Manhattan is ready to shun returning Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner
‘You villainous Barbie.’ Anti-Trump New Yorkers look forward to snubbing Ivanka and Jared, who once were ‘people like us’.
In the early days of the Trump presidency, New Yorkers protesting against the actions of the new government would sometimes appeal to Ivanka Trump or Jared Kushner, the president’s daughter and son-in-law, as allies of “the resistance”.
Ms Trump in particular became the focus because “we think she is potentially one of us”, the artist Marilyn Minter said in November 2016.
In the four years since, the idea that the couple represented “the softer side of Trumpism” has been replaced with a bitter sense of betrayal and the fervent hope that the couple will now return to the Big Apple so that they can be thoroughly shunned, if not prosecuted.
Two investigations in New York into US President Donald Trump and his businesses, being conducted by the Manhattan district attorney and the New York state attorney, are said to have broadened their inquiries to examine tax write-offs on consulting fees that went to his daughter.
In 2017 Ms Trump reported receiving payments from a consulting company she owned that exactly matched tax deductions taken by the Trump Organisation for hotel projects, The New York Times reported, noting that there was no indication that she was the focus of the investigation or in line for charges.
Ms Trump, 39, said the investigations were a “fishing expedition” and “very clearly part of a continued political vendetta”.
On Twitter she added: “This is harassment pure and simple. This ‘inquiry’ by NYC Democrats is 100 per cent motivated by politics, publicity and rage. They know very well that there’s nothing here and that there was no tax benefit whatsoever. These politicians are simply ruthless.”
However, many New Yorkers not attached to the justice system have begun envisioning other punishments for the couple, once hailed for tightrope walking the line between familial loyalty and the prevailing attitudes of Manhattan.
In the four years since they abandoned the city for Washington, Ms Trump’s father has designated New York an anarchist jurisdiction and threatened to withhold federal funds and even a vaccine as part of a dispute with Andrew Cuomo, the state’s governor.
“I have had visions of Ivanka with her thousand-dollar hair and makeup trying to show up at the opera like that and getting ejected,” the author and actor Jill Kargman told The New York Times. “The poetic justice is that coming to New York would put them in a kind of prison already.”
In the early years of the Trump administration Ivanka was regarded as a moderating force on her father, who pushed for criminal justice reform. But attitudes towards her have since hardened. Ms Trump became a forceful surrogate for her father, appearing at rallies deep in Pennsylvania, where she compared him to Winston Churchill and derided his detractors.
When the president began challenging the results of the election and claiming that there was widespread fraud, his daughter joined him in the fight. “Every legally cast vote should be counted,” she wrote on Twitter. “Every illegally cast vote should not. This should not be controversial.”
Lysandra Ohrstrom, a childhood friend of Ms Trump, wrote recently that she had watched her steadily lay waste to “the image she worked so hard to build” as both a friend of feminists and an embodiment of the American dream.
Steve Schmidt, a former Republican strategist who is one of the founders of The Lincoln Project, a political action committee formed in opposition to Mr Trump, responded with a caustic farewell.
“Goodbye Ivanka,” he wrote. “You will be loved by the people you disdain and disdained by the people you want to be loved by. There will never be a Met Ball for you again. You are fated to live out your years as an ageing, corrupt, villainous Barbie; paying the price for what you did.”
Lara Trump, the wife of Ivanka’s brother Eric, is said to be considering a run for the Senate in North Carolina in 2022, while Mr Trump himself is said to want to run for the presidency in 2024, suggesting that the family could retain a grip on the Republican party for years. And with it perhaps, a standing invitation to at least some parties on the Upper East Side.
The Times