As you may have heard, First Daughter Ivanka Trump released her second book Tuesday, called Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success. The stated aim is to "change the narrative around women and work" -- Trump points out that though 40% of U.S. households have a woman as the primary breadwinner, "we still say 'working woman' as if she were an anomaly."
That is a noble goal, and I am happy to report that with this book, Trump has helped to level at least one playing field: Here is proof that a female CEO can write a business book that is just as bad -- just as padded with bromides and widely-known examples and self-promotion and unexamined privilege and jargon -- as one written by an overconfident male CEO.
SEE ALSO:Firm that makes Ivanka Trump's clothing line paid its Chinese factory workers just $1 an hourThere is one major reason why the book is important, of course. It's that Trump and her husband Jared Kushner have suddenly become two of the most powerful people in the world. Increasingly they look like the winners of an internal White House struggle over access to the president -- and yet, as John Oliver pointed out in this tirade, we know almost nothing about them.
We can learn a fair amount about Trump from these pages. Unfortunately for those of us looking for deep thinking or self-awareness from this administration, none of it is good. Here's the TL;DR:
It's hard to overstate just how much Women Who Workreads like a slapdash term paper thrown together the night before. At least 50% of the book consists of quotes or paraphrasing from other people, some of them lasting for pages, many disguised as lists of checkpoints.
All your favorites are here, such as Steve Jobs (four mentions), Sheryl Sandberg (11 mentions) and Mark Twain (three mentions). Art of War author Sun Tzu shows up, as does the philosopher beloved by undergraduates everywhere, Friedrich Nietzsche.
(The Nietzsche quote in question, "Our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of the genius," would be perfect if applied to Trump's father; alas it is not.)
Trump seems oddly proud of the most basic sources, which seem to have enabled her to sprinkle the book with jargon:
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But her most basic go-to source is Stephen Covey, the overexposed time management guru who wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey gets a whopping 34 mentions. At one point Trump offers a Dalai Llama quote immediately followed by a Covey quote, which has to be the jackpot of business book bingo.
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And here's the thing: Almost none of these quotes are particularly revealing. Did we need life and business coach Gretchen Hydo to warn us that if you get fired, "you’ll be escorted to your desk to gather your things?"
Nor are all of the subjects particularly happy with being quoted, it emerged Tuesday, when the founder of Girls Who Code tweeted this:
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At one point Trump even appears to be quoting herself; a few paragraphs appear to be lifted from her 2009 book The Trump Card. Many more have been repurposed from articles already published on Ivankatrump.com.
Her father, who recycled much of the content from many of his books, will no doubt approve.
In an introduction written between the 2016 election and the inauguration, Trump says she's stepping away from her fashion brand and from the Trump Organization as a whole. "Emotionally, this was not an easy decision to make," she laments.
But as we've seen in the convoluted ethics conflicts of this administration, it's not that simple; for example, she won three trademarks for her businesses in China after meeting with the Chinese president.
Likewise, the book easily counts as advertising for her interests, whether or not she's currently profiting from them. The Trump Grill and Trump golf courses get plenty of shout-outs. And here she is promoting her new branding for Trump Hotels in language worthy of a brochure:
In 2016, we launched Scion, a four-star lifestyle brand. Whereas Trump Hotels stands for five-star luxury, Scion targets a new customer in search of connection, so the hotels are centered on community and innovation. Scion hotels offer energized social experiences and shared work spaces designed to bring people together to exchange ideas and create.
As for the main purpose of the book, changing the conversation around women and work, this just happens to tie in rather neatly with the Ivanka Trump brand.
She tells us she started her company as a reaction against "brands [who] portrayed the working woman as a one-dimensional, suit-clad caricature," and doesn't miss an opportunity to use the hashtag #WomenWhoWork.
As for her signature political issue, paid family leave, Ivanka doesn't hesitate to tell us that she offers her employees eight weeks of paid leave at the birth of a child. It's not the worst such policy in corporate America, and it's far from the best.
She doesn't mention the fact, however, that a former employee says Trump wasn't particularly keen on the idea of paid leave when first approached. "Our team -- the ones who created #WomenWhoWork and the ones who the hashtag really stood for -- fought long and hard to get her to finally agree to eight weeks paid maternity leave," Marissa Velez Kraxberger wrote on Facebook in October of last year.
