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      Surprised that Ivanka was almost head of the World Bank? You shouldn’t be | Arwa Mahdawi

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      OpinionIvanka TrumpSurprised that Ivanka Trump was almost head of the World Bank? You shouldn’t beArwa MahdawiDonald Trump wanting his daughter to have the top job at the World Bank is no great surprise. What intrigues me is the thought of Steven Mnuchin blocking it Tue 12 Oct 2021 11.34 EDTLast modified on Tue 12 Oct 2021 14.01 EDTIt’s no secret that Donald Trump has something of a soft spot for his eldest daughter, Ivanka. He’s constantly tooting her horn and gushing over her talents. Not only does Ivanka have a “very nice figure”, Trump has boasted, but “she’s very good with numbers”. She’s so good at all that numbers stuff that the former president even considered her for the top job at the World Bank in 2019. And that wasn’t just a fleeting fantasy, either; according to a recent report by the Intercept, Ivanka’s nomination for World Bank president “came incredibly close to happening”. The reason it didn’t is that Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, intervened. Which, by the way is a rather different story from the one Ivanka tells. The former first daughter has said she passed on the job because she was very happy with the high-powered White House position she’d appointed herself to.I can’t say I’m surprised that Ivanka was a stone’s throw away from a(nother) prestigious job she was laughably unqualified for. What does intrigue me is why Mnuchin might have blocked her nomination. Trump has a knack of surrounding himself with sycophants who do his bidding; what could have prompted Mnuchin to break ranks? Could it possibly be that the guy finds brazen nepotism distasteful? Alas, it seems unlikely, considering he’s a product of it himself. Mnuchin’s first job out of Yale was at Goldman Sachs, where his dad just happened to be a general partner. According to a New York magazine profile, Mnuchin’s colleagues at Goldman Sachs didn’t consider him “especially book smart”, but that didn’t stop him becoming partner himself. The same profile notes that his elevation to partner came at the expense of an African American trader from a working-class background who struck one colleague as being “much smarter than Steven” and having “accomplished a lot more”. I don’t know how fair that profile is, but I’d bet both my kidneys that Mnuchin isn’t someone who stays awake at night fretting about nepotism.So perhaps Mnuchin was afraid Ivanka’s appointment might be unethical or make the US look ridiculous? Again, these theories seem unlikely. Mnuchin and his (third) wife, the Scottish actor Louise Linton, don’t seem particularly bothered by ethics or looking ridiculous. Mnuchin, after all, is nicknamed the “foreclosure king” because he made a ton of money evicting elderly people from their homes. Linton, meanwhile, is notorious for having written a “white saviour” memoir full of dubious claims. The pair haven’t exactly kept a low profile since getting together. Remember when the lovebirds did a very weird supervillain-style photoshoot with a sheet of new dollar bills? Not exactly something someone concerned about optics might do. Then there was the time they took a government plane to see a solar eclipse in Kentucky. Linton posted the trip on Instagram and hashtagged all the designer labels she was wearing: “#rolandmouret pants”, “#tomford sunnies”, “#hermesscarf”, “#valentinorockstudheels”. The whole thing was #inverybadtaste.The pair haven’t exactly tried to tone it down since then. Linton recently made a movie called Me You Madness where she plays a “materialistic, narcissistic, self-absorbed misanthrope” who hates commercial air travel, loves high fashion and eats men for fun. It also contains spider sex. Mnuchin has been very supportive of the movie, calling the escapades of a greedy sociopath “highly entertaining”. Again, he doesn’t seem like the sort of guy who cares what other people think. Rather, he seems like the sort of guy who actively supports narcissistic blonds (Linton looks quite a bit like Ivanka) with white saviour complexes and enormous egos doing whatever the hell they like. If he blocked Ivanka’s nomination then I’ll once again wager my kidneys that it wasn’t for the common good, but it was somehow for his own good. After all, nepotism simply isn’t a problem for people like Mnuchin. It’s just the way the world works.
      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
      TopicsIvanka TrumpOpinionDonald TrumpUS politicsWorld BankEconomicsGlobal economycommentReuse this content More

