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You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: With This Family, It’s A Sickness

Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: With This Family, It’s A Sickness

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No, SRSLY:

Jia Tolentino, in the New Yorker, on Ivanka’s own memoir:

… 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…

Family values: Bully the help into paying for your luxuries, and scam your ‘friends’ with fake goods. I’ll bet her old man was genuinely proud of her when she told him about it, too.

Reader Interactions

24Comments

  4. 4.

    Yarrow

    Outside of her father, Ivanka is the top of my list of traitors I want to see in prison. She’s the worst of the kids because she’s the favorite. She’s treasoning all over the globe. Cannot wait for Mueller to come for her.

  7. 7.

    Mary G

    She’s a millimeter away from “Let them eat cake.”

    I’m haunted by the thought of the maids, who were probably illegal immigrants paid far below minimum wage, having to cough up “spare change” that probably took food out of their children’s mouths for these spoiled brats who are proud of learning to screw over the little people.

  8. 8.

    Jay

    @Mary G:

    Everbody below supervisor in the Crime Family was an undocumented immigrant, not just the maids.

    The day the MSM stops ignoring shit, and selling shit, and asks The Bloat, “ given your crackdown on undocumented labour, how are you going to manage to keep your companies running?” is the day they die.

  9. 9.

    tokyokie

    @Mary G: No only that, it sounds like the kids were using frozen concentrate or some such rather than making it from scratch, because juicing all those lemons requires effort.

  11. 11.

    Patricia Kayden

    Ivanka is too dumb to understand how bad those stories in her memoir make her look to regular people. Reminds me of Romney telling that awful story about forcing his dog to ride on the roof of his car in the cold for a family trip to Canada. Made him look like the horrible, heartless man he is.

  13. 13.

    patrick II

    this is kind of like mansplaining but entitled heiresssplaining instead. You know, when someone thinks they must explain things they know nothing about to you in slow, simple terms because people like you and I (women in mainsplaining, working people in heiressplaining) are just a little to slow to understand their brilliance.

  17. 17.

    Jay

    I getva little tired of the media and “hot takes”.

    The Dutch busted a 90,000 bottle delivery of $4 vodka to the DPRK.

    Wisecracks, jokes, Little Kim’s after party.

    The reality is that the DPRK smuggles booze, sells it to the Yakuzo in Japan, as a cash flow.

  18. 18.

    JR

    If you ever wanted to know what the Trump kids’ life was like as children, you could always watch Jamie Johnson’s “Born Rich”.

    *spoiler alert* it’s not flattering!

  19. 19.

    SFAW

    I hope I live long enough to see the entire family behind bars, and the disasters they’ve wrought undone.

    But given the usual unwillingness to make the “wealthy” (I don’t consider the Traitor-in-Chief, as a thousandaire, “wealthy,” but most of America does) and powerful pay for their crimes, that’s probably a futile hope. But, hey, a kid’s gotta hope.

  20. 20.

    debbie

    Pair this with Wilbur Ross’s statement that unpaid federal workers shouldn’t worry about being unpaid because they could get low-interest loans. //

  21. 21.

    Another Scott

    … fake Native American arrowheads …

    . Chips off the old block…

    VanityFair:

    Years ago, while reporting a book about a real-estate developer and reality-TV star named Donald Trump, Tim O’Brien accompanied his subject on a private jet ride to Los Angeles. The plane, as you can imagine, was overly ornate; hanging on one wall, for instance, was a painting of two young girls—one in an orange hat, the other wearing a floral bonnet—in the impressionistic style of Renoir.

    Curious, O’Brien asked Trump about the painting: was it an original Renoir? Trump replied in the affirmative. It was, he said. “No, it’s not Donald,” O’Brien responded. But, once again, Trump protested that it was.

    “Donald, it’s not,” O’Brien said adamantly. “I grew up in Chicago, that Renoir is called Two Sisters on the Terrace, and it’s hanging on a wall at the Art Institute of Chicago.” He concluded emphatically: “That’s not an original.”

    Trump, of course, did not agree, but O’Brien dropped the conversation topic and moved on with his interview. He thought that he had heard the last of the Renoir conversation. But the next day, when they boarded the plane to head back to New York City, Trump again pointed to the painting, and as if the conversation had never happened, he pointed to the fake and proclaimed, “You know, that’s an original Renoir.” O’Brien chose not to engage, and dropped the conversation.

    Then, in 2016, the unimaginable happened: Trump was elected president of the United States. A few days afterward, Trump sat down with 60 Minutes for one of his first interviews as president-elect. O’Brien was watching the interview, which took place in Trump Tower. It was highly choreographed, with cameras set up precisely where Trump wanted them. O’Brien watched Trump seated in an ugly mini-throne—“the kind of furniture Trump loves,” O’Brien notes—and sure enough, in the background, hanging on a wall, was that fake Renoir. “I’m sure he’s still telling people who come into the apartment, ‘It’s an original, it’s an original,’” O’Brien told me on this week’s Inside the Hive podcast.

    While this story is comical and sad and utterly bizarre on so many levels, it’s also emblematic of Trump’s very essence. “He believes his own lies in a way that lasts for decades,” O’Brien told me. “He’ll tell the same stories time and time again, regardless of whether or not facts are right in front of his face.” And, as O’Brien points out, that’s what makes Trump so dangerous in his current war with the media around so-called fake news. “Its foundation is that he’s the final arbiter of what is true and what isn’t,” O’Brien said, “and it’s one of the reasons that he’s so dangerous.”

    Yup.

    And we’ve known it for a long time… :-(

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  22. 22.

    Dr. Ronnie James, D.O.

    @Another Scott: This kind of behavior is a hallmark of narcissism: their absence of self esteem bends the truth the way a black hole bends approaching light, and the stories stay engrained in the bent version.

  23. 23.

    Mnemosyne

    @patrick II:

    I remember someone saying in the Bush II years that W would explain things he didn’t understand to the press in very slow and simple terms because it was the way someone else had had to explain it to him.

    I think that’s the same reason Ivanka does it. She is Dunning-Kruger in heels made from someone else’s design.

  24. 24.

    BruceJ

    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…

    Born into a life of crime.

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