​Ivanka doesn’t moderate Trump; she sells him to moderates | Lindy West

Are there still people out there who think that Ivanka Trump is a moderating influence on her father? If you believe that – that the Donald Trump currently Big-Wheeling all over the Middle East is the toned-down version – can I just ask, respectfully: what exactly do you think Donald would be doing to the country if he wasn’t under the supposedly soothing spell of Ivanka? Outlawing renewable energy in favour of whale oil? Replacing the constitution with the lyrics to Ted Nugent’s Free for All? Just straight-up cannibalism?

That’s like saying that fur is a moderating influence on a wolf. (It’s so soft!)

Ivanka is not simply tolerant of her father’s blathering radicalism, let alone nobly embattled by it; she is an active proponent and beneficiary of the outrageous robbery her family is perpetrating against those they purportedly serve. Come on. She loves it. You can tell because she continues to be a beaming member of the administration instead of an estranged daughter who cries every day in her nest of shame.

The Guardian reported this week on the shocking brutality of the president’s budget proposal:

“Cuts to Medicaid over the next decade exceed even the more than $800bn reductions contained in a health bill passed by the House of Representatives earlier this month. The president also aims to slash welfare by $274bn over a decade, including $193bn on food stamps, driving millions of people off the programme … The blueprint also shaves 31.4% off funding for the Environmental Protection Agency and 29.1% off that for the State Department and other international programmes.”

It goes on like that. Donald’s dream budget would defund Planned Parenthood, destroy public broadcasting and funnel billions of dollars toward his ludicrous border wall and its defence, a project that, if completed, will serve absolutely no purpose except for a symbolic one – bolstering the lie that America is a white country and emboldening racists to harass, intimidate and discriminate against immigrants. So moderate! Good job, Ivanka!

Sure, Ivanka claims to care about women. She sometimes says the words “paid family leave” out loud and even got her dad to mention it in his budget proposal. Plus, she wrote a whole book about women having jobs (a daring stance!). But what about all the women whose safety, livelihoods, and legal rights and protections are already being threatened by her father’s policies? What about poor women, refugee women, Muslim women, trans women, gay women, undocumented women, disabled women, incarcerated women, women of colour, women working minimum wage, women who can’t find jobs, women who can’t afford childcare, women who need abortions, women who don’t want to die of cervical cancer, women in abusive relationships, women with pre-existing conditions and women who weren’t born into ghastly amounts of inherited wealth, handed the keys to real-estate empires and endlessly congratulated on their entrepreneurial acumen? What about women who are just trying to get by?

Ivanka cares about women in the same way that her father is “the least racist person you’ve ever met”. The way is lying. When it comes to letting us know who they are, the Trumps are more showers than tellers.

During the Trump family’s bizarre state visit to Saudi Arabia last week, while her father was distracted by the promise of a great big orb he could fondle, Ivanka busied herself the same way she busies herself in the US: crooning nonsensical boilerplate about empowerment at women whose challenges she hasn’t bothered to understand. According to the Washington Post, Ivanka met with “a small group of accomplished Saudi women gathered for a dialogue with her about how to build on their successes”.

“In every country, including the United States, women and girls face challenges,” the heiress said to a group of women who are not allowed to travel without a permission slip from a man. “Saudi Arabia’s progress, especially in recent years, is very encouraging, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.”

What a bunch of nothing. It’s the same nothing that fills Ivanka’s books, her speeches, her shoe designs and her understanding of feminism. Ivanka is a husk animated by pure branding.

If you’ll follow me on a little tangent, I’ve noticed that a lot of men find the body positivity movement threatening because they are convinced its goal is to force them to have sex with fat women. That’s silly (and not on the table, boys). The real goal, if you distill it to its essence, is to kill the pernicious and persistent fiction that beauty correlates with goodness. That people like Ivanka must have our best interests in mind because their hair is very shiny. That we can trust her because of her teeth. That pretty people deserve more than the rest of us.

It’s not true; we can’t, and they don’t. Ivanka’s nail beds don’t put her on the right side of history. In fact, Ivanka doesn’t moderate her father at all; she sells her father to moderates. Watch out.