But hey, at least Ivanka has stopped incorrectly claiming that the eight paid weeks policy applies to the Trump Organization as a whole.
She may look like the smarter, more calm Trump. But from the moment Ivanka uses the phrase "total disaster" to describe the majority of family-run businesses in America, it's clear that the apple has not fallen far from the tree.
"I design and build iconic properties all over the world," Ivanka says in her "extended job title" (one of the book's few original ideas, that women should write business card-like descriptors that encompass their entire lives). She doesn't design or build the properties herself, of course, but taking credit for the work of others is a fine Trump tradition.
She's also way ahead of her dad when it comes to another Trump tradition: nepotism. A section on venture capital is basically an email interview with her brother-in-law. And then, during negotiations to turn the Old Post Office building in Washington, D.C., into a hotel, Ivanka casually suggests that her then-unborn daughter Arabella might run the property some day.
Trump the father doesn't make too many appearances in the book; when he does, he's generically mentioned as a "great negotiator" or "great dealmaker." Ivanka is much warmer toward her mother, Trump's first wife Ivana, who gets the first paragraph in the acknowledgements. Donald Trump gets a single line.
There are also one or two suggestions she offers to the reader that we wish her father would take. Laughably, she uses a Teddy Roosevelt quote about the need for self-restraint in a leader. And then there's this:
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No fewer than five times in Women Who Work, Trump pours scorn on the notion of work-life balance. It's either "not possible" or "doesn't exist." She's forever telling us how much of a detail-sweating workaholic she is, "micromanaging Instagram crops" and answering emails from first thing in the morning until last thing at night.
And yet elsewhere she tells us the opposite -- that business is about "working smarter, not harder," that she and Jared always unplug for Shabbat, that she's trying to delegate more, that employees should be trusted with unlimited vacation time. To be fair, she's hardly the only business leader to be ambivalent on this topic.
Despite quoting liberally from Sheryl Sandberg's book Lean In, Trump doesn't seem to grasp its central concept. She rarely suggests that women's voices should be heard in the workplace more. In fact, at one point she suggests the opposite:
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There is one admirable exception to this; she offers a few pointers on how women can and should negotiate a better starting salary. Oddly enough, she spends almost as many words on how women can negotiate a better severance, reflecting her father's association with firing people.
We don't learn a whole lot about Jared Kushner in these pages. But what we do learn makes him sound like the dad in a 1950s sitcom.
On a couple of occasions, Ivanka describes herself getting overly emotional -- but don't worry, here's cool, rational Jared, who never gets upset:
When I have a lot of different stressors coming at me, he’ll say, “Just take one thing at a time. Slow down and focus on what you have the ability to control. Focus on solutions.”
Welp, so much for smashing stereotypes.
It's too easy to take shots at Trump for the many supposed woes and hardships she describes in this book. Examples from the extract published in Fortunehave already been widely mocked: the stress of the 2016 campaign meant she couldn't wake up early for Transcendental Meditation like she wanted; the fact that she is to be found at 7 a.m. with "avocado puree on my bathrobe" is meant to show she's just another working mom.
But they're just the tip of the Trump Tower ice sculpture. For example, here she is getting the kids clean: "I like to give them 'spa baths,' where I run the shower for steam, play rain forest music on Spotify, lower the lights, and let them add bubble bath to the water."
Like I said, just another working mom.
"This book was not written for women who are working two jobs, caring for a sick loved one and struggling to make ends meet," wrote Tracy Sturdivant, cofounder and director of Make It Work, in a scathing statement. "If Ivanka is going to assert that she is an ambassador for working women she needs to seek out a wider range of voices than those of CEOs and celebrities."
But perhaps the most telling example of Ivanka's unexamined privilege is who she doesn't mention, at least not until the acknowledgments: her nannies. Even then, she gives them what you might call ambiguous extended job titles: "To Liza and Xixi, who are helping me raise my own children, thank you for being a part of our extended family and enabling me to do what I do," she writes.
So yes, if Ivanka still wants to be an ambassador for working mothers, perhaps she can start by relaying the voices of the two people whose attention to her children have allowed her to write this book in the first place.
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