The opening line of Ivanka Trump’s 2009 bestseller, The Trump Card, is almost too good to be true. She was 27 years old, a member of America’s most exorbitant family and the Trump Organisation’s Executive Vice President of Development and Acquisitions when she wrote: ‘in business, as in life, nothing is ever handed to you.’
The irony of that statement coming from her is, of course, excruciating. She follows promptly with some caveats: ‘Yes, I’ve had the great good fortune to be born into a life of wealth and privilege, with a name to match. Yes, I’ve had every opportunity, every advantage. And yes, I’ve chosen to build my career on a foundation built by my father and grandfather, so I can certainly see why an outsider might dismiss my success in our family business as yet another example of nepotism.’ She says things like this throughout the book – because if she’s the one to say it, it takes the weight off the accusation.
Ivanka spends the next 241 pages trying to argue against the allegation of nepotism. She tries to justify her success and establish her identity outside the Trump brand, while neatly laying out exactly how it benefited her career. She tells the story of her childhood with parents Donald and Ivana Trump as though it’s a professional qualification in itself – because, in her case, it was. She speaks about her astonishingly fast ascent in business (at 25, she was the youngest board member of a publicly traded company in the United States), she has to believe that success belongs only to her and you can tell she’s trying to convince herself as well as the reader.
The entire book is an exercise in self-defense and you might catch yourself almost feeling sorry for Ivanka. The first chapter of her career advice bible is a pep talk to herself, wherein she says things like ‘you’re not about to be dismissed because someone might think you’ve had an unfair advantage’. She claims to have too thick a skin to allow any such pesky accusations rile her, which explains why she remains so composed in the face of criticism now. Indeed, Ivanka’s elegant stoicism is an important part of her image as the President’s daughter. But then, you realise that the thing about Ivanka Trump is that she believes she is exactly where she deserves to be. She thought that when she was given her current role in the Trump Organization at the age of 24, less than a year out of college, and she thinks it now that she has an unofficial position advising the leader of the free world. Where Ivanka’s opinion of herself may once have been naïve, it is now potentially dangerous. The eldest Trump daughter has barely changed her worldview since 2009.
Apart from getting an increase in confidence, that is. Back then, Ivanka wrote about feeling ‘completely out of my depth’, ‘anxious’ and ‘overmatched’ in board meetings. It sounded like Imposter Syndrome, only she had extremely valid reasons to question her own position. Anyway, that trepidation seems to have disappeared, as she takes what she believes is her rightful place beside her father in the White House. But, perhaps the most alarming thing about Ivanka’s position in the world is her failure to understand how privilege works. ‘After all, I eventually realised, we’ve all got our own baggage,’ she writes. Only, this is her definition of baggage: ‘whatever we do, whatever our backgrounds, we’ve all had some kind of advantage along the way. Some break that might have gone to someone else. Some edge or inside track we couldn’t have counted on.’ Who is she talking about here? Which parallel universe does she exist in, where everyone has the burden of superfluous advantage? In the same chapter, Ivanka describes herself as ‘just like any other young woman in the workplace’. It’s unclear whether this is delusion, ignorance, or part of Ivanka’s personal brand as the benevolent young Trump. Either way, it is terrifying that she might have influence on any policy that affects the lives of real human beings.
The most perfect analogy for Ivanka’s career is actually a childhood anecdote she tells in this book. As a kid, she was visiting one of the Trump casinos in Atlantic City, playing that arcade game where you manoeuvre a giant mechanical claw inside a glass box to pick up a stuffed toy. Only, the claw is deliberately made so that it can’t support the weight of the toy and the whole game is actually rigged against the player; it’s there just to take your spare change and raise your blood pressure. But when Ivanka Trump played that game and furrowed her little brow in frustration, a security guard who worked for her father would simply come over with a set of keys, unlock the glass case, scoop out the toy she wanted and hand it to her. ‘Sucked being me, huh?’ Ivanka writes, having unwittingly found the perfect metaphor for her current position in public life.
It should be said that Ivanka Trump is an intelligent, highly educated, proficient business woman. The way she recounts her career, it sounds as though she is savvy, effective and persuasive. She tried always to meet her father’s high expectations and she has always made the most of what has been given to her. She is confident and self-assured – and that is perhaps the one way in which other working women could actually learn from her. Because the question remains: does this careers advice book give any actual careers advice? The answer is yes, sort of, kind of, a bit.
When Ivanka couldn’t get into a particular professor’s class at college, she just turned up. As an undergraduate, she talked her way into a prestigious graduate subject with MBA students (she would later decide an MBA, for her, was ‘redundant’ because…Trump). As a young, female board director in a room full of middle-aged men, she held her own and never let on that she was nervous. Basically, the best advice this book can give an aspiring young businesswoman is to behave with Ivanka Trump’s sense of entitlement. You know that saying ‘Lord, grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man’? Well… perhaps we should reframe it slightly ‘Good, sweet Lord, grant every woman the confidence of an Ivanka Trump’! She has had flashes of ingenuity that any timid woman in the workplace could do well to emulate, though they may not come by the confidence to do so in quite the same way.
The actual career advice she offers, when she gets to it, is pretty simple: be prompt to meetings, value other people’s time, show up, eat breakfast. Dress the part, don’t wear too much perfume, do your homework, have your answers ready, ask questions, make a good impression. Read the news, take classes and do as Rupert Murdoch does: come into the office on Sundays. Don’t put your phone on the conference room table or sleep it with by your bed. And then various logistical things about getting into the jewellery business.
The confusing thing about Ivanka Trump is that she says things that sound a lot like self-awareness: ‘it wouldn’t be reasonable to suggest that young entrepreneurs go out and land their own reality show to raise their public profile or work it out so that they just happen to be born to a media magnate dad who’s managed to turn the family name into a precious commodity.’ But actually, that’s essentially what she does suggest. Saying things like this are her way of deflecting the exact criticism this book deserves: that you can only do as Ivanka Trump says if you are Ivanka Trump. It was true then and it remains true now: there is, has ever been and only ever will be one Ivanka Trump.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.