Ivanka Trump is incredibly proud of the art collection she has amassed and prominently features works by contemporary artists in her Instagram and other social media feeds.
, however, some of the artists she has featured are less than proud to know that their work has been purchased by the daughter of the president-elect.
These artists not only don't want to be associated with the divisive, historically unpopular incoming president, they feel that their work is being co-opted as aesthetic window dressing for the 35-year-old heiress' personal brand.
“I think there are a lot of artists that are uncomfortable now being incorporated, or leveraged, as part of the Ivanka Trump brand," said art dealer Bill Powers.
"In one post, Trump shimmies in front of a Dan Colen 'chewing gum' painting; a comparable work sold for $578,500 at Phillips New York in 2012," wrote Bloomberg's James Tarmy. "In another post, Trump’s child plays the piano in front of a 'bullet hole' silkscreen by Nate Lowman; a bullet-hole painting in the same palette sold for $665,000 in 2013 at Sotheby’s in New York. In yet another post, taken from a Harper’s Bazaar shoot, Trump poses at her dining table in front of a work by Alex Israel. A similar painting by Israel sold for $581,000 in 2014 at Phillips New York."
Like many moneyed collectors trying to establish themselves in the art scene, Trump employs the services of an art adviser. Alex Marshall, Trump's adviser, is the daughter of Patricia Marshall, known as one of the most powerful and savvy art advisers in the world.
One group of artists, curators and activists -- theHalt Action Group (HAG) -- has started an Instagram feed called "Dear Ivanka" in which they "repost glossy stock images of Trump along with earnest appeals about what they foresee as the dire consequences of her father's politics," said Tarmy.
“Dear @Ivankatrump please get my work off of your walls. I am embarrassed to be seen with you," wrote artist Alex Da Corte.
HAG organized a protest march outside a building owned by the family of Jared Kushner, Ivanka's husband and owner of the New York Observer newspaper.
Tarmy said that some of the artists' aggressive response comes from the fact that they would never have thought Trump and her husband would fall in line with the kind of regressive, reactionary politics that fueled the Trump 2016 campaign.
"No one could have anticipated [Donald] Trump's policies and how horrible he's turned out to be, and no one could have anticipated that his daughter and son-in-law would agree with him," said Brendan Dugan, the founder of bookstore/gallery Karma to Bloomberg. "The real argument is that the art world is primarily a marketplace, and if you have money, people will sell you things. I think maybe this is a wake-up call."
When Ivanka Trump was a socialite and heiress, artists were perfectly happy to do business with her. Now, however, having seen the role she played in her father's rise to power and anticipating how she will function in his government, they are finding themselves faced with a moral conundrum.
“It’s a moment of reckoning,” said curator Alison Gingeras of HAG. “Going forward, we need to think more carefully about how our work gets brought to the world, and who it’s sold to.”
In the wake of violent attacks in Turkey, Switzerland and Germany this week, President-elect Donald Trump has shown his characteristic lack of restraint on social media.
On CNN, anchor Poppy Harlow hosted a panel that included Basil Smikle Jr.,David Gurgen, and Alice Stewart to discuss Trump's itchy Twitter finger and the possibility that he could do real harm in the world as a recklessly tweeting president.
Harlow pointed out that with the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey, violence against Muslims in a Swedish mosque and an attack on a crowded Berlin market that killed 12 and injured 48, Trump blamed "radical Islamic terrorism." However those charges have not been borne out.
In each instance, Harlow said, "he jumped the gun." He did it a few times during the campaign, she noted, but asked Republican strategist Alice Stewart, "Aren't the stakes higher now?"
He might even be right in some of these cases, Harlow said, but "until you know, why say it?"
Stewart replied that Trump has been "correct more than he's been incorrect when it comes to pointing out radical Islam."
"But why jump the gun?" asked Harlow.
Former New York state Democratic Party chairman Basil Smikle Jr. said that Trump shot out the tweets before he consulted with his security team and before he consulted with international authorities who were trying to make their own determinations at the time about what had happened and why.