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      Jared Kushner's hidden genius? To make terrible decisions – yet keep failing upwards | Arwa Mahdawi

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      OpinionJared KushnerJared Kushner’s hidden genius? To make terrible decisions – yet keep failing upwardsArwa MahdawiDonald Trump’s son-in-law has decided to step away from politics and launch an investment firm. No doubt it will be a roaring success, whatever he does Wed 4 Aug 2021 02.00 EDTHaving selflessly served the public for four long years, Jared Kushner has decided it’s time to step away from politics and apply his unique talents elsewhere. According to mysterious sources said to be “familiar with the plan”, Kushner is preparing to launch a Miami-based investment firm called Affinity Partners. The exact nature of the firm is unclear; however, it will reportedly have an office in Israel, which will pursue investments connecting Israel’s economy with India, north Africa and the Gulf. Now that he has oh-so-successfully made peace in the Middle East, Kushner appears to have decided he deserves to make a little profit.It must have been hard for Kushner, who former ambassador Nikki Haley once described as a “hidden genius that no one understands”, to give up his political career. Still, the decision was probably made easier by the fact that said “career” was simply a cushy “senior adviser” job with his father-in-law, and that ended when Donald Trump lost the election. Since then, Kushner and his wife, Ivanka, have been spending their days scooping up Miami mansions. One presumes the pair haven’t exactly been inundated with invitations to join the Biden White House, so the fact that the likes of Reuters are running headlines announcing Kushner is “to leave politics” is quite the PR victory on his part.That’s not Kushner’s only victory. While he might have the charisma of a soggy tissue, Mr Ivanka Trump seems to have a knack for failing upwards. In 2007, for example, a 26-year-old Kushner urged his family’s real estate company to pay a then-record $1.8bn to purchase 666 Fifth Avenue, a skyscraper in Manhattan. This turned out to be a terrible decision. It might have had devastating financial consequences for the Kushner family had it not been for a sudden stroke of luck: in 2018, in the middle of Trump’s presidency, a Canadian asset-management company, Brookfield Asset Management, agreed to take a 99-year lease on the building, paying a huge amount of rent upfront. Funnily enough, the Qatar Investment Authority was a major investor in Brookfield and, at the time, Kushner was backing a blockade on the Gulf kingdom. This was all a complete coincidence, and there was no intention of persuading Kushner to reverse his support for the blockade, Qatar has stressed. And, to be fair, the blockade wasn’t lifted until this year. Still, if Kushner keeps running into coincidences like that one imagines his investment firm will do very well indeed.
      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
      TopicsJared KushnerOpinionIvanka TrumpUS politicsDonald TrumpcommentReuse this content More

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      Secret Service extension for Trump’s adult children cost $140,000 in a month

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      Donald Trump’s adult children reportedly cost taxpayers $140,000 in Secret Service security in the month after the clan’s patriarch left the White House in January.Ordinarily, family members of a president lose their security detail when they leave office. But in the case of the four Trump siblings and two of their spouses, the former president issued a directive to extend post-presidency protections by six months.The costs, obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Ethics, do not include security protections at Trump properties in New Jersey, Palm Beach and Briarcliff, New York. With those factored in, the total would likely be far higher, according to the group.According to the watchdog, records reveal that the Trump children maintained a “breakneck speed of travel, and racked up significant hotel and transportation bills for the Secret Service”. Transport costs alone amounted to $52,296.75, and hotel costs totaled at least $88,678.39.If that schedule is maintained, the group estimates, post-presidency protection costs could nearly $1m. The group has previously calculated that the Trump family made 12 times as many trips in three years as the Obamas made in seven.The arrangements, however, are not unique: former presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and George W Bush also sought protection extensions, though in the case of Clinton and Obama their children were by then at, or close to, college-age.The Washington Post, which reported on Trump’s directive in January, found that extensions to Secret Service protections were also extended to former treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, former chief of staff Mark Meadows and former national security adviser Robert O’Brien.Under federal law, Trump and his wife Melania are entitled to protection for their lifetime; their teenage son Barron receives his until he turns 16.The watchdog found that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump went from their jobs at the White House to a 10-day vacation in Utah, racking up hotel costs of $62,599. After a month in Miami, they stayed at Trump’s Bedminster golf property for three days in late February.Eric and Lara Trump spent much of February at Trump’s Briarcliff property, interspersed with trips to New York, Miami and Palm Beach, at a cost of $12,742.Donald Trump Jr also spent time in New York City, on Long Island, and in upstate New York, racking up bills of $13,337.But Citizens for Ethics said the Secret Service did not provide records of spending at Trump businesses.“While it may be tempting to put the story of the Trump family’s profiteering in the past, we cannot until they have actually stopped directing taxpayer money into their own bank accounts,” the group said. More

