The Rules Do Not Apply to Ivanka Trump and That's the Problem
The vagueness of Ivanka's role doesn't diminish its dangerous potential.
Here's a sobering little fact for you: We are more than 60 days, two Muslim bans, and one Kellyanne Conway "commercial" into the Trump administration, and we still have no idea what Ivanka Trump's job is.
She is not, she says, the first lady of the United States; "there's one first lady, and Melania will be an unbelievable first lady," she told ABC News. She is not actively running her eponymous lifestyle and jewelry brands, nor is she working for the Trump Organization, having taken a "formal leave of absence" in January. Finally—and perhaps most importantly—she is not a formal White House staffer. White House staffers take oaths of office; they are governed by strict ethical guidelines; they are, importantly, prohibited from working on projects that stand to benefit their personal business interests.
None of those rules apply to Ivanka. She has never been given a job title; she has never been formally considered, let alone hired, for any position in her father's administration. And yet, this week—after months of meeting with foreign leaders, sitting in on key meetings, and in all other ways acting like someone who worked for the president—Ivanka was given a White House office, a government communications device, and a security clearance that allows her to receive classified information.
The ethical problems posed by this arrangement are so glaring that Ivanka's team has responded to them pre-emptively; her attorney, Jamie Gorelick, announced that Ivanka will voluntarily "abide by all the ethical rules that she would abide by if she were an employee." Experts say this may well solve nothing, since rules are only rules because there are consequences for breaking them—"if she can voluntarily subject herself to the rules, she can voluntarily un-subject herself to the rules," former Obama ethics czar Norm Eisen tells Politico.
Indeed, she may already be voluntarily un-subjecting herself from the rule about using the office for profit; even though Ivanka no longer participates in the day-to-day operations of her lifestyle brand, and though it has been placed in trust, she still owns it. This has caused trouble in the past, as when the president publicly lashed out at retailers for not carrying her brand, or when Kellyanne Conway promoted Ivanka's products during an interview. By touting herself as a policy advisor to the president on issues like family leave and child care (as we've covered), Ivanka is arguably still marketing her brand's #WomenWhoWork campaign, which has a book out in May. In fact, as we speak (well: as I type and you read), Ivanka is facing a class-action lawsuit from a San Francisco boutique, alleging that her relationship with the president gives her brand "unfair advantage" on the market.
President Trump, for what it's worth, has denied the influence of her role. In January, he tweeted that he was "not trying to get 'top level security clearance' for [his] children."
Looking beyond the obvious financial tangles and opportunities for corruption, the sheer vagueness of Ivanka's function points to something perhaps even more worrying. Namely, the possibility that the president needs a babysitter. Consider: Even as Ivanka and her team announced the new position in the White House, no one seemed entirely clear on what it was. Yet everyone was clear that she'd already been doing it for a while. Gorelick told National Public Radio that Ivanka would "continue to be the eyes and ears of her father." Ivanka Trump's statement to Politico said that she would "continue to offer my father my candid advice and counsel, as I have for my entire life."
These aren't descriptions of a new gig, or a specific role; they're descriptions of a relationship, some ongoing dynamic that only Ivanka and her father have. At our sister publication Cosmopolitan.com, Amanda Carpenter attributes Ivanka's security clearance and office to nepotism, writing that "[by] taking this role, Ivanka is taking away a life-changing opportunity from another woman, who undoubtedly would have more expertise than the first daughter."
But it's a mistake to dismiss Ivanka as a mere heiress coasting on her father's name. She was part of the reality TV show, the hotels, the foreign properties, the presidential campaign; according to a Forbes writer who profiled her in 2013, "she plays a very significant role within the Trump Organization—perhaps an even bigger one than she's given credit for." Specifically, in contrast to her showboating father, Ivanka was the one who actually did her homework and sealed deals her father could not: "He's kind of an old school, seat-of-the-pants type of dealmaker," said one anonymous source who had negotiated with Ivanka. "She's the opposite: She's done the work and put in the time. When she asks for something, she has all the research to back it up."
Yet Ivanka's work for her father also consists of managing his behavior. There is no other woman this nepotistic appointment is depriving because no actual body of expertise is being tapped. Ivanka's job isn't to do anything—Ivanka's job is to be Ivanka. She has, indeed, been doing that for a while. She is his ambassador to the outside world, perpetually reassuring others that he's not all that bad, or telling them what he really meant to do or to say—in Ivanka-Speak, Trump is not sexist for alleging that Megyn Kelly has "blood coming out of her wherever," he's just "very blunt" —but she is also, reportedly, responsible for smoothing over and pacifying his emotions behind the scenes. People who have observed them together describe Ivanka as acting more like Donald Trump's parent than like his daughter, accommodating him and keeping him on track; "she is always trying to calm him down and say, 'I don't know if this is good for business,'" according to an anonymous source in a Huffington Post Highline article. Notoriously, some of Donald Trump's worst Twitter wars are started on Shabbat, when Ivanka (who is Jewish) is out of the office and out of touch.
Ivanka's competence, or her unenviable role mopping up Trump's emotional messes, doesn't excuse her for her complicity; if anything, it makes her more accountable than ever for Trump's excesses and mistakes. (Sometimes very literally. One particularly scandal-plagued and potentially illegal hotel project, for example, has been written off by Trump as something he had nothing to do with, yet there's documentation of Ivanka being on-site and actively involved with the planning.) If the ongoing conflicts of interest surrounding her brands are anything to go by, her sense of ethics is no better developed than his.
Ivanka deserves no one's pity. Yet this dynamic—the theatrical, unreliable, charismatic man soaking up the credit, and the competent, detail-oriented woman plugging away in the background and compensating for his personality problems—is hardly unfamiliar. Nor is the fact that women are channeled into seeking "soft power" through influence over the men in their lives, rather than accumulating power on their own merits. Ivanka is what female power will always look like in a society where the closest female equivalent to "president" is "president's wife" or "president's daughter." Despite all her talk about working women, Ivanka is living confirmation that many women's lives are still largely defined by the work of managing and comforting men.