But in private, rougher, more Trumpian edges still occasionally poked out. Ivanka would regularly relay stories of teachers or observers who had commented that she had the most innate talent they had ever seen for whatever new pursuit she was taking up. She never wore a Halloween costume that wasn’t flattering, which means she usually showed up at costume parties looking beautiful and boring. She always stopped at McDonald’s for cheeseburgers. She cursed. And of course, she had the Trump radar for status, money, and power, and her dad’s instinct to throw others under the bus to save herself.
One of the earliest memories I have of Ivanka from before we were friends is when she blamed a fart on an insecure classmate. Some time later, she goaded me and a few other girls into flashing our breasts out the window of our classroom in what has since been labelled the “flashing the hot dog man” incident in Chapin lore. Ivanka had basically been the ringleader, but she pleaded her innocence to the headmistress and got off scot-free. The rest of us were suspended.
While Ivanka was laying the foundation for her conquest of Manhattan, I was experiencing a new reality in Lebanon as it was rocked by a string of political assassinations and bombings and a decimating war with Israel. The gulf between us became increasingly apparent. During my first two-year stint in Beirut, Ivanka regularly emailed me messages like, “When are you getting your ass back to NYC? You’re going to be replaced.” I remember her being the only person I knew who didn’t ask me what the war was like. By the time I did return home, she had started dating Jared Kushner, whose family was Orthodox Jewish, and my pro-Palestinian stance began to chafe. Since 2007, I’ve worn a necklace with my name written in Arabic, and Ivanka grew increasingly irritated by it. Sometimes, she would randomly say, “I hate that thing.” Then one night in the middle of dinner, she glanced at the necklace and said, “How does your Jewish boyfriend feel when you are having sex and that necklace hits him the face? How can you wear that thing? It just screams, ‘terrorist.’”
But Ivanka was skilled at blunting her more Trumpian comments with equally typical acts of generosity. Once, she lent me her apartment for about six hours during a trip home from Lebanon so I could rendezvous with my boyfriend during one of his layovers. She connected me with Peter Kaplan, the late editor of the New York Observer, who hired me as a freelance writer between 2007 and 2009. When I was single, she and Jared often tried to set me up with a roster of eligible bachelors in what I always felt was an effort to elevate me to the ranks of people they wanted to socialize with. When I was an intern at Al Jazeera English, I ended up on an awkward date with a close associate of Rupert Murdoch’s; I sat through a group dinner while Jared, Wendi Murdoch, and the New York Post higher-up they had their eyes on for me discussed the expendability of journalists in the digital age and ignored me completely.
One time, we were driving to Manhattan from Bedminster, and I think we were having some sort of disagreement about affordable housing in Manhattan. I distinctly remember Ivanka saying something along the lines of, “Ly, I can’t talk about this stuff with you anymore because you’ve really turned into a Marxist.”
Still, Ivanka asked me and one other friend to be in her wedding party in 2009, along with some relatives and Wendi Murdoch’s daughters as flower girls. The months between her engagement and wedding to Jared were a flurry of activity in which I was honored to participate. When I started a new job in a different field the day after their wedding, however, I expected my best friend to ask how it was going. After what could have been a few days or weeks, I remember sending her a text that said something like, “Hey, I started a new job the day after your wedding, and you haven’t asked me a single question about it.”
I don’t remember her exact reply, but it was something along the lines of, “Ly, I’m too busy for this shit.”
That was more or less the end. She still sent presents on my birthday and invited me to her Halloween birthday parties at Trump SoHo. When my son was born, sent me a gold-plated bracelet engraved with his name. She was never impolite, but we no longer belonged to each other’s inner circles.
For the past four years I have tried to tune out the conversation that dominated international media, but it is nearly impossible to ignore when the person who used to pluck ingrown hairs from your bikini line suddenly appoints herself to the role of unelected public official and begins to torch democracy. When Ivanka recently posted a photo of herself on stage with her children at a Trump rally, I wondered to another friend from the Manhattan private school world what her endgame might be. Ivanka had deigned to dress Middle American housewives when I knew her, but did not pretend to want to hobnob with them. Predictably, as she began moving with the real power brokers of the world, Ivanka became increasingly certain that she and the rest of the capitalist elite had better solutions to the plight of America’s struggling working class than elected officials and the creaky bureaucracies they presided over. But aligning herself with her dad’s banana republic-style administration made no sense to me, until my friend suggested that Ivanka took her kids to the rally to show them that they are American royalty. This explanation seemed most plausible. What is more royal than presiding over subjects that you disdain?
I’ve been a good Wasp and kept quiet until now, even as I’ve grown increasingly repulsed by Ivanka’s ability to aid and abet her father. I’ve been comforted by the certainty that the backlash from those whose respect she craves most must sting. Still, I miss my old friend. I miss going to Green Kitchen on First Avenue at 1 a.m. for “mozzarazza,” hailing down a gondola in Amsterdam for a tour, belting out “Anna Begins” and songs from Les Mis on a road trip. But most of all, I miss the time when the Trump family quest for power was not dangerous to the country.
A day before Biden finally declared victory, I saw Ivanka issue a tepid statement about how “Every legally cast vote should be counted,” presumably at her father’s behest, still clearly hoping that she can be enriched and adored by the public she exploits even as she’s embraced on the slopes of Aspen. “Goodbye @IvankaTrump,” reads one reply to her tweet. “You will be loved by the people you disdain and disdained by the people you want to be loved by. There will never be a Met Ball for you again. You are fated to live out your years as an aging, corrupt, villainous Barbie; paying the price for what you did.”