You want to know how Donald Trump got elected president? Read the review of his daughter's new book in the New Yorker, written by a woman named Jia Tolentino, with the title: "Ivanka Trump Wrote a Painfully Oblivious Book for Basically No One." Supercilious when it isn't carping, contemptuous when it isn't angry, disdainful when it isn't fretful, Tolentino's patronizing review is enough to make one want to buy the book—if only in rebellion against its reviewer's snobbery. Yes, Ivanka Trump may be rich, Tolentino suggests, but she simply isn't one of us. She seems . . . but how to put this delicately? She seems more than a little déclassé. She lacks the proper attitudes of the elite class—as sure a marker of the bounder and the interloper as a lack of table manners among the Victorians.
You can build the same mood of rebellion by reading the dueling reviews of Trump's Women Who Work in the Washington Post, where Ruth Marcus mocks the author for daring to quote "a woman who spiralizes vegetables," and James Hohmann takes a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger look at the book's many failures of propriety. Or the Slate review by Katy Waldman, which labels Ivanka Trump a "sparkly vampire." Or the Huffington Post column by Emily Peck, which moans that Ivanka Trump, the woman thought to be the only hope for "women's issues" in the White House, is oblivious to all that right-thinking people rightly think. Or the NPR review by Annalisa Quinn, the U.S. News & World Report review by Fatima Goss Graves, and the New York Times review by Jennifer Senior.
Make no mistake: Ivanka Trump's Women Who Work is not a good book. It's not even a particularly good self-help book—a category that starts with fairly low criteria for what constitutes goodness in a book. Women Who Work is anodyne when it isn't obvious, insipid when it isn't derivative, sententious when it isn't clueless. Trump uses "wordsmithing" to describe her activity in producing the book, which is a relief to those of us who write for a living. And the result of her wordsmithery is basically a lightweight version of the already lightweight Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg's much-mocked 2013 self-help book for professional women.
Trump believes that women should find a profession they like, something that inspires them, and then pursue it wholeheartedly and without regret. The energy and good-feelings that come with doing something one enjoys will carry over into all other aspects of life—marriage, child-rearing, leisure activities—and thereby allow women truly to have it all.
That's the book in a nutshell. No, that's the entire content of book, which wouldn't even fill a nutshell. Women Who Work is a pretty small nut. While preparing her "manual for architecting the life you want to live," she writes, "I've curated my best thinking, as well as that of so many others, in the pages of this book." ("Curate" seems to be, like "wordsmithing," another word for "writing.") She advises that you "center your work" around "Your Passion." She suggests that "Writing Your Personal Mission Statement" will help you define "Your Passion," and she may be right. She complains that most business meetings are a waste of time, too long and too unproductive, and about that, she is surely right.
But there just isn't enough in the book to apply her grand idea of passion with any specificity. Neither, for that matter, is there much politics. Trump discusses her nervousness before addressing the July 2016 Republican National Convention, but even there she shies away from anything resembling policy discussions. She writes in her preface that she had finished wordsmithing and curating Women Who Work "before we knew the results of the election"—adding that the preface itself was written a few days before her father's inauguration.
Of course, her father did win the election and become president, with Ivanka taking a major advisory role in the White House. And that's why the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and all the rest have devoted so much reviewing space to Women Who Work. Despite the timing noted in the preface, several of the reviewers have complained that the book doesn't reveal anything about the author's work in the new administration. Mostly, though, the reviews have complained that Women Who Work doesn't address the problems of ordinary women working at menial jobs. It may look as though Ivanka Trump aims her book at professional women, they insist, but what she's actually doing is deliberately ignoring lower-class women—just as her father does! She has nannies, housekeepers, and drivers to help her maintain her have-it-all lifestyle, and that's why she's blind to the travails of women of color and women of poverty: the women who can't have it all.
If Trump had set out to write something along the lines of a sociological survey of women's work in the twenty-first century, that might be a telling point. But self-help books aim at specific audiences and cover specific ground. To criticize Women Who Work for describing the successes of white-collar women is like complaining that Dale Carnegie didn't cover the Spanish Civil War in his 1936 How to Win Friends and Influence People, the all-time classic of the genre.
It's this kind of complaint that puts one's back up. A nearly endless artillery of reviewers has been rolled out to attack Ivanka Trump's Women Who Work. And when battalions this massive bombard a target this small, our sympathy doesn't go out to the gunners. The willfulness of the reviews, their determination to blast the book to pieces, is apparent from their opening paragraphs. Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? Who swings at gnats with a sledgehammer? The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the New York Times do, at least when the small fluttering thing has the name Trump attached to it.
The reviewers have strained to make the book seem an image of all that's wrong with the Trump administration, and generally they've failed—since the book never set out to be a representation of Donald Trump's daughter as a stand-in for her father. But there is, in truth, an image of our current political situation in the reaction to the book.
No truly successful women needs the advice Ivanka Trump offers in Women Who Work. The target audience seems instead the middle-class and lower-middle-class women who dream, or daydream, about themselves as successful. They're the consumers of self-help books in general, and this book in particular. And they are exactly the people condescended to in all the interchangeable reviews. They see the faces of those sneering at Ivanka Trump. But instead of becoming alienated from her as a result, they conclude that this ridiculously beautiful, wealthy woman must be just like them. And why not? After all, the New Yorker is contemptuous of them both.
We've seen this process before. A person is mocked by snobs as representative of a class of deplorables—and in rebellion, that class decides to accept the designation and make that person their representative. That's how Donald Trump gets elected president. And how Ivanka Trump makes the bestseller list.