Strange Things Everyone Ignores About Ivanka Trump

Ivanka Trump’s 2017 book, “Women Who Work,” was published to biting criticism and a chorus of scathing reviews. From NPR to the New York Times, the bulk of these reviews lambasted Trump for her bland, surface-level feminism and refusal to acknowledge her own privilege throughout the book. However, one detail stands out as particularly strange and ignorant.

“Women Who Work” includes a plethora of inspirational quotes. One of these is from Toni Morrison, a renowned Black American author who, among many other modern classics, wrote “Beloved.” The book follows Sethe, a Black woman who escapes slavery and is haunted by the ghost of her dead child. The quote describes Sethe’s struggle: “Bit by bit, she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” According to The New Yorker, Trump then likens this experience to effective time management, with the quote, “Are you a slave to your time or the master of it?”

Toni Morrison, who passed away in 2019, did not make a public statement on this specific usage of her quote, though she made her disapproval of the Trump campaign crystal clear in a 2016 essay for The New Yorker, titled “Making America White Again,” where she said: “So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength.”