The Fascinating Fascist Woman

Ivanka Trump Takes the Stand

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Credit: Mark Peterson/New York Times

Last week I spent a day with pack of journalists in a chilly third floor courtroom inside the colonnaded facade of the New York State Supreme Court Building at 60 Centre St. in Manhattan. We were all there to watch former senior White House advisor and lifelong Trump-branded femme re-enter public life, ever so briefly, to answer questions about her involvement in the Trump Organization getting huge loans guaranteed by lies about her dad’s inflated personal wealth.

I was there at the behest of a New York Times opinion editor who asked if I’d write an essay (linked below) about Ivanka Trump’s first appearance in an official capacity since January 2021. One of the last times we spotted Ivanka out with Daddy, she was standing beside him inside a party tent on the Ellipse an hour or so before the noose erected by his “patriots” at the Capitol for Mike Pence and other elected officials, was broadcast across the world. The video of that little pre-riot party is one of the great 1/6 artifacts, with MAGA freaks and grotesques in up close cameo: Laura Branigans “Gloria” is turned up high. Don Junior can barely contain his puppy-like excitement, babbling about needing snacks, Kimberly Guilfoyle sashaying in skin-tight dress and Mark Meadows bustling officiously in and out of screen range.

I gave a lot of thought to the intentions, psyches, role and influence of the women in Trump’s family and inner circle, for my book. Trump’s election was first and foremost a slap in the face to all American women. It was a massive regressive backlash to the modest gains women since the 1970s had achieved in access to education and employment and consequent economically independent living.

The MAGA movement went after women first. It’s the old boiling frog crackdown method: “First they came for (fill in the blank for them) … and then they came for us.“

Think back to where we were in 2016: most of us under the age of 60 could not remember a time when we didn’t have a right to medical privacy. Now we live in it. More than that, the rise of the stilletoed fembot and the unleashing of rabid toxic influencer men like wife abuser Steven Crowder, and Andrew Tate, undercut women’s sense of dignity, and independence.

The women around Trump, and the women who support him, participate in the backlash for power and personal gain. Ivanka Trump is their avatar. Fascist movements require certain behaviors and styles from women including idealized, doll-like ultra-femininity, involvement in fashion, and persistent advertising of one’s motherhood. Like the Aliyeva sisters, daughters of Azerbaijan butcher and kleptocrat, Ivanka used her dad’s money to get into the fashion business. And last week Ivanka, who has never lived without household help, tried to use the fact that her three kids are in school in Florida to get out of coming to New York to testify.

Ivanka Trump was the last of 25 witnesses the prosecution called to testify before a New York judge who will decide damages for a fraud that has already been determined to have occurred. In September, the judge ruled Tuesday that Trump had committed fraud for years while building his real estate empire, and ordered some of the former president’s companies removed from his control and dissolved.

The dissolution of the Trump Organization in New York is one of the most severe punishments Trump has faced since he lost the election in 2020. Predictably, it has provoked him to promise revenge. Last week the Washington Post reported that fascist elves at Washington think tanks - including the Koch funded Heritage - and in various law firms are already helping write a legal blueprint for Trump’s plans to turn the presidency into an autocracy/kleptocracy. Their plans will chuck out rules that separate the Department of Justice from politically motivated prosecutions, and then end the civil rights most Americans take for granted starting with free speech and freedom of assembly and including the right not to be thrown in jail or a concentration camp for beliefs or ethnicity. The New York Times followed that story this week with more specifics on the size and logistics of the concentration camps Trump and his elves have planned for when he is back in power.

Trump’s supporters say this would be payback for what they believe is politically motivated persecution, “a witch hunt” by liberal New York judge and prosecutors. They believe the same about the three other criminal cases against their hero in DC, Florida and Georgia. They are willfully blind to the fact that Trump is a lifetime lawbreaker, who has managed to evade consequences for decades. The slow wheels of American justice are only finally catching up to Trump as he runs for a second term because he exposed himself to closer attention by getting elected the first time. (And he’s running out of lawyers.)

Chiseled into the frieze above the columns of the New York courthouse is a line from George Washington: "The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government." The former president and reality show businessman is not interested in good government. The true administration of justice has always been anathema to him.

Experts in autocracy and fascist movements like Ruth Ben Ghiat have explained at length and repeatedly how supreme leaders always use both criminality and cries of “victimhood” to gain power and keep it. Based on polls putting Trump ahead in swing states released last week, Americans are not paying close attention to the 2024 election yet. When they do, everyone must recognize this is no joke. It is a civic emergency. Please help your friends and colleagues of all political persuasions take seriously Trump’s promise to become the fascist leader we have never had.

My NYT essay on Ivanka

Trump Family pre-insurrection party video

Judge’s Trump fraud determination

Concentration camps and dissident roundups

Trump and allies plot revenge