Given his frequent attacks on the media, it is increasingly obvious that Donald J Trump would like us to get our news solely from his Twitter feed. As it happens, I do rely on social media to keep me informed of international events, but I turn to a different app and a different Trump for this. When I really want to know what’s going on, I look at Ivanka Trump’s Instagram.

Ivanka’s photographs can be seen as not-very-cryptic crossword clues about life inside the White House. So, for example, on 24 February, she posted a photo of herself alongside Lisa Phillips, an African American woman who, says Ivanka’s caption, “stands as an inspiration for what one woman can accomplish with passion and perseverance”. This was just a week after Trump’s enthrallingly unhinged press conference, which led to him being accused of, among other things, racism. He had asked April Ryan, an African-American woman and an experienced reporter, to “set up a meeting” with the Congressional Black Caucus, because apparently all black people a) know each other and b) are his servants, no matter how much passion and perseverance they possess.

Then there are the usual catalogue-perfect photos of Ivanka and her three Bonpoint-clad children larking around DC. See, President Trump can’t be all bad: look how cute his grandchildren and their collars are! Here’s Ivanka with one of her sons “exploring the wonders of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History” while gazing at a butterfly. Enjoy those wings while you can, kid, because Grampa’s working to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency.

I am fascinated by Ivanka’s feed, because it is the literalisation of her relationship with her father: she is his Instagram filter, airbrushing him into acceptability, and if that filter had a name, it would be Gwyneth. Like Paltrow, Ivanka has long presented herself as the embodiment of that particular brand of modern feminism which claims everything is possible for all women – if only they would do more yoga, invest in perfect shoes and get born into enormous wealth. Ivanka makes privilege look aspirational, as opposed to her brothers, who make it look like a call to the people’s revolution.

Throughout his campaign, Ivanka acted as the reassuring salve to her father’s raging misogyny, telling voters, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, that her father is “colour blind and gender neutral”. Last year Cosmopolitan magazine’s Prachi Gupta interviewed Ivanka about her father’s childcare and maternity leave policies, which she had helped shape, and pointed out that Trump had once described pregnancy as “bad for business”. Ivanka, her father’s daughter to the bone (even if she does have better hair), accused Gupta of having “a lot of negativity in your questions” and ended the interview.

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Now that she has become the de facto first lady, meeting heads of state, helping draft policies, it is worth looking at what Ivanka has achieved in her first 50 days in the office. She has hosted dinners for CEOs at her home to talk policy, and tweeted a picture of herself in the Oval Office to launch an initiative supporting women in the workplace, presumably not only those who are sitting in their father’s office chair. But the nonsense that she acts as Trump’s moderating force is belied by her own limited worldview: her much-vaunted childcare bill, for example, has been exposed as a tax boon for the rich, with families earning between $250,000 and $500,000 benefiting the most.





Increasingly, the president uses his daughter as a fig leaf for his misogyny and anti-semitism, quite literally pointing at Ivanka as counter-evidence when asked about his bigotries during press conferences. (She converted to Judaism when she married Jared Kushner.) The self-described “least anti-Semitic person you’ve ever seen in your entire life” suggested last week that attacks on Jewish cemeteries were faked “to make others look bad”, a claim that is one breath away from Holocaust denial. But he can’t be anti-Semitic, his supporters cry: Ivanka is Jewish! And he allows her to exist!

But Ivanka is the ultimate example of exceptionalism: she got where she is because of her family, not because of her dynamism. Her self-branding is as hollow as any suggestion that she proves a wider point: that her father loves women or the Jewish people; he just loves her. That she has been given a free pass for so long is both a testament to the media’s weakness for photogenic women, and her skill at playing that game. But Ivanka’s double game is starting to come undone: increasing numbers of stores are dropping her fashion lines. After all, as Instagram proves daily, the story those pictures tell is only the one she wants you to see.