Ivanka Trump has a self-help book? Of course she does. And Jia Tolentino at the New Yorker read it. It explains so much about that whole rotten, corrupt family.
When Ivanka was a kid, she got frustrated because she couldn’t set up a lemonade stand in Trump Tower.
We had no such advantages,she writes, meaning, in this case, an ordinary home on an ordinary street. She and her brothers finally tried to sell lemonade at their summer place in Connecticut, but their neighborhood was so ritzy that there was no foot traffic.As good fortune would have it, we had a bodyguard that summer,she writes. They persuaded their bodyguard to buy lemonade, and then their driver, and then the maids, whodug deep for their spare change.The lesson, she says, is that the kidsmade the best of a bad situation.In another early business story, she and her brothers made fake Native American arrowheads, buried them in the woods, dug them up while playing with their friends, and sold the arrowheads to their friends for five dollars each.
Her bad situation
was being wealthy; her solution was to compel her servants and bodyguards, you know, the little people, to give her more money, and to lie to her friends to trick them into giving her yet more money. And she’s completely oblivious to the ethical problems with what she did!
I hope all of her businesses fail and that she is publicly scorned by all of her friends, but I suspect she’s just going to come out of the next few years richer, and that her friends are all just as awful as she is.
And proud of learning how to defraud her friends. Wonder where they learned that. /obvious
Testing new device
?????
I put up a post yesterday about Trump’s troubling belief in genetic superiority, his own, naturally. Steve Bannon is also a proponent.
Great Genes. The Best Genes! Probably Yuuge, Too.
My heart bleeds buttermilk for poor Ivanka. I mean, not being able to put up a lemonade stand in Trump Tower, imagine the hardship of her childhood.
What’s the title of that self help book? “How to be a complete oblivious asshole”?
Sometimes I start to feel kind of sorry for these people. About the awful stunting of emotions and empathy and perspective that seems to come from that sort of life, locked in their gilded solipsistic bubble of greed and superficiality, cut off from humanity and the world around them. Not only have they been turned into gross caricatures of people, they’ve been deprived of any of the mental tools they’d need to even realise that or better themselves…
Then I remember what they’re doing to the rest of us, of course.
Ugh, yes – obvious that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, in this case. That “arrowheads” story – makes me cringe.
Speaking of poor – poor Ms Tolentino, for having to wade through this trough of swill.
I smell a rat, (& I don’t mean Trump). $5.00 per arrowhead? Think of the huge amount of work that goes into finding the right material, excavating it, knapping it to shape, then burying it where it can later be found. And how did she learn the skill of knapping? That took more time & work.
$5.00 per arrowhead? She must’ve inherited her business acumen from a real dork.
What makes you think she bothered with the right material, shaped it properly, or went to all the difficulty of burying it somewhere? She’s a Trump. You know she did everything half-assed.
Oh, I don’t know – being born into that kind of environment is clearly a huge disadvantage in terms of developing a sense of perspective and empathy. I’d be genuinely impressed if she’d managed to overcome those obstacles to turn into a decent human being.
Also… what exactly is the deal with her sitting in on official meetings with foreign leaders? Is that… is that normal over there? Because if David Cameron or Tony Blair had taken their children along to that kind of official diplomatic engagement they would have been dismissed immediately for impropriety. Does the US not have rules about these kinds of nepotistic excesses, or has it just been something nobody has ever tried before?
She also wrote about some “character building” she had to endure: Momma forced her to fly coach this one time. Here I thought my first evening without dinner changed my perspective.
PZ, I said I smelled a rat, (& I didn’t mean Trump). The story calls for an exercise of some skill, enough to fool her friends, anyways. It also shows that she can be unethical towards her friends. What the fuck would she be like to those who aren’t her friends?
I smell a Trump-sized rat. Whatever way one looks at this, she’s proud to be dishonest. Where’d she inherit that from?
“Up is down”
Nothing new here.
The Fatherland was never defeated in the Great War, it was the Jews and the liberals who stabbed the Feldarmee in the back.
— — — — — — — — — —
Incidentally, after the end of the Napoleonic wars when the victors had divided Europé between them after the defeat of the “French tyrant”, a Swedish poet wrote a piece called “The World is free and the raven is White”.
Take your kid to work day. OK, it’s supposed to happen when you’re still in school, but well…
I was harboring some sympathy for Melania, who may have married into it all not quite knowing what she was getting herself into, and feeling vulnerable enough to stay regardless because she feared the consequences of leaving. Until today.
That’s when I read that an autistic teenager had made a youtube video telling people to not make fun of Barron Trump because maybe he has some autistic symptoms (apparently some people have been criticizing Barron), and Melania’s response was to threaten to sue him and demand a full public apology. Turns out whether on her own or made into it by her environment, she’s just as much of an asshole as the rest of them.
Well, well, Trump’s named one of sporn Barron. I think I can see where this is going. How about the imposition of an hereditary aristocracy on the USA by President Trump? What about him making himself King Donald the First, at the end of his Presidency?
(Okay, “the First” doesn’t get added until there’s a “the Second”.)
Too bad he won’t be King Donald the Third (pronounced with an old-style NYC accent).
As far as shunning goes, I’m pretty damned sure she’s not friends with Chelsea Clinton any more.
She probably got someone else to donate the material and do the shaping.
So in effect, the Trump family garnished the wages of domestic employees to supply their children’s pocket money?
Yeah, good point. I wouldn’t have found it worth my time to pull that stunt, and I wasn’t a spoiled rich kid.
It’s too bad Ivanka didn’t read a draft before it went to publication. She might have had an editor explain to the ghostwriter what an implausible thing that was.
It reminds me of Ann Romney’s tale of woe, straight out of Les Miz: While her husband was going to Harvard Biz and Harvard Law, they had only his stock portfolio to live on.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/4/16/1083802/-Ann-Romney-s-tale-of-struggling-We-learned-hard-lessons-living-off-our-stock-portfolio
This Ivanka story reminds me of Mr. Deity’s recent talks about LUCK and how privileged folks can delude themselves that it’s not a dominant influence.
robnyny: The husband and I have been enjoying that interview for years. We particularly liked the bit where they were living in a basement apartment, on Beacon Hill.
For those unfamiliar with Boston, Beacon Hill is not exactly a bad neighborhood.