Ivanka Trump: how do you accessorize a world leader, daddy?
"How do you accessorize a world leader, Daddy?" This was the question Ivanka Trump could be heard asking her father, President Donald Trump, just before this group portrait was taken. And that's me, Ali Naderzad, making a poor attempt at humor in a humorless state of affairs.
The takeaway from this week's news cycle is the image of Ivanka Trump standing amid G20 leaders at the just-ended G20 meeting in Hamburg. She is surrounded by Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel, Xi Jinping, and Theresa May, among others (I could not identify two people in the portrait). Her father, Donald Trump, is standing behind her, to the left.
WATCH: Ivanka Trump hosts Miss Teen USA (1997)
Although the two Trumps are together in this portrait, at some point during a panel of the G20 summit the President left the room and Ivanka Trump took his place. It is protocol that when a world leader leaves the table they get replaced by their top representative. Thus, this father-daughter switcheroo. And yet, this smacks of partiality, and contempt towards other world leaders, on the part of Donald Trump. Is this kind of nepotism-gone-bananas the new normal? Are we going to be seeing more of this? It’s not the first time that Donald Trump foists his socialite daughter (she hosted the Miss Teen USA pageant a few years ago) unto big-ticket political affairs. People like Merkel or Christine Lagarde, not forgetting which side their bread is buttered on, have merrily sat in on discussions with the silver spoon-fed entrepreneur before. Ivanka Trump mingled with world leaders with ease and grace. How the fashion guru relate to eminent personalities like Lagarde and Merkel on issues like mass immigration to Europe, the environmental impact of uranium mining in Niger or GMOs, is a different matter altogether.
And thus, Ivanka Trump, smart, diplomatic and beautiful, sporting a megawatt smile, Ivanka Trump the boardroom dominatrix, the former model, the shrewd accessory entrepreneur, the big-hearted philanthropist, stands next to other world leaders and her father in this indecent tableau, bitter satire of what the world's powerful have become, a inauthentic group portrait that reeks not just of nepotism but also points to the meekness and the hypocrisy of otherwise respected leaders like Merkel and Lagarde, women who, rather than calling B.S. and denouncing the grotesque imposition that Ivanka Trump represents, apparently are relishing the moment.
Trump’s willingness to counterfeit the Office of the President by replacing himself, albeit temporarily, by his daughter Ivanka Trump, is a sign of his aloof indifference to the job.
Back to our family portrait. This is the new normal, and the new normal is sickening. The dull inefficiency of the Trumps (since it’s not just Donald Trump leading anymore, it’s apparently a team effort) at leading the country ("Hundreds of government posts, including ambassadorships still to be filled under Trump administration," The Telegraph), the gilded cage in which they live, their demonization of the media, it all makes me wonder if they are really fit for the job.
This poem by Zoe Leonard seemed like a good fit here :
I want a dyke for president. I want a person with AIDS for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to AIDS, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no air-conditioning, a president who has stood in line at the clinic, at the DMV, at the welfare office, and has been unemployed and laid off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown. Always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker. Always a liar, always a thief, and never caught.”
(from LE BLOG, SENSEI AGENCY's company blog)