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      Ivanka Trump, crusading criminal justice reformer? Pull the other one | Arwa Mahdawi

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      [embedded content]
      Ivanka wants to be the next Kim Kardashian
      Ivanka Trump is done empowering women. For years the heiress styled herself as a sort of Susan B Anthony in stilettos, working tirelessly to advance women’s rights. That mission has apparently been accomplished, and Ivanka has now moved on to a new passion project: criminals.
      Ivanka spent her final hours in the White House frantically working with her daddy to grant pardons and commutations to 143 people. Some of those people had been locked up for decades for nonviolent drug offenses; many others, however, were Trump cronies and white-collar crooks. According to a new report from Axios, Ivanka wasn’t just helping these people out of the goodness of her heart; it was a calculated strategy. Ivanka apparently plans to use the platform of criminal justice reform to rehabilitate her image and re-emerge into public life.
      Tying her brand to criminal justice reform, which is a bipartisan issue, is a savvy move by Ivanka. It gives her a way of worming herself back into liberals’ good books without alienating conservatives. It also doesn’t hurt that criminal justice reform has become rather glamorous. Over the last few years big-name celebrities like Kevin Hart, Jay-Z and Meek Mill have spoken out on the issue. And Kim Kardashian, of course, has made criminal justice reform her life’s work. (Although she still finds time to hawk shapewear and promote dubious diet products.)
      And then there’s the fact that, unlike most things she sets her sights on, crime is something Ivanka appears eminently qualified to speak out on. There is, after all, a convicted felon in the family: her father-in-law, Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to tax evasion and intimidating a witness (he hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, videotaped it, then sent the video to his sister to try to stop him testifying). Kushner, of course, got a pardon from Trump.
      Criminal justice reform may theoretically be a bipartisan issue, but it’s important to note that there are very different interpretations of what that reform looks like in practice. For the left it means things like addressing structural racism and reallocating funding from police departments to community support. For the right it often seems to mean cutting costs by reducing the number of people in physical jails while finding new ways to police people. Ways which, conveniently enough, make private corporations and tech companies a lot of money. In 2018, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, warned that many recent criminal justice reforms contain the seeds of a frightening system of “e-carceration”.
      Replacing cash bail with expensive ankle monitoring devices is one example of this. “Many reformers rightly point out that an ankle bracelet is preferable to a prison cell,” Alexander wrote. “Yet I find it difficult to call this progress. As I see it, digital prisons are to mass incarceration what Jim Crow was to slavery.”
      As for Ivanka’s approach to criminal justice reform? One imagines that, just like her approach to women’s empowerment, it will be vacuous and self-serving. Still, she may need to serve herself sooner rather than later: the Trump Organization is facing a number of legal issues. One imagines a get-out-of-jail-free card would be very useful.
      Man who talks a lot of rubbish thinks women talk too much
      Yoshiro Mori, head of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics organizing committee, reckons women talk too much and cause meetings to “drag on”. When asked why he thinks that he replied: “I don’t talk to women that much these days, so I don’t know.” Seems like he doesn’t know a lot of things: while women are often stereotyped as chatty plenty of research shows men are by far the more garrulous sex in meetings and public forums.
      Rashida Tlaib, AOC and the power of vulnerability
      Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivered emotional speeches about the US Capitol attack this week. These speeches weren’t just powerful; in many ways they were historic. As Moira Donegan wrote: “Vulnerability and power do not often go together, and certainly not in female politicians.” However, by opening up about her trauma, “AOC demonstrated that she was unwilling to concede that female vulnerability is incompatible with the dignity of power. Refusing to separate those two was a demonstration of her feminist vision, a gesture at what an authentic kind of power might look like.”
      ‘Sew bros’: the wholesome rise of men who stitch
      George Clooney is one of them: he recently revealed he’s been sewing clothes for his kids during lockdown.
      Mike Pence is starting a podcast to share good news about conservatism
      Couldn’t he just take up sewing instead?
      New Zealand’s Māori foreign minister is the perfect diplomat
      Nanaia Mahuta is impossible to miss: she’s the first woman to sit in the country’s parliament wearing a moko kauae, an ancient Māori tattoo form. But it’s not just her tattoo that sets her apart. Morgan Godfery argues that, under Mahuta’s ministership, New Zealand’s commitment to prioritizing trading arrangements over global human rights issues may be changing.
      French 106-year-old pianist to release sixth album
      Colette Maze began playing the piano at age four to find warmth absent in her strict upbringing: she’s been going strong ever since and has a new album out in April.
      US toddler to release debut album recorded in the womb
      At the other end of the age spectrum a Brooklyn toddler is about to release her debut album, the world’s first LP made from sounds inside the womb.
      The week in rodent-archy
      Naked mole rats, I’m sorry to say, are absolutely hideous. Turns out they’re also pretty xenophobic. Scientists have discovered that naked mole rats speak in accents unique to their colonies and ignore rodents from different colonies. The accent of each colony is determined by the queen but can change if she is overthrown. This may be the first time that cultural transmission of dialect has been seen in small rodents and the study is causing quite a stir in the naked mole rat community. More

