Ivanka Trump Desperately Tries to Rehab Her Image on the Way Out the Door

When Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner first took jobs in the White House in 2017, they presumably assumed that eight years later, they‘d return to New York and be crowned the king and queen not just of an exclusive social set but the city—nay, the entire globe. Vogue would put them on the cover of the September issue. Billionaires would beg them to sit on the boards of their companies to lend an air of credibility. People would scream, “I love you Javanka!” as they walked down the street. Politicos would constantly beg them to run for president. Penguin Random House would get into a bidding war for their memoirs, telling The New York Times, “That $65 million we dropped on the Obamas? Peanuts compared to what we’re shelling out for these two.” When being introduced at major conferences people would say, of Jared, “And now please welcome the man who brought peace to the Middle East!” World leaders would do whatever the opposite of pulling a “Who the f–k is this and why is she here?” face when approached by the first daughter.

Instead, they’re being unceremoniously booted out of the place after just four years, with significantly worse reputations than when they started. To be clear, no one was falling all over themselves to get an audience with the couple before Donald Trump was inaugurated but they weren’t reviled among the people whose opinions they presumably once and probably do still care about, with just a narrow portion of Manhattan reportedly looking forward to their return, and an open invitation from Staten Island to take the ferry out and put down roots. “Everyone with self-respect, a career, morals, respect for democracy, or who doesn’t want their friends to shame them both in private and public will steer clear,” a former friend of the couple told my colleague Emily Jane Fox, which probably has something to do with kidnapping and the possible prison sentences and the whole not-giving-a-crap-if-New-Yorkers-die-of-COVID-19 business.

Not surprisingly, the outgoing first daughter appears to be in extremely frantic damage control mode, attempting to prove, via tweets that should come with fact-checks, that the Trump administration isn’t the worst collection of people in modern presidential history. For instance, on Tuesday alone, Ivanka wrote this:

…which might sound impressive were it not for the fact that there’s a reason greenhouse gasses are down and it’s that her father (and husband) royally screwed up the country’s pandemic response, leading to the deaths of 250,000 Americans and a situation wherein no one can go anywhere. As USA Today put it:

…the study said that U.S. emissions have been trending downwards since 2008, mainly due to the lower dependence of the power sector on coal. “Indeed, we estimate that without COVID-19 emissions would have been 1% lower in 2020 than in 2019,” the study said. “This implies that COVID-19 alone has pushed down U.S. emissions by 8% in 2020.”

Also:

The study included one caveat to its findings: “2020 saw a sharp increase in fires in the U.S. and, if included in our analysis, their emissions partially offset the drop in emissions from human activity.” Wildfires are another source of carbon dioxide emissions into our atmosphere. “The fires in the U.S. in 2020 are part of a global trend, since 2019, of forest fires occurring more frequently in temperate regions,” the study said. 

The news about the drop in greenhouse gas emissions isn’t necessarily cause to celebrate. “The amount of pain we’ve had to go through for a relatively modest drop shows that there needs to be more smart policy and smart thinking about emissions,” Ethan Zindler, BloombergNEF’s head of Americas, told The Washington Post. “The emphasis has to be not on how to reduce demand, but how to make supply more green.”