a mercantile variety that is familiar to the women the Ivanka Trump brand hopes to reach.
.. The defining feature of mercantile feminism is its use of values — those of political, social and economic equality for women — to make money. And it works only for individuals and brands with real credibility.
.. But now, as the accumulated effects of her father’s campaign sink in, Ms. Trump is testing the limit of how far she can take her mercantile feminism.
.. Shannon Coulter, a San Francisco-based marketing executive who, a few weeks ago, started a campaign, #GrabYourWallet, to boycott the 21 retailers, including Lord & Taylor, Zappos, Nordstrom and Macy’s, that carry Ms. Trump’s wares.
.. George Stephanopoulos asked Ms. Trump about the boycott. Ms. Trump, who did not look pleased, said, “People who are seeking to politicize it because they disagree with the politics of my father — there’s nothing I can do to change that.”
.. But Ms. Trump .. is showing her true colors.
.. Yet at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in the middle of October, Ms. Trump said of her father, “I’m sure he didn’t remember” his conversation with Billy Bush. As Gabriel Sherman at New York Magazine reported recently, Ms. Trump took her father’s side after the tape became public and insisted that he had to fight back. (She also said he had to apologize.)
.. “I think what Ivanka is doing is extremely cynical,” said Kim France, the founding editor of Lucky, a shopping magazine for young women. “It’s not female empowerment, it’s business.”
.. Her editorial director, Sarah Warren, recently said that web traffic is “through the roof” and the company’s newsletter database is 275 percent bigger than it was last year. “You couldn’t pay for this visibility,”
.. after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, 75 percent of Democratic women said they would not purchase clothes from Ivanka Trump’s clothing line, compared with close to 60 percent of independent women and a third of Republican women.