Like father, like daughter, like, oops.
On Thursday, a little late to the party, Donald Trump said that his presidency is not turning out as expected. In an interview with Reuters, he revealed that he thought the job “would be easier.” At the same time, his daughter Ivanka has emerged as a target of fiery criticism from the left and the right.
On Wednesday, conservative commentators Mark Levin, Alex Jones and Amanda Carpenter called Ivanka “Trump’s problem child” and — in the alt-right’s equivalent of Salem’s dunking policy — said she was a “lot like Hillary.”
The incident that provoked this: On the Today show Wednesday, Ivanka said allowing Syrian refugees into the U.S. “has to be part of the discussion.”
This comes after a month in which conservative commentators seem increasingly to be having a problem with the dulcet-toned first daughter, afraid that Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner are stealth liberals and will influence the president. Last weekend, a former Breitbart writer said that “One of the problems for Donald Trump right now, period, is Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.”
Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, Ivanka has been criticized for being amorphously “complicit” with her father’s anti-choice, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, pro-fork stances. But reporters have uncovered concrete facts why progressive haters have been hating and are probably gonna for the foreseeable future:
The Washington Post reported this week that workers in a Chinese factory make approximately $1 an hour to produce Ivanka Trump branded clothing — working 60 hours a week for $62, well below minimum wage even in parts of China.
Ivanka’s book “Women Who Work” debuts next week.
The Post pointed out that “the president’s daughter has sought to cast herself as both a champion of workplace issues and a defender of her father’s ‘buy American, hire American’ agenda.”
Yet her peers are not buying what she’s selling: Earlier this month, a survey conducted by Cosmopolitan found that only 35 percent of young women view Ivanka favorably.
Ivanka previously said that she doesn’t care about making money, referring to herself, not her employees. Yet money is being made. Reporters have found that the presidency has built a fountain of cash (not literally — yet) for the Trump family: Imports of Ivanka’s clothing have increased 166 percent last year and sales have hit record levels in 2017. And Vox’s Matthew Iglesias outlined why the Trumps are making money “hand over fist” since Inauguration Day.
And he was not referring to the size of the president’s actual fists.
