Early Morning Open Thread: Red(state) Princess Ivanka

So she can be in the room where it happens to be closing a deal for her business. https://t.co/zvHzTJ1DyV

— Schooley (@Rschooley) December 5, 2016

A concept imported from China, like Trump’s campaign hats: the “Princelings” eliding the line between political machine and business empire. Neither of her adult brothers seem to be capable of doing much beyond collecting ‘honorariums’. Ivanka, on the other hand, is not only a chip off the Trump block (or at least presenting herself as one), she’s done double familial duty by allying herself to another wealthy real estate crime family by marriage…

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are moving to D.C. https://t.co/Q7jGb3gyXy pic.twitter.com/WoOF1FHnBv

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) December 6, 2016

Interesting Esquire piece on young Jared: “His father-in-law is moving into the White House, and he’s got a seat at the table”:

… And yet for all that Jared has helped Trump, there is a sense among Jared’s friends and business associates that he sees the gold-plated vision of a Trump White House as the ultimate step in a carefully plotted ascent to redemption, one that began when his father’s scandal tarnished the family name…

Who will be Donald Trump's real first lady? https://t.co/1CLicvx6uq via @CNNOpinion pic.twitter.com/1eQtLtR3Eb

— CNN (@CNN) December 6, 2016

… Who exactly is going to be the first lady come noon January 20? The answer, I think, is no one. Melania may prefer, it seems, to remain in New York with son Barron, but that doesn’t make Ivanka the de facto first lady. It makes her someone potentially much more publicly powerful…

This isn’t the first sign that Ivanka’s influence on her father outpaces that of her stepmother. After Melania was criticized for cribbing parts of her remarks at the Republican National Convention from first lady Michelle Obama, Ivanka positioned herself as the moderate in her father’s circle during her own speech at the convention, in which she spoke out strongly for progressive values like child care tax credits.

Melania was conspicuously absent when her husband announced Mike Pence as his running mate, marking the first time in modern campaign history that the wife of a presidential candidate was not there for the public announcement. Of course Ivanka and Jared stood gamely by Trump’s side…

… [T]here has never been a first daughter who was also a serious political adviser — and certainly not like this, where the lines of business interest, of politics, and of diplomacy are so thoroughly blurred between family and the West Wing…

And no presidential daughter has come to her father’s defense quite like Ivanka has since Julie Nixon Eisenhower. Julie is the only daughter of a president who has been so publicly devoted. As the Watergate investigation dragged on, Julie stood by her father’s side. In a diary entry less than a year before her father’s resignation, Julie wrote: “Fight, fight, fight.”

She took the bold step of standing in her father’s place during a news conference at the height of the scandal. “I have seen what my father has gone through, and I am so proud of him that I would never be afraid to come out here. … I am not trying to answer questions for him. I am just trying to pray for enough courage to meet his courage.”

Julie’s praise for her father is not unlike what we’ve heard from Ivanka, who defended Trump from charges of misogyny and insisted: “My father is a feminist. He’s a big reason I am the woman I am today.” That devotion is returned: During the campaign, when asked to name a woman he would consider appointing to his Cabinet, Trump mentioned Ivanka. “She’s very popular, she’s done very well.” …

Interesting that the author, Kate Anderson Brower, seems to assume that sooner or later Ivanka will be standing on a podium to assure the media that her father is not a crook.

Pending that day, the NYTimes is already busy burnishing Ivanka’s credentials…

… Ms. Trump said on “60 Minutes” last month that when her father becomes president, she will just be a “daughter.” She has said she will use her “heightened visibility” to champion working women. (After the show, Ms. Trump was criticized for her company’s attempt to market the Ivanka Trump $10,800 diamond and gold bracelet she wore during the interview…

For a long time, Ms. Trump’s popularity owed (at least in part) to her ability to smooth out her father’s rough edges.

Where Donald Trump was brusque, Ms. Trump was tactful. Where Mr. Trump came off self-centered and easily distracted, she was self-effacing and sharply focused, traits she displayed from her earliest days growing up on the Upper East Side…

Mr. Trump and his older sons are not fixtures of the New York power scene, but Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner, who bought The New York Observer in 2006, are more socially nimble.

She was seated front row at Carolina Herrera shows at New York Fashion Week, walked the red carpet at the Glamour Woman of the Year gala at Carnegie Hall and was a guest at dinners with the movie star Hugh Jackman and the media heir James Murdoch.

When Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner broke up during their courtship, a reconciliation took place on Rupert Murdoch’s yacht – a rapprochement that was brokered by Ms. Trump’s good friend Wendi Murdoch, who at the time was still married to Mr. Murdoch…

“They’re ideal politicians,” said Peter Davis, the society journalist Mr. Kushner hired in 2011 at his wife’s suggestion to edit a magazine called Scene. “Because you come away from any interaction thinking they’re great and nice and don’t have any deeper feeling about them.”…

Mentioned in Ivanka piece: her & Kushner reconciled w help from Murdoch ex-wife Wendy Deng.

Unmentioned: rumors Deng’s involved w Putin

— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) December 4, 2016

Jia Tolentino, in the New Yorker:

Ivanka Trump’s 2009 self-help book, “The Trump Card,” opens with an unlikely sentence: “In business, as in life, nothing is ever handed to you.” Ivanka quickly adds caveats. “Yes, I’ve had the great good fortune to be born into a life of wealth and privilege, with a name to match,” she writes. “Yes, I’ve had every opportunity, every advantage. And yes, I’ve chosen to build my career on a foundation built by my father and grandfather.” Still, she insists, she and her brothers didn’t attain their positions in their father’s company “by any kind of birthright or foregone conclusion.”…

Ivanka spends much of “The Trump Card” massaging the difficulty in her premise. What can a woman born with a silver spoon in her mouth teach people who use plastic forks to eat salads at their desks? 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.”…

For anyone who still finds Ivanka to be a cipher, “The Trump Card” provides a surprisingly clear indication of her instincts, particularly when she discusses her childhood. 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. She has a sour sense of humor: she describes attending the élite prep school Choate Rosemary Hall as an opportunity “to look at the world from a whole new angle. Even if it meant living in a building named for someone else!”

When Ivanka was a kid, she got frustrated because she couldn’t set up a lemonade stand in Trump Tower. “We had no such advantages,” she writes, meaning, in this case, an ordinary home on an ordinary street. She and her brothers finally tried to sell lemonade at their summer place in Connecticut, but their neighborhood was so ritzy that there was no foot traffic. “As good fortune would have it, we had a bodyguard that summer,” she writes. They persuaded their bodyguard to buy lemonade, and then their driver, and then the maids, who “dug deep for their spare change.” The lesson, she says, is that the kids “made the best of a bad situation.” In another early business story, she and her brothers made fake Native American arrowheads, buried them in the woods, dug them up while playing with their friends, and sold the arrowheads to their friends for five dollars each…

Poor little princess, reduced to bullying the help into buying her product, and peddling knock-offs to her “friends” under false pretenses! Quite the omen for the next four years…