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      'I like Ivanka': Marco Rubio sweats over rumoured Trump Senate challenge

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      The last time Marco Rubio looked this uncomfortable in the national spotlight, he was stuck on robotic repeat in a Republican debate, being pummelled by Chris Christie.Or maybe it was when he lunged for a bottle of water as he sweated his way through a response to Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, back in 2013.Either way, on Sunday morning Florida’s senior Republican senator squirmed again as he was grilled on the possibility of a primary challenge by Ivanka Trump, the ex-president’s oldest daughter, in 2022.“How seriously do you take Ivanka Trump as a potential opponent?” Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked, citing speculation over the former “first daughter’s” personal political ambitions following her purchase of property in Miami with her husband, Jared Kushner.“Well, I, I, I don’t really get into the parlour games of Washington,” Rubio replied, clearly wishing his potential challenger was called anything other than Trump.“When you decide to run for re-election in a state like Florida, you have to be prepared for a competitive race, you run it like a competitive race, so that’s what I’m preparing to run, a very competitive race against a tough opponent.“I don’t own the Senate seat, it doesn’t belong to me. If I want to be back in the US Senate I have to earn that every six years.”Wallace pressed on, attempting to get the floundering Rubio, who has something of a love-hate relationship with Donald Trump, to at least acknowledge the name of his possible challenger.“I like Ivanka, and we worked very well together on issues, and she’s a US…” Rubio said, trailing off then pivoting swiftly to a list of his perceived successes “for the people of Florida” since he was elected in 2010.The interview ended soon after, a relieved Rubio able to avoid any further reference to his new Miami neighbour.Scholars of Rubio’s previous encounters with Ivanka Trump will have noted this was far from his first moment of awkwardness. In June 2017 he was photographed trying and failing to give her a hug in Washington, the image inevitably going viral.Rubio tried to make light of that episode, promising a full investigation by the Senate intelligence committee into why it was “blowing up Twitter”.In 2016, Rubio ran for the Republican presidential nomination ultimately won by Donald Trump. The senator squared up to the property developer, evidently unfamiliar with the old political saw, variously and wrongly attributed to Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain or George Bernard Shaw, about why it is never a good idea to wrestle with a pig.You both get dirty, the saying goes, but the pig likes it. Rubio and Trump ended up exchanging insults about the size of their genitals.Rubio’s last robust primary was an all-round chastening experience. Not only did he fail to make much of a mark but during a campaign event in Iowa, the senator also beaned a small child with a football. More