"It is problematic that Donald Trump doesn't sort of seem to have the ability to control his need to get out in front of everyone else -- even if the information is wrong," said Smikle.
Former high-ranking White House official David Gergen said that yes, as Trump's inauguration approaches, it becomes more and more imperative upon him to approach the office with seriousness and that he should start getting his intelligence briefings on a daily rather than weekly basis.
With regards to Trump's access to Twitter, Gergen said, "It would be a blessing if it just went away."
"It's not going away, David Gergen," said Harlow.
"He has to get it right," Gergen said. "When people hang on every word, he has to get it right! He's like the Federal Reserve Chairman. The words matter."
"He needs to stop tweeting the way that he is," said Smikle. While it makes him seem accessible and genuine to voters, "there's an erratic nature to it which I think will undo him at some point in time because as David said, every word matters."
We need a person in the White House, Gergen said, who speaks "with authority, with respect for the facts."
Republican President-elect Donald Trump's quest to fill cabinet positions and make key hiring decisions looks more like a "casting call" for one of his beauty pageants, say some observers, with Trump turning away applicants who aren't attractive enough or -- to his thinking -- don't look right for the job.
According to the Washington Post, longtime friend and advisor Chris Ruddy of conservative website Newsmax said the former reality TV star has been meeting with cable news personalities and other media professionals because he wants his administration to have a certain "look."
“He likes people who present themselves very well and he’s very impressed when somebody has a background of being good on television because he thinks it’s a very important medium for public policy,” Ruddy said. “Don’t forget, he’s a showbiz guy. He was at the pinnacle of showbiz and he thinks about showbiz. He sees this as a business that relates to the public.”
He continued, "The look might not necessarily be somebody who should be on the cover of GQ Magazine or Vanity Fair -- It’s more about the look and the demeanor and the swagger.”
Other aides described the hiring process almost as if it were one of Trump's beauty pageants.
“That’s the language he speaks. He’s very aesthetic,” said one aide to the Post. “You can come with somebody who is very much qualified for the job, but if they don’t look the part, they’re not going anywhere.”
One Trump confidant anonymously said that Neocon John Bolton's walrus mustache may have ultimately cost him the Secretary of State nomination.
“Donald was not going to like that mustache,” said the associate. “I can’t think of anyone that’s really close to Donald that has a beard that he likes.”
Trump favored both former Gov. Mitt Romney and Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson over Bolton because they both had that "central casting" politician look, a phrase that Trump is apparently currently enamored with.
Trump has made it clear that he wants a "telegenic woman" to be his press secretary because "he thinks it would attract viewers and would help inoculate him from the charges of sexism that trailed his presidential campaign."
When campaign manager Kellyanne Conway turned down the job, the names Trump is still considering are all familiar to Fox News viewers: conservative pundits Laura Ingraham, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Monica Crowley.
“Presentation is very important because you’re representing America not only on the national stage, but also the international stage depending on the position,” said senior aide Jason Miller.
President-elect Donald Trump officially won the election on Monday, Dec. 19 after electors cast their votes. Trump won the electors fairly, and needing to get to 270 to win, he took 304 of the 538 total electors.
But now, even after winning over the Electoral College, Trump supporters are pushing a strange argument to defend his popular vote loss. With the final numbers in, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. That doesn't matter, though.
Sure, if everyone got to pick and choose their states, then the outcome would obviously vary. But that argument doesn't make much sense. Sometimes you just can't win them all — for instance, a lot of Americans have lost as a result of the election.
J.D. Durkin at Mediaite writes:
There is quite simply no more foolish argument. Yeah, if we take away these 5.8 million American voters, then Trump wins in a landslide! It’s an upset of unpresidented unprecedented proportions!
You can not just simply decide to chop off two states in our union to try and make a silly point.
