Just when you’re thinking geopolitics can’t actually can’t get any more hostile to progressive values, Ivanka Trump weaponises the mismatched earring. Is nothing sacred? What next, Steve Bannon in a Cos long-sleeved T-shirt and Adidas Gazelles? Kellyanne Conway arriving for a weekend at Mar-a-Lago with a Daunts Bookshop tote bag?

Odd danglers … JW Anderson earrings, spring/summer collection, London fashion week 2016. Photograph: Estrop/Getty Images

Ivanka’s mismatched earrings are sold as an off-the-peg non-pair from Marni for around £500, although you can replicate the look on the high street for the price of a sandwich, or for free by matchmaking waifs and strays from your jewellery box. Wearing mismatched earrings is this year’s catwalk-to-front-row breakout trend. Celine, JW Anderson, Mary Katrantzou and Simone Rocha have all abandoned symmetry in favour of odd danglers. Gwyneth Paltrow does it on the red carpet. I am wearing mismatched earrings today, as it happens. One is by Pamela Love, a safety-pin shape with two pearls, the other a pink marble on a gold chain that I bought from Monoprix for a few euros. Such is the pervasiveness of the vogue for odd earrings in my industry that if your front-row neighbour admires your earring, she will then likely crane her neck around to see what you’re wearing “on the other side”. Oh, the shame of being outed as a dullard in a matching pair.

As a political statement, Ivanka’s earrings go beyond mere glamour. They go beyond dressing on-trend as a device to look in touch with the modern world. They go beyond, even, the ability of an eyecatching look to steer media focus away from Ivanka’s lead-balloon panel appearance earlier in the day, although they did this with aplomb. Statement earrings have always been a conversation piece, this being one of the reasons I love them and am currently obsessively stalking Dolce & Gabbana’s crystal-studded lobster earrings (£504), but Ivanka has taken this to a new level. Her earrings make Lynton Crosby’s “dead cat” manoeuvre look kittenish by comparison.

Mary Katrantzou show, backstage, spring summer 2017, London fashion week. Photograph: WWD/REX/Shutterstock

But more insidious than all this is that the Picasso-asymmetry of mismatched earrings suggests an independent-minded, creative-thinking outlook, an identity Ivanka Trump deliberately flirts with. We should all be scared of Ivanka’s earrings, because they represent what makes her the most terrifying of all the Trump circle, which is her Bladerunner-replicant-like ability to make you believe – just for a second – that she is a bit like us. Remember when she wore a Hillary-esque white trousersuit to the inauguration, deliberately fuelling dangerous nonsense-talk that she is in some real sense a secret feminist?

She has the cash to blind us with diamonds, but the smarts to seduce us with the kind of jewellery that a gallery curator might buy to jazz up her Margaret Howell apron dress for a cocktail party at Frieze instead. Her dad may not be able to string a basic sentence together, but Ivanka is a virtuouso of visual messaging. Be afraid.