Left, by Daniel Zuchnik; RIght, by George Pimentel, both from WireImage/Getty Images.
Growing up Trump affords a supernatural ability to compartmentalize. Like a nine-year-old Ivanka walking to school swarmed by paparazzi in the midst of her parent’s messy divorce and still actually going to school to face her Upper East Side classmates. Or hearing her father’s repeated comments about how attractive she is and still appearing side by side with him as an executive at his company. More recently, as Donald Trump’s campaign navigates one gaffe after another—a call for “Second Amendment people” to “do something” to block Hillary Clinton from appointing judges, or calling on Russian hackers to target his political enemies, for example—Ivanka has gone about promoting her eponymous lifestyle brand with little acknowledgment of her father’s fires burning around her.
As Donald sat down to tape an interview with ABC’s This Week in which he trashed a Gold Star family, for example, Ivanka went on posting “some tips on throwing your next #summer soiree #HostessWithTheMostess” on Instagram. Now, she has her own brand, apart from her father’s, to get on with, and it is fair to assume that many people looking to Ivanka for hostess tips aren’t fazed by her father’s sit-down on a Sunday-morning political show. But the ultimate act of compartmentalization came when Ivanka posted an Instagram ode to her friend Wendi Deng last week, celebrating her profile in Vogue by calling her “one of those friends that inspires you to work hard.”
The two make for an interesting pairing. Deng, who was married to and subsequently divorced from conservative media billionaire Rupert Murdoch, had reportedly been romantically linked with Vladimir Putin (a rumor that has not been, at all, confirmed). Of course, Ivanka’s father has, in recent months, been accused of his own links to Putin. (That Hollywood bigwigs David Geffen and Brian Grazer were also tagged in the Croatia photo make this more like a version of summer billionaire bingo than anything.)
The rumored Putin connections likely have nothing to do with one another, but that doesn’t mean the dots weren’t easy enough to connect (or note with a laugh, at least). It is not exactly the sharpest political move, to highlight any sort of link, in the midst of a presidential campaign.
But Deng and Ivanka have a long history together. In fact, Deng is reportedly responsible for re-uniting Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, who broke up in 2008 when their religious differences caused them to split. A new New Yorker profile of the couple relays how Deng invited Jared for a weekend on the Murdoch family yacht. “You’re working so hard. Come with Rupert and me on the boat for the weekend,” she said. He showed up without knowing that Deng had also invited Ivanka. Trump later converted to Judaism, and the couple married in 2009.
It is not surprising, then, that someone so adept at building mental walls between her life and her father’s foibles would publicize a politically inexpedient European holiday with a friend whose network of associations are not ideally suited to the Trump campaign. Billionaires will billionaire together, often on a yacht in the Adriatic. Believe it or not, without much thought they are able to leave the dictators out of it.
Trump’s America: The R.N.C. in Portrait, State by State
Alabama: Judy Carns
“We’ve been in politics for a long time and we keep sending people to Washington to make a difference and we don’t do that much changing. I just said, ‘This guy’s got what we need.’”
Photo: Photograph by Justin Bishop.
Alaska: Jerry Ward, 68
Photo: Photograph by Justin Bishop.
Arizona: Russ Clark, 57
“We need to unify. It needs to be done regardless of the 17 choices that you had going into the whole thing.”
Photo: Photograph by Justin Bishop.
Arkansas: Bob Ballinger, 42
Photo: Photograph by Justin Bishop.
West Virginia: Michael Baisden, 66
“My hat is my hard hat from work. That’s actually coal dust . . . I wore it for about 16 years in a coal mine. Whenever a sticker would get scratched I wouldn’t remove it, I’d just cover it with another. It probably weighs about 10 pounds more than it should but it’s my hard hat. . . . There’s probably a thousand dollars’ worth of stickers on that hat if you go through all the layers. I used to sell heavy equipment in the mining industry. It became [that] there was no return on my investment. I couldn’t make any money because of the downturn in the coal-mining industry, so I’m not doing that anymore.”