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      What is Ivanka Trump's legacy? Enabling her father's odious actions | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Ivanka Trump has wound up her time in the White House in the most fitting way possible: with a scandal about a $3,000-a-month toilet. Members of the Secret Service, it was recently reported, were banned from using any of the bathrooms in Jared Kushner and Ivanka’s Washington DC mansion and, instead, had to rent an apartment to relieve themselves in (although Jared and Ivanka have denied this). Talk about flushing taxpayers’ money down the drain.One imagines Ivanka did not plan to spend her final days in DC dealing with the fallout from a violent insurrection and battling embarrassing leaks about her loos. When she appointed herself special adviser to the president, Ivanka was a handbag and shoe saleswoman bursting with ambition. She was going to empower women everywhere! Little girls around the world would read about Saint Ivanka for decades to come. She would be a role mogul: her branded bags would fly off the shelves.Four years later, Ivanka’s clothing line has shut down and her personal brand has been damaged enough for a university to cancel her as a speaker. It seems she is persona non grata in New York and her dad has been banned from parts of the internet for inciting violence. By rights, Ivanka should be sobbing into her sheets wondering how everything has gone so wrong.But Ivanka is a Trump: narcissism and self-delusion are in her DNA. As DC braces for pre-inauguration chaos Ivanka has been blithely tweeting her “achievements” and retweeting praise in an attempt to convince us she has left an important legacy.According to her Twitter feed, one thing Americans should all be thanking Ivanka for is paid family leave, which has been one of her marquee issues. And, to be fair, if Ivanka is to be praised for anything, it’s for pushing Donald Trump to pass a bill giving federal employees 12 weeks of paid parental time off. Would that have happened without Ivanka? I don’t know. But she facilitated it. Does it make up for the many odious things Ivanka also facilitated? No.Another of Ivanka’s big projects was the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) initiative, which aims to reach 50 million women in the developing world by 2025 and … well, I’m not sure exactly what’s supposed to happen then. The initiative is so buzzword-laden that it’s somewhat hard to understand. You get the impression Ivanka launched it via vague instructions to “empower women in powerful ways via strategic pillars of empowerment”.Ivanka has been very keen to turn the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity initiative into part of her political legacy … But she got greedy and insisted on using her version of the billAnyway, all that empowering has paid off, according to a report W-GDP released last week: almost 12.6 million women worldwide have been equipped with the skills they need for economic advancement, thanks to Ivanka. Let’s be charitable and say W-GDP has done some good. The problem is, that good is massively outweighed by the Trump administration’s worldwide war on abortion: the administration imposed an harmful expansion of “the global gag rule”, which bans US federal funding international NGOs that provide abortion services or advocacy. Trump also did his best to try to destroy the budget for foreign aid.Still, Ivanka has been very keen to turn the W-GDP into part of her political legacy. Last year, she was behind the bipartisan launch of a bill formally authorising the programme so that it would live on after her dad left office. That could well have happened: Jeanne Shaheen, a Democratic senator, initially lent Ivanka her support. But Ivanka got greedy and insisted on using her version of the bill. Shaheen abandoned her support, explaining that Ivanka’s version of the legislation focused too narrowly on women’s economic advancement, minimising issues such as education, healthcare and gender-based violence. Not so much “let them eat cake”, as “let them start cake-making businesses”. Last month, the bill was dropped and now the future of Ivanka’s biggest project is unclear.I don’t want to be unfair to her. She may not have empowered women the way she promised she would, but she did empower herself. Ivanka and Kushner have made a fortune while “serving” in the White House. And you know what they say about charity: it begins at home. More

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      Trump heads for new life in Florida, marking end of an era in New York

