Et Tu, Ivanka?
No one knows better than Ivanka Trump about the power of imagery, which I wrote about earlier this week. (She’d cropped Kimberly Guilfoyle, her brother’s fiancé, out of an Instagram photograph. She said it wasn’t deliberate. But Ivanka is not somebody who puts up Instagram posts without deliberation.)
In case you’ve forgotten (and you may have, because it feels like a lifetime ago), before she went into her father’s White House, Ivanka had a clothing line. The line had its ups and its downs, but it had one powerful asset that remained consistent: Ivanka’s messaging. This is a woman who once wrote in the introduction of a memoir, “Perception is more important than reality.”
Therefore, the fact that Ivanka did not show up at Trump’s presidential announcement just to smile and say “good luck, Dad” sent a much clearer message than the statement she released declaring she wanted to stay out of politics and parent her three young children.
In Republican consultant circles, there was a fairly startled reaction to her absence, made only more glaring when, two days later, she was photographed wakeboarding. In other words: She wasn’t absent from her father’s speech because she was doing anything especially meaningful with her time.