The Week in Patriarchy
Ivanka Trump
Ivanka Trump, crusading criminal justice reformer? Pull the other one
Arwa Mahdawi
Arwa Mahdawi
Expect the former first daughter’s approach to criminal justice to be as vacuous and self-serving as it was to women’s rights
‘Tying her brand to criminal justice reform is a savvy move by Ivanka – it allows her to worm herself back into liberals’ good books without alienating conservatives.’
‘Tying her brand to criminal justice reform is a savvy move by Ivanka – it allows her to worm herself back into liberals’ good books without alienating conservatives.’ Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock
Sun 7 Feb 2021 01.00 AEDT
Last modified on Sun 7 Feb 2021 01.02 AEDT
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Ivanka wants to be the next Kim Kardashian
Ivanka Trump is done empowering women. For years the heiress styled herself as a sort of Susan B Anthony in stilettos, working tirelessly to advance women’s rights. That mission has apparently been accomplished, and Ivanka has now moved on to a new passion project: criminals.
Ivanka spent her final hours in the White House frantically working with her daddy to grant pardons and commutations to 143 people. Some of those people had been locked up for decades for nonviolent drug offenses; many others, however, were Trump cronies and white-collar crooks. According to a new report from Axios, Ivanka wasn’t just helping these people out of the goodness of her heart; it was a calculated strategy. Ivanka apparently plans to use the platform of criminal justice reform to rehabilitate her image and re-emerge into public life.
Tying her brand to criminal justice reform, which is a bipartisan issue, is a savvy move by Ivanka. It gives her a way of worming herself back into liberals’ good books without alienating conservatives. It also doesn’t hurt that criminal justice reform has become rather glamorous. Over the last few years big-name celebrities like Kevin Hart, Jay-Z and Meek Mill have spoken out on the issue. And Kim Kardashian, of course, has made criminal justice reform her life’s work. (Although she still finds time to hawk shapewear and promote dubious diet products.)
And then there’s the fact that, unlike most things she sets her sights on, crime is something Ivanka appears eminently qualified to speak out on. There is, after all, a convicted felon in the family: her father-in-law, Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to tax evasion and intimidating a witness (he hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, videotaped it, then sent the video to his sister to try to stop him testifying). Kushner, of course, got a pardon from Trump.
Criminal justice reform may theoretically be a bipartisan issue, but it’s important to note that there are very different interpretations of what that reform looks like in practice. For the left it means things like addressing structural racism and reallocating funding from police departments to community support. For the right it often seems to mean cutting costs by reducing the number of people in physical jails while finding new ways to police people. Ways which, conveniently enough, make private corporations and tech companies a lot of money. In 2018, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, warned that many recent criminal justice reforms contain the seeds of a frightening system of “e-carceration”.
Replacing cash bail with expensive ankle monitoring devices is one example of this. “Many reformers rightly point out that an ankle bracelet is preferable to a prison cell,” Alexander wrote. “Yet I find it difficult to call this progress. As I see it, digital prisons are to mass incarceration what Jim Crow was to slavery.”
As for Ivanka’s approach to criminal justice reform? One imagines that, just like her approach to women’s empowerment, it will be vacuous and self-serving. Still, she may need to serve herself sooner rather than later: the Trump Organization is facing a number of legal issues. One imagines a get-out-of-jail-free card would be very useful.
The Guardian
