The Media Goes Deeper And Deeper Into Ivanka Trump; Zembla Looks At Jared, Ivanka & Lev Leviev

The People's Princess

By Caitlin Flanagan

Writing for New York Magazine's current cover story, Caitlin Flanagan shares an insightful view with analysis of Ivanka's childhood, her extraordinary attachment to her father -- and he to her, and the utter loathing that Progressive, Democratic and even Independent women are feeling for Ivanka these days.

Ivanka is now in Saudi Arabia, where she met with women leaders this afternoon. Surely the Trump daughter is shaking over the announcement that the FBI and now Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into ties between the Trump Administration involves a person of interest in Trump's inner circle. Most pundits point to Ivanka's husband Jared Kushner and his previously unreported meetings with sanctioned Russian bank Vnesheconombank. 

Equally interesting -- and an association that involves Ivanka and Jared both -- are the couple's ties to the King of Diamonds -- notably of blood diamonds -- Russian billionaire Lev Leviev.

Part 1 of the Zembla investigation is explosive in its allegations about Trump. Part 2 is clearly still in development. 

Previously accepted in New York by Democratic progressives, the pummeling she's getting in New York -- where Manhattan voters voted against daddy nine to one; and DC where voters rejected Trump by 23 to one -- has caught the First Daughter off guard, much as her father is truly shocked from all reports, that Dems have a big problem with daddy firing the FBI Director James Comey.

Flanagan draws comparisons between Ivanka and Diana as "the people's princess".

"Diana, it was decided, in a brilliant phrase coined almost on the spot by Tony Blair, the morning after she was killed, was “the people’s princess.” Ivanka is a different kind of people’s princess. She wears couture gowns of staggering cost, but she sells shoes that a bank teller can afford on a splurge. Like many of her fans — and like Diana — she is the daughter of a messy divorce, but she has found a way to rewrite that unlovely story into one of unbroken father-daughter devotion. She admits occasionally to the reality of skillful nannies, but she sends out pictures and videos of herself with her adorable kids so you know that she’s a mom, one of us. She advances the kind of Spanx feminism that crosses the political divide and that can unite even the pro-choice and the pro-life: feminism as a fashion to be worn, as a consumer need that should be met by a canny entrepreneur, as the belief that a woman really can do anything because all that is required is the right attitude and the right giant handbag. She has probably never in her life had to visit a Planned Parenthood or sit on a phone for hours fighting with a health-insurance company, never lived in the income bracket that won’t be much helped by her proposed child-care tax credit — nor would her fans want her to have experienced any of these things. They haven’t fallen in love with a nobody, after all.

Like a princess, Ivanka devotes herself to the needs of a waning king. He is Lear — “All the power of his wits have given way to his impatience” — but Lear with only one relevant daughter, and to her has fallen the task of keeping his terrifying impatience from destroying not just their shared empire but the world itself. He is strangely dependent on her now. And so are we."