‘Pariah Barbie’: Ivanka Trump trashed, abandoned in a New York minute
If you thought the humiliation of the election was awful, then you have no idea what acute social torture is being lined up for the Trump women now.
There are rich people, and then there are seriously rich people, and then there are seriously rich people who lose it all in a blaze of madness and end up at a facility in Florida arguing with the guards about whether the prison visitors’ dress code allows “cap sleeves” or “ecru”.
In her memoir about the collapse of her husband’s empire, Barbara Amiel recalls how she couldn’t stop crying after Conrad Black was arrested on suspicion of fraud. She’d listen to Andrea Bocelli crooning Time to Say Goodbye daily and would fantasise about the glittering revenge party she’d throw at the Savoy “for the friends who stood by us” after he got out of jail.
Boyzone would sing the song No Matter What, repeating the verse “No matter how they judge us” while the couple danced alone, even though Black “can’t begin” to dance, she says, and their friends would “have died”, and “Stephen Gately, too, would be dead” by the time he was released from jail. “My dream is f***ing over,” she moans.
Dancing with a dead man to dead music
Dancing with a dead man in front of dead people to dead music is just about how I’d sum up the life that is facing the Trumps. Every time I read about Ivanka or Melania, I wonder: what will happen to Eva and Blondi now? If you thought the humiliation of the election was awful — if you cringed at Rudy Giuliani’s running-espresso hair dye — then you have no idea what acute social torture is being lined up for the Trump women if they dare to sneak back to New York in their acres of camel bodycon.
Ivanka could be openly “harangued” if she so much as turns up anywhere “cool like the Waverly Inn”; if she dares to appear at the opera “with her thousand-dollar hair”, an actress said last week, she might easily be “ejected”.
She will be ignored by people she thought were beneath her, such as shop girls or hairdressers; her art collection is “virtually unsaleable”.
‘Opportunistic grifter’
As for work, two investigations have been widened to examine her stake in her father’s business — most New Yorkers see her as a loathsome “opportunistic grifter”, says a friend, who committed “class betrayal” when she obviously started supporting her father. No one will admit being friends with Ivanka, said one television writer on Friday, “and people admit to being friends with Henry Kissinger”.
She is fated to be “an ageing, corrupt, villainous Barbie”, said Republican Steve Schmidt, and will be “paying the price” for what she did. “There will never be a Met Ball for you again,” he added. This is the strongest curse anyone in New York society can issue.
Above all, they will be reminded that they are trash and people always thought they were.
On Tuesday a hatchet job by Ivanka’s former best school friend appeared in Vanity Fair. You had to read it to remind yourself how efficiently unpleasant the rich can be once you’ve fallen from grace.
Ivanka could always pass, she wrote, for “polite” and “refined” in places such as Newport, Rhode Island — a place so snobby the locals call the Kennedys “white trash” — but everyone still thought her father was vulgar and a social embarrassment. Even Florida rejected him: he’s fought legal battles with Palm Beach for decades.
Rich pile-on
He was “insecure” about the posh old clubs, telling diners at Mar-a-Lago that they were “a dump”. You think: why is this woman waiting until now to say this? Couldn’t we have used it four years ago? But that’s the problem with rich people. They’re shallow cowards, who’ll only pile on once they’re sure someone’s out of favour or, worse, running out of cash, as Trump might be.
Only now, for example, do we learn Ivanka was a mean girl who once “blamed a fart on a classmate” at Chapin, the upper-crusty New York school where Trump sent her in the hope he might erase the family’s clumpy German roots (Trump’s grandfather sold horse burgers and prostitutes).
Only now do we learn she orchestrated a famous Chapin “incident” in which she goaded classmates to flash their breasts at “the hot dog man” out of the window of their classroom and later pretended she was nothing to do with it. Only now do we learn that Ivanka might not — spoiler alert — really like poor people, asking her friend “why would you tell me to read a book about f***ing poor people?” after she recommended a novel about a man who ran a diner.
The feeling among sniffy New York circles is she will have to move to Florida or, even worse, Texas, where she can mobilise troops for what will inevitably be her presidential bid. How will she fare among the Darleens at the Dallas spring galas? New Yorkers can’t wait to find out.
The Times
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