Durkin adds, if we're going to be reimagining the election results, how about thinking about it like this:
Final tally shows Trump lost popular vote by 2.8 million – but he REALLY GETS EMBARRASSED when you remove Oklahoma, Nebraska, Georgia, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Trump won the election. He may be the president who lost by 3 million votes for the rest of American history, but he did win. No amount of tweeting about voter fraud, or popular vote math that excludes millions of voters, will change that lost the popular vote.
— (@)
The most important thing to keep in mind is that Trump won the election, regardless of whether it takes a hit at his pride that he lost by 3 million votes. He still won and the world must prepare.
Right-wing mouthpiece and provocateur Ann Coulter attended a Christmas party thrown by the racist, anti-immigrant group VDARE -- her second appearance at a white nationalist soirée since September.
VDARE -- named for Virginia Dare, believed to be the first white child born on the North American continent -- was founded by another former Britisher, Peter Brimelow. The site is a notoriously racist anti-immigration message board which features contributors lamenting the toxic effects of nonwhite immigrants on the U.S. as well as the writings of anti-Semites.
"VDARE’s list of contributors, in fact, is akin to a Rolodex of the most prominent pseudo-intellectual racists and anti-Semites," wrote the SPLC's Stephen Piggott. "They include names like Jared Taylor, who once wrote that black people are incapable of sustaining any kind of civilization; Kevin MacDonald, a retired professor who wrote a trilogy claiming that Jews are genetically driven to undermine the Christian societies they often live in; and the late Sam Francis, a white nationalist ideologue who wrote several key racist books."
This is Coulter's second star turn at a white nationalist event since the fall, Piggott noted, "In September, she spoke to the annual “Writers Workshop” event put on by the anti-immigrant and white nationalist publishing house The Social Contract Press (TSCP)."
The TSCP is a Michigan-based publishing house that specializes in the writing of white supremacists.
"TSCP has spent years pushing the myth that Latino activists want to occupy and 'reclaim' the American Southwest," said Piggott. "It has argued that no Muslim immigrants should be allowed into the United States. And it has claimed that multiculturalists are trying to replace 'successful Euro-American culture' with 'dysfunctional Third World cultures.' Its editor is Wayne Lutton, a longtime member of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, which inspired the Charleston mass murderer Dylann Roof. Also on staff is well-known white supremacist Kevin Lamb, who was fired in 2005 by Human Events and the Evans-Novak Political Report over his extremist activities."
On Wednesday night, Coulter's fellow right-wing talking head Bill O'Reilly mounted a full-throated denunciation of "liberals" and "the left" for wanting to unseat "the white establishment."
"My question is -- why does Bill O'Reilly think people of color having a stake or having power is a bad thing?" asked critics on Twitter and elsewhere, marveling that the Fox News pundit would -- after years of innuendo and racially provocative remarks -- actually come out and lay his race cards on the table.
Newt Gingrich, an adviser to Donald Trump, asserted on Wednesday that the president-elect can accomplish more that President Barack Obama if he "remains honest."
During an interview with NPR, Gingrich predicted that conservatives would be "giddy" as Trump issued executive orders during the first 48 hours of his presidency.
"I suspect that the opening 48 or 72 hours will have so many executive orders repealing Obama's executive orders that the average conservative will be giddy with excitement," the former Speaker of the House opined. "This was an election that had consequence. It probably rivals the Reagan election of '80 and the FDR election of '32, in that sense."
"Obama, by the way, had a similar election but couldn't sustain it, partly because he kept lying," Gingrich said. "And this will be a real test for Trump. If Trump remains honest and seems like a person who's authentic, he's going to go a long way. If, under the pressure of the city, he starts dissembling and saying things that aren't true, he'll decay much as Obama did."
Gingrich lamented, however, that Trump had disavowed his promise to "drain the swamp."
"I've noticed on a couple of fronts, like people chanting 'lock her up,' that he's in a different role now and maybe he feels that as president, as the next president of the United States, that he should be marginally more dignified than talking about alligators in swamps," he observed. "I personally have, as a sense of humor, like the alligator and swamp language."
