Tag: Trump

“I don’t think most Americans, in their heart, want to be given something,” Ivanka Trump told Fox News’ Steve Hilton in an interview about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal proposal earlier this week. “I’ve spent a lot of time traveling around this country over the last four years. People want to work for what they get.” (In addition to an outline on how to achieve net-zero emissions in the next decade, the Green New Deal proposal would also create millions of new jobs and offer a guaranteed federal job at a livable wage; one recent poll found 71 percent of Americans supported a hike in the federal minimum wage. But OK, Ivanka.)

It’s a rich observation from a woman who has quite literally been given not just “something,” but much, much more wealth and privilege than most Americans will ever see. On Fox, Trump went on: “I think that this idea of a guaranteed minimum is not something most people want. They want the ability to be able to secure a job. They want the ability to live in a country where there’s the potential for upward mobility.”

It was a comical, if tragic picture: Trump after all has a guaranteed job (working for her father’s real estate empire and in his White House) and a rather maximum wage (she and her husband Jared Kushner have made at least $82 million in outside income as they serve in the White House). What qualifies her to speculate about what Americans in desperate financial situations with which she has zero experience do and do not want?

I know just how rose-colored her vision must be. Early in my own career, I had an obvious leg up. My mother is a famous writer, and so when I decided to write, too, I began miles ahead of the usual start line. I sold my first novel at 19 for way more than I would have if my mother weren’t Erica Jong. I knew better than to believe that talent alone got me to where I am now. Nepotism is deeply unfair, and anyone who says otherwise is blinded by their own delusions.

Someone who did not benefit from nepotism? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who wasted no time and minced no words in her response to Trump on Twitter. During her now-famous primary campaign, she wore actual holes into her shoes as she and her staff knocked on 120,000 doors. The contrast could not be starker: Ivanka Trump has worn glass Manolo Blahniks since birth, but somehow convinced herself she pulled each up with (custom, probably) bootstraps. Ocasio-Cortez was so determined to walk in her constituents’ shoes—to understand their needs and dreams—that she shredded her own.

Unlike Trump, AOC wasn’t gifted a cushy job in her father’s real estate business. Before she was elected, she worked as a waitress and a bartender. One has to imagine that the woman who knocked on all those doors and worked late shifts might know a little more about what the average American wants than the daughter of real estate impresario who married the heir to another real estate fortune does.

Wealth can insulate a person from the real world, but alas no rich person has figured out how to make it fend off negative press. In Vanity Fair, Bess Levin wrote, “Ivanka Trump comes from a long line of assholes who confuse inheriting money with hard work.” In the Daily Beast, Erin Gloria Ryan wrote, “Ivanka, like her father and siblings, was born on third base and thinks she invented baseball.” The critiques were written, retweeted, and amplified far and wide.

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