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WAPO OP ED: Trump's photo with his loyalists was a vulgar mess. And Ivanka brought a handbag.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/trumps-photo-with-his-loyalists-was-a-vulgar-mess-and-ivanka-brought-a-handbag/2020/06/02/af44d0ee-a4e8-11ea-b619-3f9133bbb482_story.htmlBy Robin Givhan Fashion critic June 2, 2020 at 5:24 p.m. EDT
The president could have opened the Bible. He could have read Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd. Federal law enforcement had just fired tear gas at peaceful demonstrators, pelted them with rubber bullets and chased them away on horseback. Trump now had the secured space to stand in front of cameras in front of a historic church. And he couldn’t even be bothered to crack the spine on the holy book.
Instead, he corralled members of his staff for a photograph that, in its nightmarish awkwardness, revealed all the ineptitude, cowardliness and pettiness for which the whole charade was a grotesque cover.
Ivanka long ago perfected the art of playing the part, of moving through life like an Instagram feed made real. Over the weekend, she’d tweeted a Bible verse. That was followed by an acknowledgment of Pride Month with a rainbow line of heart emoji. And now she was in the park just violently cleared of peaceful protesters. She was surrounded by police in riot gear. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark A. Milley, was in camouflage.
The photographs in front of St. John’s captured the president’s fundamental discomfort with what it means to exist out in the open where people do not soothe him with flattery, where brute force is an accelerant, not an answer, and where imperfect lives spill outside their borders. Trump worked so hard for his flaccid, sanitized photograph: a man standing with nothing but white bureaucrats — most of them men — on the plaza in front of a neatly boarded-up house of worship. Trump isn’t even really at the church; he’s in its vicinity.
32 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Are we at rock bottom yet? So much winning I can't take much more.
No woman would leave her handbag unattended in that White House.
Ivanka sees her looking at it longingly all the time.
Beside it matched her heels. You want her to look thrown together like she was cowering in a bunker with the rest of the clan?
. . . was the token woman. They were careful not to make it look like the old boy's club. 
Jared, Ivanka and Hope Hicks -- the Trump administration brain trust -- set up this disaster. Word has it that Sec-Def Esper is on his way out for disagreeing with Trump about using troops to deal with protesters. The chaos is breathtaking.