"But, you know, he is my leader and if he decides to drop the swamp and the alligator, I will drop the swamp and the alligator."
A teacher in Fall River, Massachusetts was accused of making anti-LGBT remarks about a student's rainbow gingerbread house, but the school has called the incident a miscommunication.
In a Facebook posting on Tuesday, Marissa Farias said Chef Jeffrey Coulombe, a culinary arts teacher at Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School, discriminated against her 16-year-old brother Joshua because he decorated his gingerbread house with rainbow colors.
"He was working on a ginger bread house, he was using really cool colors," she told WLNE-TV. "He was really proud of his work with his friend. And when the chef saw it, he said, 'Don't be surprised if this is in the trash tomorrow.’”
"If you feel the need to express yourself and your diversity, we have clubs for that," the teacher allegedly said.
According to Marissa Farias, other students have also faced discrimination. One student confirmed on Facebook that Coulombe had taken away her rainbow food coloring.
But the school insisted to WLNE-TV that the student had misunderstood Coulombe's remarks.
"I think that when things are taken out of context, things can be misconstrued,” Superintendent Thomas Aubin said.
“It is a complete falsehood and fabrication,” the superintendent charged. “On a personal level, we think it is disgusting that somebody would take somebody like Chef Coulombe’s image and put it on the internet when he’s had a history of tolerance and inclusion. Our feelings are hurt about it. We are so insulted by [the accusation]… it is disgusting.”
Joshua Farias said those remarks caused him to break down in tears.
“For [the school] to just say straight out that me, my sister, and my friend were lying…without even talking to me… was crazy,” Farias explained. “They claimed we are liars.”
WLNE-TV reported that the rainbow gingerbread house is now on display in the school’s restaurant.
An Emmy-winning producer who worked on "The Apprentice" for its first two seasons says TV had warped reality to benefit Donald Trump.
Bill Pruitt, who also worked on "The Amazing Race" and "Deadliest Catch," said Trump's real estate empire was crumbling when he was cast as the star of NBC's reality show, which redeemed him as a famous and successful businessman, reported Vanity Fair.
"'The Apprentice' was a scam put forth to the public in exchange for ratings," Pruitt said. "We were 'entertaining,' and the story about Donald Trump and his stature fell into some bizarre public record as 'truth.'"
Their scam was so successful that it eventually got Trump all the way to the White House, although the president-elect has already signaled he doesn't really want to live there and would prefer to stay in the Manhattan apartment building with his name on it.
"We are masterful storytellers and we did our job well," Pruitt said. "What’s shocking to me is how quickly and decisively the world bought it. Did we think this clown, this buffoon with the funny hair, would ever become a world leader? Not once. Ever."
Pruitt said their hopes were more modest for the "narcissistic" mogul whose "lewd (and) lascivious behavior" was caught on video but not released before the election.
"Would he and his bombastic nature dominate in prime-time TV? We hoped so," he said.
Pruitt said he's horrified that the reality they constructed had corrupted the political world, and he warned TV producers to use their new powers responsibly.
"Now that the lines of fiction and reality have blurred to the horrifying extent that they have, those involved in the media must have their day of reckoning," he said. "People are buying our crap. Make it entertaining, yes. But make it real. Give them the truth or pay the consequences."
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's transition team is considering the use of discretionary trusts to avoid conflicts of interest for Trump family members or administration officials, Politico reported on Wednesday.
Such an arrangement would provide individuals with an alternative to selling off assets or placing wealth in blind trusts, which president-elects traditionally do.
Trump aides have discussed the idea of discretionary trusts with the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), but it was unclear whether the set-up would be for Trump, his family or any of the wealthy individuals nominated to his Cabinet, according to Politico, which cited two unidentified sources briefed on the talks.
Reuters could not immediately confirm the report.
Among Trump's many holdings are hotels and golf resorts from Panama to Scotland, besides a winery and modeling agency
Federal law does not prohibit the president's involvement in private business while in office but most presidents in recent decades have placed their personal assets in blind trusts so they do not know how their decisions influence their personal fortunes.
Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told Politico no decisions have been made and that his team would release more details next month. Representatives for OGE declined to comment to Politico on the discussions.
Discretionary trusts "could allow Trump or his family members to reap some of the legal benefits of a blind trust, but could also give them some insight into how the Trump businesses are faring while also allowing Trump and his family to continue to make money from those investments," Politico said.
Trump's team has said he will address his business arrangements in January after cancelling a planned Dec. 15 news conference on the issue, which looms over the New York businessman as he prepares to assume office on Jan. 20.
Executive branch officials and U.S. lawmakers, however, are subject to conflict-of-interest rules, and Democrats in Congress have called on Trump to divest himself of his vast business interests.
Trump has said he would avoid the conflict issue by transferring control of his businesses to his oldest three children, but has given no details.
Critics have said the "half-blind" discretionary trusts would allow Trump to sidestep conflict-of-interest rules and would be inappropriate, according to Politico.
A home health care nurse in Maine said this week that supporters of President-elect Donald Trump have attacked her and her family with more than 100 calls because conservative websites published the wrong number.
Debbie Oram explained to the Bangor Daily News that the callers are upset at the owner of Turner LP Gas, who said he would not deliver gas to anyone who voted for the president-elect because he believes Trump is the antichrist.
Although Oram has no connection to the gas company, she has received more than 100 calls since Friday. It turns out that her number is one digit off from the number of the gas company. While some of the callers have been polite, the nurse said others have been downright scary.
“I’d appreciate anything you can do to put it out there so these calls will stop,” Oram told the paper. “I would hate to change my number but that’s what I’ll have to do if this doesn’t stop. We’ve had our number for years.”
According to Oram, some of the calls threatened her 21-year-old daughter and her 11-year-old son. Her son was so frightened that he began sleeping in his mother's bedroom.
“They’re saying rude and disgusting things,” she remarked. “I had to go to my doctor today for more anxiety medication because of it.”
Two days after the U.S. presidential election, Marine Le Pen – the leader of the right wing French National Front – tweeted out congratulations to Donald Trump.
During a controversial BBC interview that aired a few days later, Le Pen summed up how she believes the American election will affect her own electoral chances. She said Trump’s victory “renders possible what had been presented as impossible – that what the people want, the people can have.”
Brexit and the election of Trump have given hope not only to Le Pen, but also to her European confrères, such as leader of the Dutch nationalist right Freedom Party Geert Wilders, as they look forward to their own elections in spring 2017. As savvy politicians, they are exploiting the American election for their own purposes.
Yet, despite the temporal coincidence and surface similarities, I believe the election of Trump in the U.S. is fundamentally different from what is occurring in Europe. The Trump phenomenon is not simply an American iteration of European populism. It’s also potentially more dangerous.
populism – or extreme nationalism – began to gain ground in Europe during the 1990s as a reaction against the accelerated process of European integration. European populists sought to preserve their national institutions against encroaching Europeanization – a term they use sometimes interchangeably with globalization. Globalization is a force that has contributed to putting large numbers of people, particularly young people, out of work and facing a bleak future on both sides of the Atlantic.
In contrast, Trump questions the legitimacy of political institutions and the reality of facts in a manner that European populists do not.
Let’s consider the important ways that America and Europe differ by first turning to the European example.
An imperfect union
Le Pen has been gaining ground since the 2012 French presidential election. Recent polls place her on track to move to the final round in the 2017 presidential elections, although most analysts agree she’s unlikely to win the presidency.
For years, scholars have debated whether the lack of direct popular participation in EU governance mattered.
They got their answer beginning in 2008 when economic crisis and austerity politics proved that democracy did matter. European citizens began voting in national parliamentary elections for parties that advocated economic protectionism. For example, in 2011 the True Finns scored 19 percent of the vote. In 2010, the Swedish Democrats had their first breakthrough. In 2012, the Greek left populist party Syriza polled at 16.8 percent and is currently the main party in Greece, and the Greek neo-Nazi Golden Dawn broke through at 7 percent.
