“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 offering an outline on how to achieve net-zero emissions in the next decade, the Green New Deal proposal proposes creating millions of new jobs and offering 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.”
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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 starting 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.
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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.
So the smooth-skinned presidential daughter who once published a book titled Women Who Work that Jia Tolentino in the New Yorker called “an even worse idea than it seems” and “painfully oblivious” tweeted out a “correction.”
Trump wanted to make clear that she does not oppose the existence of the minimum wage (and good; while it’s too low, the federal minimum wage is still law). She is, however, against guaranteed work. You know, the kind she’s had her entire life.
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“I’ve spent much of the last 2 years focused on inclusive economic growth via workforce development and skills training as well as pro-working family policies such as the doubled Child Tax Credit & CCDBG,” she continued.
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We can evaluate just how much (or little) Trump has accomplished since her father’s inauguration at a later date. Although for now, let’s acknowledge she expanded the child tax credit and has done about zero else.
The point of Trump's “rebuttal” was to tell AOC and the mean, mean critics that despite her near complete silence on her father’s radically conservative and regressive policies, she cares deeply about economic inequality. Like a pageant queen, she has her answers rehearsed. And she returned to them on Twitter. But for one precious moment, the veneer cracked. And she let a little of the not-so-polished truth slip out: She likes “inclusive economic growth” when she can benefit from it. She believes in the virtue of hard work…for people who aren’t her.
AOC and most Americans know better. When she was sworn in, Ocasio-Cortez Instagrammed a photo of herself with her mother and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. In the caption she wrote, “It wasn’t long ago that we felt our lives were over; that there were only so many do-overs until it was just too late, or too much to take, or we were too spiritually spent…. It was not long ago that our family’s hope was so dim it was barely an ember. Darkness taught me transformation cannot solely be an individual pursuit, but also a community trust. We must lean on others to strive on our own.”
