That nice Trump family
by digby
This article about Ivanka’s future plans is a big yawn. Honestly, who cares? But this part of it shows that she’s her father is a gross pig. She is a damaged person:
She operated in fear around him, says a friend. Sometimes she would tell a taxi to drive around the block if she saw him getting out of a car in front of her. When Ivanka would receive a call with his number on the caller ID, she’d become very anxious. She’d have a momentary panic about what he was going to say about her life and whether she was about to be blindsided by his disapproval. “I think she knew,” the friend says, “and at times resented, that she was a prisoner to the condition of seeking his approval at all times.” When they’d talk, “she was very careful. It was like listening to a person talking to her boss.”
But in her father’s presence, Ivanka never talked back or even rolled her eyes. Friends I spoke with have not seen them fight. She played the dutiful daughter on flights to Mar-a-Lago with her friends when her father would do cringey things like put a VHS tape of his recent media clips on the TV or ask them which female stars they considered hot. Among the members of New York society in the ’90s and early aughts, he was seen as a credit clown, a joke, but never to Ivanka. His chauvinism frustrated her, however, and she was repelled by the way he talked about women’s bodies — who was fat, who was not. In 2003, when Paris Hilton’s sex tape was leaked on the internet, Donald wouldn’t stop talking about it, saying, “Paris is laughing all the way to the bank, she’s got the last laugh, she’s marvelous.” Ivanka could not believe her father was not only idolizing an airhead heiress caught blowing a guy on a night-vision video but encouraging her to follow Paris’s lead. (Speaking from the White House, Grisham says, “This is untrue and is disgusting.”)
“The thing with Paris hurt Ivanka a lot,” says a friend. “He was heartbreaking to her at times.” But as with so much of her father’s behavior, she buried her feelings and moved on. She told herself that the story of her father’s attitude toward women was, simply, complicated, according to friends. Donald hired many women at the Trump Organization, she knew, and these women weren’t universally pretty; he wanted to employ women with traditionally masculine attitudes and almost enjoyed feeling discomfited by them, having them boss him around. Her father may have had issues with women, she felt, but he did not meet the textbook definition of a misogynist — a belief she seems to hold to the present day.
I believe the sex tape thing. Why?
When asked on The View how he would react if Ivanka, a former teen model, posed for Playboy, Trump replied, “It would be really disappointing — not really — but it would depend on what’s inside the magazine.”
He added: “I don’t think Ivanka would do that, although she does have a very nice figure. I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”
“Isn’t that terrible? How terrible? Is that terrible?”
“After I met Ivanka and praised her to her father, he said, ‘Yeah, she’s really something, and what a beauty, that one. If I weren’t happily married and, ya know, her father . . .’
Ivanka deploys Trumpian lies in defense:
In May, Ivanka Trump gave a lengthy interview to CBS News in which she said claims about her father’s conduct with women – specifically in the New York Times article in which it was alleged he asked people if they thought his daughter was “hot” – were “pretty disturbing”.
“I was bothered by it, but it’s [the story has] largely been discredited since,” she said.
It has not been discredited. He’s said much worse and she knows it. It’s all on tape:
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