The festering European economic crisis was joined by two additional crises in 2015 – the refugee crisis and the security crisis that public terrorist attacks generated. All of this was played out in mass media and provided the final push for nationalist parties across Europe to come close to achieving political power.
An all-American election
Donald Trump is more than an Atlantic Ocean away from Marine Le Pen.
As I see it, Trump’s electoral victory is a peculiarly American product of working-class unemployment, a deep distrust of and resentment of educated elites and a celebrity culture that valorizes street smarts.
We should not forget that Trump was elected at the margins – razor-thin layers of non-college-educated voters living in rural Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania appear to have tipped the outcome of the election.
Trump tapped into what Richard Hofstadter identified in 1966 as “anti-intellectualism” in American life in a way that his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton never could.
Trump’s 3 a.m. tweets exploited social media. His tweets and retweets generated many more millions of followers than traditional media. In a popular cultural world where “Dancing with the Stars” and “American Idol” tell their audience anyone can be a “star,” Trump reigned supreme. On his reality television show “Celebrity Apprentice,” he was the uber-successful billionaire and alpha male who lived in a golden tower – an image that is arguably more accessible to the average person than the closeted world of Hamptons cocktail parties that Clinton was portrayed as inhabiting.
Trump exploited the fears, feelings of neglect and fantasies of his voters. He deployed rhetoric that combined a cadence of danger with megadoses of emotional empathy. Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention invoked law and order and was replete with descriptions of violent acts that victimized ordinary Americans – particularly those who live in inner cities. Trump claimed that he was the “only one” who could save ordinary Americans. He would be their “champion.” He would “fight” for them. He would “win” for them.
A different reality in Europe
In contrast to Trump, European populists are committed conservative nationalists. They are responding to a crisis of management on many levels in EU governance – debt, migration and security. Many are experienced politicians who have held office and have thought out policy positions – no matter how one feels about those positions.
The media often emphasize the anti-immigrant positions of European populists. But these politicians are more than single-issue xenophobes. When European populists say they want to express the will of the people, they have some specific issues in mind. They want to exit the European Union and reestablish national governance. They want to return to the “social Europe” that began to crumble in the 1970s.
An American rootlessness
Trump has tapped into what sociologist Emile Durkheim identified as anomie – a state of profound rootlessness and dislocation that occurs when institutions such as family and work break down. The salesman in Trump seemed to have grasped this instinctively. He was willing to say what perhaps others were thinking and to shatter verbal taboos.
Mussolini inspects athletes at a stadium in Rome on Oct. 31, 1927.
AP Photo
Pundits have also compared Trump to another European figure I’ve studied – Benito Mussolini. Some see similarities in the men’s physical appearance, personal style and authoritarian ways.
This may be a more apt comparison.
The motto of the Italian fascist party was “Believe, Obey, Fight!” – an injunction to action without a defined object – a command to do anything that the leader requires. In other words, style without content.
“Make America Great Again” is a similar slogan. It opens the door to virtually anything. So far it has encouraged white nationalists to justify public attacks on Americans of color which have risen since the election.
It is a rare event when citizens turn their back on things that even basic civics teaches about good governance – such as the legitimacy of political institutions, the free press and the electoral system. This, to my mind, is the true American exceptionalism, and it is profoundly dangerous. Europeans have some idea what the populist script will be; Americans do not.
The following editorial appeared in The Charlotte Observer on Wednesday, Dec. 21: ——— Stop us if you've heard this one. The North Carolina legislature passes a bad bill and sends it to Gov. Pat McCrory. McCrory says the bill includes provisions that are "wrong and short-sighted." McCrory then signs the bill anyway. It happened yet again…
Foreign policy is a tricky beast for any new president, at any time. But 2016 presents some particular international challenges: ISIS, Syria, Russia and the Ukraine, Russia and Syria, China and Iran (to name just a few). When a new president is on the way, traditional adversaries might test the waters a bit by, say, seizing…
