How Trump’s Nordstrom Tweet Took the Aspiration Out of Ivanka’s Brand

Ivanka Trump means business. Image by Getty Images
Imagine the following: You have an important business client, but they’re wavering. There’s a setback in your arrangement. You’re dealing with it. You’re on top of things. And then suddenly, boom, there’s your father — you are, for the purposes of argument, an adult woman, married with several kids — decides to tweet his disappointment at, as in @, the company.
There’s a lot to decode in Donald Trump’s anti-Nordstrom tweet, an event that appears to have further damaged Ivanka’s brand, and that would indeed pose various presidential-ethics questions, if we were not already awash in such a sea of those that it’s hard for a new one to even register. Anyway, a reminder of the tweet’s contents:
“My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person — always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!”
What comes through most immediately is that the myth of Ivanka, Businesswoman In Her Own Right, is shattered. “My daughter,” as though Ivanka were one of those 15-year-old heiresses with a ‘handbag line’, as versus… a somewhat older heiress with various business endeavors well past the ‘trunk show at family friend’s Hamptons’ house, as a favor’ stage. It’s clear that Trump gets — that everyone gets — that this is about him, his presidency, his brand, and that Ivanka-stamped merch is of interest only by association.
Then we have the “great person” interlude. The second sentence starts off as a generic statement of family loyalty, but then veers of into a subtweet of another Ivanka myth, namely that she’s her father’s conscience. Setting aside the odd placement of “terrible,” what’s Donald getting at?
The message is clear: Ivanka is to be cast as a nice liberal when it’s convenient. Donald engages in a bit of — yes, wild, I know — modesty here, very uncharacteristic, yes, but there’s a point to it. By acknowledging the obvious — that he’s in constant desperate need of a nudge “to do the right thing” — he sets up Ivanka as somehow untarnished by his awfulness, even while she, you know, profits from his role. And even as he involves himself in business dealings that ostensibly have zilch to do with him and that reallllly shouldn’t have a thing to do with his presidency.
But it’s the infantilizing angle that I can’t get past. I think I might, for once, feel sorry for Ivanka. Not for having her line dropped by Nordstrom — oh, she had that coming — but for being a grown-up woman whose boundary-lacking father couldn’t leave well enough alone.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood, and can be reached at [email protected]. Her book, The Perils of “Privilege”, 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
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 2
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 3
Culture How two Jewish names — Kohen and Mira — are dividing red and blue states
- 4
Opinion Mike Huckabee said there’s ‘no such thing as a Palestinian.’ It’s worth thinking about what that means
In Case You Missed It
-
Books The White House Seder started in a Pennsylvania basement — its legacy lives on
-
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
-
Fast Forward Yarden Bibas says ‘I am here because of Trump’ and pleads with him to stop the Gaza war
-
Fast Forward Trump’s plan to enlist Elon Musk began at Lubavitcher Rebbe’s grave
-
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.