In her speech at the Republican National Convention, on Thursday night, Ivanka Trump spoke not only as a daughter but as a political admirer.PHOTOGRAPH BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY FOR THE NEW YORKER
Midway through her speech introducing her father at the Republican Convention, on Thursday night, Ivanka Trump began talking about disparities in pay for women. The ones it was particularly hard on, she said, were not single women but "married mothers." Donald Trump, when he was President—and she was sure he would be—would see to it that American women had affordable child care, and he would fight for other "policies that allow women with children to thrive." At that, Ivanka, glowing in a petal-pink dress, her hair a smooth sheen, swivelled to look directly into the camera, with a brilliant smile, like the heroine in a nineties action television show, about to impart a point of plot explication, and said, "And I will fight for this, too—right alongside of him!"
She had emerged onstage to the strains of "Here Comes the Sun." Someone from the New York delegation shouted, "We love you, Ivanka!" She said, to that and to the general adulation, "Thank you." Her tone of even politeness was an immediate reminder of the most basic way in which she has been said to be an asset to Trump’s campaign: she must have learned her manners somewhere, and perhaps something could be imputed from that about how her father treated people. She has, in the course of the campaign, gone further, speaking about his encouragement of her career and making videos with instructions for registering to vote, so as to make America great again. She clearly wants her father to win. On Thursday night she appeared not only as a character witness, or as a softener of his shouting image, but explicitly as part of his political operation. (She and her husband, Jared Kushner, also have a behind-the-scenes campaign strategy.)
Part of Ivanka's task was to make an overt play for women's votes, but she also went to Cleveland as a messenger of sweetly aggrieved populism. Her father had become "the people's champion," she said. "And tonight he is the people's nominee." She asked the audience, in effect, to walk with her as she walked with her father in a fantasy park of Trumpian themes.
Ivanka Trump at the Republican National Convention.
Photograph by Philip Montgomery for The New YorkerIt started in his office, with toys. She would be "constructing miniature buildings with Legos and Erector sets, while he did the same with concrete, steel, and glass." He would tear stories about people encountering hard times out of the newspaper, and those people would appear, "invited to Trump Tower," after a word to his assistant; then, after speaking with him, they left "feeling that life could be great again." Trump also took his daughter out to show her what he was building. "I've learned a lot about the world by walking construction jobs by his side," Ivanka said. "When run properly, construction sites are true meritocracies," as well as "incredible melting pots," in which people work together "towards a single mission”—miniature idealized Americas, in other words. (She did not mention that, on at least one occasion, her father's contractor was cited for hiring undocumented workers.) "Billionaire executives don't usually ask the people doing the work for their opinion of the work," Ivanka said, with a confiding smile, as if the delegates, from their experience with billionaire executives, knew exactly what she meant. "My father is an exception. On every one of his projects, you'll see him talking to the super, the painter, the engineers."
Ivanka was one of several speakers at the Convention to suggest that Trump's life as a real-estate developer made him something of an honorary blue-collar worker. (Pence and the Trump boys made this point, too.) She expanded on the idea with a return to Trump Tower. "At my father's company, there are more female than male executives." Several of these women had appeared in a video that played earlier in the evening. Indeed, it was notable that the lead-in to Trump's speech had involved a number of women, including Representative Marsha Blackburn, of Tennessee, and Governor Mary Fallin, of Oklahoma. The Wall Street Journal noted on Thursday that Hillary Clinton leads Trump among women by fifteen points—a gap that is not as big as one might think, though it is greater among younger women. The Trump campaign clearly sees an opportunity. Ivanka's message was that, if leaders just focussed, as her "color-blind and gender-neutral" father did, on competence, most problems, including those of working women, would disappear.
"When my father says he will build a tower, keep an eye on the skyline," Ivanka said. She did not say when to keep an eye on the border. It was during her father's speech that the crowd chanted, "Build the wall!," as he talked about politicians giving up a child “to sacrifice" at the hands of murderous immigrants. Ivanka’s view of Trumpism is from the metropole. That doesn't make it, or her, less political, even if, for her admirers, her presentation is more palatable. When she said that, while politicians wanted to be “judged by their promises” and not by their accomplishments, her father should be judged by his buildings and his family, she ignored the toxic nature of many of his promises.
She spoke not only as a daughter but as a political admirer. Donald Trump "sacrificed greatly to enter the political field as an outsider," she said, referring, perhaps, to his renunciation of another season of "The Apprentice," and nights spent in places like Iowa. As she followed him on the campaign trail, she saw how he “dug deeper, got better, and became stronger . . . and now I am seeing him fight for our country.” She accepted his diagnosis of America’s ills: her father’s nomination, she said, was “a prelude to reaching the goal that unites us all: when this Party and, better still, this country know what it's like to win again.”
“Come January ’17, all things will be possible again," Ivanka assured the audience. Then, reaching the end of her speech, she said, "This is the fighter, the doer, that you have chosen for your nominee,” and beckoned onto the stage her father, “the next President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.” He embraced her as the delegates cheered wildly. Then, for the next hour, he talked about how “the situation is worse than it ever has been before,” in a country facing “death, destruction, terrorism, and weakness," and where the sun seemed to have gone away.
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