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      When Donald Trump leaves the White House on 20 January, reports indicate that he will not return to his home town of New York City but rather, reside at his Mar-a-Lago home in south Florida. Indeed, Trump formally changed his residency to the so-called Sunshine State in fall 2019.Trump’s seemingly permanent departure to a state known for its large population of elderly retirees marks the end of an era in New York, the city where he grew up and moved from its suburbs of Queens to become an icon of brash Manhattan style and wealth in the 1970s and 1980s.“He made his presence known on the island of Manhattan in the mid 70s, a brash Adonis from the outer boroughs bent on placing his imprint on the golden rock,” the New York Times reported in 1983. “Donald John Trump exhibited a flair for self-promotion, grandiose schemes – and, perhaps not surprisingly, for provoking fury along the way.”Trump’s flashiness arguably encapsulated the unapologetic financial excesses of the 1980s and beyond with him sticking his family name on seemingly everything he got his hands on. There have been 17 properties in New York City that bore Trump’s name over time, NBC News reported.Trump became a tabloid fixture, feeding the papers stories about himself, according to the Hollywood Reporter and other outlets. One of them was the famed New York Post cover about his relationship with Marla Maples, who became his second wife. The headline read: “Marla boasts to her pals about Donald: ‘BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD.’”Trump even had a cameo in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Macaulay Culkin, as the star Kevin, asks him for directions to the lobby of the Plaza hotel, which Trump owned at that time.While Trump’s cultural cachet was bizarre, it had power. Director Chris Columbus said in a December interview with Insider that Trump “did bully his way into the movie” by demanding that he get a role in return for allowing shooting to take place at the Plaza.The majority of New Yorkers are not mourning Trump’s departure. They long seemed ready for it.When news emerged that Trump was changing his residency, Governor Andrew Cuomo said in as statement: “Good riddance. It’s not like Mr Trump paid taxes here anyway. He’s all yours, Florida.”Cuomo’s reaction encapsulated the feelings of many residents. New York is a blue state, and the city still more liberal; since Trump took office, there have routinely been demonstrations against White House policies outside his eponymous properties.New Yorkers’ dislike of Trump hit new highs last spring. His administration’s mishandling of coronavirus was felt especially deeply in New York City, an early US center of the pandemic. City and state officials begged a seemingly uninterested Trump for help.“How on earth do you think that New York City can get back on its feet without federal support?” Mayor Bill de Blasio said. “Mr President, are you going to save New York City, or are you telling New York City to drop dead?”Cuomo, speaking of the coronavirus-spurred financial crisis in September, remarked: “Trump is actively trying to kill New York City. It is personal. I think it’s psychological. He is trying to kill New York City.”Since many New Yorkers feel this way, it’s not surprising that Trump and his clan have nothing left for them here, except for a sea of legal problems.De Blasio announced this week that New York City was cutting its contracts with Trump’s companies for his involvement in spurring a deadly attack on the Capitol. That means Trump will lose $17m in deals to run the Central Park Carousel, Wollman and Lasker skating rinks, and Ferry Point golf course in the Bronx, according to ABC News.Trump’s cronies speculate that Trump’s departure from New York City could also include his business interests, given his dislike of local and state officials, ABC News reported. Meanwhile, the Manhattan district attorney and state attorney general are investigating Trump’s financial dealings.Trump’s departure from the White House also means that civil litigation against him here might finally proceed, as he can no longer cite presidential duties in efforts to delay proceedings.Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, are not expected to be welcomed in New York City’s elite circles when they leave Washington, according to reports. They purchased a $30m property in Miami’s luxe Indian Creek village.Donald Trump Jr and girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle are also relocating to Florida and are eyeing homes in Jupiter. “There is no way they can stay in New York. They’d be tortured in the streets,” a source told the New York Post of Junior’s impending move.As Trump and his family try building a new life, and potential Maga capital, in south Florida, the ostracism they faced in New York might follow them to some degree. Ivanka and Kushner might struggle with the south Florida social scene.The New York Post quoted a source saying: “The Indian Creek country club members are very picky and the word is that Javanka need not apply.”Even Trump’s appearance in Home Alone 2 has come into question, with Culkin supporting social media commentary in favor of removing Trump from the movie. More