Ivanka, We’re Not Buying It — Your Words, or Your Clothes
Everyone! #GrabYourWallet & tell the stores that sell Donald’s products and those of his campaign surrogates: we won’t shop until they drop. pic.twitter.com/6XK3EAGdlV
— Shannon Coulter ? (@shannoncoulter) October 20, 2016
The great ambiguity at the center of the Trump campaign goes as follows: Are we witnessing a grand political ambition, or a great big advertisement for a brand? Yes, in a sense all politicians are brands, all candidates selling something. But I mean in the literal sense: Donald Trump is selling, like, widgets. Goods and services (and steaks) with “Trump” stamped on them. If he wins, he’s president! But if he loses, he’s still a brand, one that just got a ton of free advertising.
Ivanka, too, is a brand, and a somewhat more complicated one. If the Trump brand image is ‘crass douche’ or maybe ‘1980s teen movie villain’, the Ivanka Trump one is something like Sheryl Sandberg ultra-lite. Remember in the 1990s when there was “girl power” and it was kind of like feminism but not really? Or more recently, when we’ve been asked to derive feminist significance from the fact that Taylor Swift appears on social media with a “squad” of female friends? It’s kind of like that, but the fantasy is that you’re a successful young businesswoman and ex-model who also happens to have a rich father and rich husband but you’ve kept your name (which is… Trump) and you’re an independent, self-made career woman and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
This may be attributing too much power to branding. Ultimately we all need to get dressed, and if you’re working in an office, you need inoffensive office-wear, which is evidently what Ivanka sells. I wouldn’t assume every woman with an Ivanka-branded shift dress in her closet is or ever was some sort of aspirational Trump-o-phile. But until recently, so what if some women were Ivanka-admirers? Who am I, an occasional goop-browser, to judge?
A political campaign crossed with an ad campaign lends itself naturally to economic boycotts, organized as well as visceral. Trump hotels are discreetly rebranding themselves “Scion,” while Upper West Siders question whether they really want to live in a building called “Trump.” And as Joanna Walters reports in the Guardian, there’s an Ivanka-brand boycott afoot, led by a woman named Shannon Coulter (see the tweet above), and driven by the #GrabYourWallet hashtag, a reference to Trump’s own “grab them by the pussy” comment. “Women Who Work,” Ivanka’s almost comically tepid slogan, still reads as empowering, and thus hypocritical when juxtaposed with a candidate whose disregard for women in and out of the workplace is so pronounced.
Normally, viral-and-aggregated brand boycott stories make me suspicious: Isn’t even discussing the topic just more free advertising? Doesn’t controversy sell? Here, though, the issue seems a bit different. The brand-such-as-it-is is everywhere. Its name is already recognized. Bad publicity is, I think, in this case, a real thing.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood. Her book, , will be published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 3
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 4
Fast Forward Cory Booker proclaims, ‘Hineni’ — I am here — 19 hours into anti-Trump Senate speech
In Case You Missed It
-
News Who would protect New York Jews better? Cuomo and Lander trade attacks on the campaign trail
-
News Rabbis revolt over LGBTQ+ club, exposing fight over queer acceptance at Yeshiva University
-
Opinion In Qatargate fiasco, Netanyahu’s ‘witch hunt’ narrative takes cues from Trump
-
Yiddish די הגדה ווי אַ לעבעדיקער דענקמאָל פֿון אַשכּנזישער פּאָעזיעThe Haggadah as a living monument to Ashkenazi poetry
אַמאָל זענען די פּייטנים, מיסטישע דיכטער־וויזיאָנערן, געווען אויבן־אָן בײַ די פֿראַנצויזישע און דײַטשישע ייִדן.
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.