P
oor Ivanka Trump. The president’s daughter has spent the past few years toiling away in a mysterious governmental role that nobody asked (or elected) her to take on – and yet she is criminally underappreciated by the underlings she serves.
On Friday, the heiress angrily tweeted that she was the victim of “cancel culture”, after a university in Kansas scrapped a virtual commencement speech she had prepared for graduating students. The students had not been thrilled about the choice of speaker, given Donald Trump’s widely criticised response to protests against police brutality and her involvement last Monday in that response: after demonstrators had been dispersed with tear gas, the first daughter pulled out a bible from her £1,200 Max Mara handbag so that her father could pose with it for a photo op by a church.
“Cancel culture and viewpoint discrimination are antithetical to academia,” Ivanka declared, with no self-awareness whatsoever. To help educate the masses, she attached a video of the commencement speech she had so graciously prepared. It was quintessentially Ivanka: looking like a Botoxed deer in the headlights, the multimillionaire child of a (supposed) billionaire spoke mechanically of the “discomfort and uncertainty” she had bravely overcome. She did not mention George Floyd or police brutality.
I hate to break it to Ivanka, but not giving a commencement speech does not mean you are a victim of “cancel culture”. Indeed, it is remarkable that, despite standing by her father during endless atrocities, she has not been definitively cancelled by her circle of “liberal” high-society friends.
That may soon change. Last week, Tavi Gevinson, an influencer and actor, called out Ivanka’s sister-in-law, the model Karlie Kloss, for posting a poem on Instagram that urged people to end racism by “healing it in your own family”. “Karlie, give it a rest,” Gevinson wrote, going on criticise Kloss for not disavowing Ivanka. Meanwhile, the Daily Beast asked on Monday whether New York’s glitterati will “finally turn on Ivanka”. Elsewhere, a new political action committee, founded by Colin Kaepernick’s lawyer, has released a scathing ad, entitled “Bye Ivanka”.
Ivanka has been given a free pass for a long time. But, given her father’s plummeting popularity, she may soon find out what it is like to be held accountable for her actions – and learn a thing or two about “discomfort and uncertainty”.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
