The Enigma That Is Donald Trump’s Relationship With Ivanka
In the gaudy living room of a gold-everything penthouse, Donald Trump threw extravagant parties that never failed to generate social intrigue.
Amidst lavish displays of narcissism adorning the hallways — including several life-size portraits of himself, counterfeit Time Magazine covers featuring his face, and a poster purporting to show average human hands with the outline of a another, bigger hand next to it claiming unconvincingly to be the outline of his own hand — the glasses of champagne flowed their waterfalls for his friends, if you could call them that, of new money New York wannabe aristocrats tipsily spilling their drinks talking to the Epstein girls they knew looked young but no one asked about.
Amid the throngs of people, one figure stood out from the rest, and though his eyes meandered from woman to woman, they always returned to her— the young, captivating Ivanka.
She was Trump’s daughter, and when she was in the room he couldn’t hide his spellbound glances at her, betraying an almost artist passion for the results of his long-term grooming work.
He had made the perfect daughter, he thought often, and dominated conversations finding out who else agreed. He’d revel in the coaxed compliments he’d all but beg them to shower upon her character, intellect, and, most of all, her physique, savoring every bit of praise as if they were really compliments for him.
“Isn’t she tremendous?” he’d ask tactlessly, his voice tinged with a paternal pride veering into possessiveness. “The most beautiful woman in the room. And she’s mine.”
She was the embodiment of his descendant aspirations, a living testament to his delusions of genetic superiority despite never thinking up a cosmetic enhancement he was unenthusiastic paying for from her adolescence onward. In his mind she represented the pinnacle of feminine beauty and charm, a reflection of his own greatness that shined even greater next to his regretfully unimpressive sons Don Jr. and Eric. If only he could go back in time, he often daydreamed, and give Don Jr. a different name so he could save his eponymous birthright for his beloved daughter, who he’d name “Donaldina” instead of honoring his first wife’s name with “Ivanka.”
“She has such great legs, doesn’t she?” he’d ask, while his guests would awkwardly shift their weight on their own legs trying unsuccessfully to change the subject. “And what a chest! One of the great chests, maybe of all time. How lucky her kids were as babies. And fetuses. What a tremendous womb. What I’d pay to be able to spend a day up inside of her!”
In conversations behind his back, his guests deservedly remarked and satirized upon the inappropriate infatuation. Whispers of forbidden love and gossip grew into a mystique surrounding the Trump family, and the city socialites frequently debated theories of how the Trumps behave when in the private oases of their sprawling, ostentatious properties.
The gossipers could only agree on two apparent facts: that the bond between father and daughter transcended the boundaries of societal decorum, and that Donald Trump’s years of close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein had not made him any less of a creepy, freaky perv than he was prior to their lamentable meeting.
All this Ivanka felt, and she struggled with the public knowledge and disgust in her father’s debauchery with Epstein, the predatory beauty pageants, the sexual assault allegations and lawsuits, and all the scandalous things he has said in public about her since her birth.
She played the part of obedient daughter and smiled for the cameras, but, beneath her composed exterior, she grappled with the disconcerting reputation of her father that prevented her from ever obtaining the social standing she craved among her socialite peers. Ivanka yearned always for independence from her father.
She contemplated abandoning her maiden name to forge a new legacy with her still dysfunctional, but much less damned and nationally destructive, in-law family to free herself from the nepotistic prison that was the Trump name. Could an Ivanka Kushner finally be invited into the New England brahmin milieu, and not be blamed for her father’s belligerent and abhorrent political career? Ivanka Kushner had $2 billion in Saudi blood money to try and buy her way in.
But, in the meantime, perhaps Donald might at last realize he has unwittingly stifled his daughter, and must refrain from further objectification. Could he respect the fact that the seemingly perfect daughter he had groomed was more than just a gratifying personification of how hot he’d be if he were a woman?
Maybe in time, father and daughter will find a new balance in their relationship, built not on appearances and expectations, but on respect. And Donald will come clean about all the gross stuff he did on Epstein’s pedophile island, and accept the consequences for being an underground sex offender his whole life.
Or perhaps the weight of their secrets and the constraints of their world will become too much to bear, and the house of incestually ambiguous cards they labored many decades building will come crashing down in unprecedented humiliation and shame.
Either way, the story of Donald and Ivanka will forever be shrouded in speculation, a mystery that will never be fully unraveled.
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