We’ll start with the headline. "Ivanka Trump: The new Hillary Clinton in the White House?"
Sometimes you read a headline and you think “this is such obviously false clickbait designed to provoke outrage that it should be ignored.” And then you read the article, and it is exactly what you thought it was, but it’s in Newsweek and it’s just the logical endpoint of what a lot of political reporters and pundits believe, and as exhausting and infuriating as it is, it requires a response. The top response to this nonsense from Nina Burleigh: You and every editor who signed off on this should drive a truck over your computer then set it on fire and never touch a keyboard again.
But on the argument, such as it is.
After 100 days, the answer to Who is Ivanka is clear: Almost everything about her politics and political style is something that we’ve seen before. In fact, very, very recently.
Let’s review her uncanny similarities with Hillary Clinton.
Wait, let me guess. Ivanka was a student leader in college, went to a top law school, spent her summers doing things like going undercover to make the case against segregation academies, spent decades advocating for children while building a solid law career, and sacrificed her own goals for someone else for years before putting her career back at the center of her life after his retirement?
Yeah, no.
Ivanka, Burleigh says, “provides cover for sexism,” as did Hillary when Bill Clinton so famously was caught on tape talking about “grabbing [unwilling women] by the pussy.” Or … wait … how did that go? If Bill Clinton had talked publicly about any woman the way Donald Trump talks about his own daughter, Republicans probably would have succeeded at removing him from office.
Ivanka and Hillary each apparently “start[ed] on third base thanks to her man,” which is disgusting, when you consider that Ivanka’s “man” in this case is her father. But the specifics of the comparison are equally offensive. Of Hillary, we learn that “The maiden name retention, though, could never obliterate that she was in the White House, in politics at all, thanks to her marriage,” obliterating in a sentence the help that she gave her husband over decades of marriage, help he has repeatedly cited as central to his rise.
Similarly, Ivanka—who certainly isn’t changing her name—has often implied that she earned her business empire and now, political standing, thanks to old-fashioned hard work. She has even built a brand and is writing a book identifying herself with, as she puts it, #womenwhowork.
One of these people had a career independent of and arguably at times hindered by her husband. The other joined the family business a year after graduating from college. To suggest equivalence between their careers isn’t just an insult to Hillary Clinton, it’s an insult to every woman who ever fought to build a career in her husband’s shadow and be acknowledged as an independent, competent adult.
And seriously, “thanks to her man.” Where her man is her father. There are no words for how creepy it is that that language would be embraced anywhere this side of an incest-oriented subreddit.