Memories: Ivanka Trump Demanded the White House Squash a (True) Story About Her Flashing a Hot Dog Vendor

We hope it doesn’t come as a surprise to hear this, but something people should know at long last is that when she was working in the White House, Ivanka Trump did not end hunger or empower women or create 14 million jobs. Instead, most of her time was spent cultivating the image of someone who might do all those things, when in reality her nine-to-fives revolved around cosplaying as a person who had any business advising the president, offering uniquely bad advice, and somehow always being on vacation when s–t hit the fan.

Not surprisingly, Princess Purses believed that the White House press team existed to serve her and her ambitions, and apparently quite often expected it to “siphon off some of its resources to defend and support her,” according to former press secretary Stephanie Grisham’s new book, I’ll Take Your Questions Now. “She obviously had a Google alert set for her name and would go to Sean Spicer whenever a story about her popped up that she didn’t like, which was most of them, expecting us to push back,” Grisham writes. “That happened even if 90 percent of a story was positive. She would focus on obscure small facts that she didn’t like or claimed weren’t true.… Image was everything in the Trump family, and Ivanka worked very hard to convey an image of perfection.”

According to Grisham, one story the former first daughter really didn’t like involved her flashing a hot dog vendor, which she presumably believed didn’t fit in with the trajectory she had laid out with Jared wherein she would one day be the first female president. Initially reported by Vanity Fair’s Emily Jane Fox in her 2018 book, Born Trump, the story was recounted in detail by Trump’s childhood best friend Lysandra Ohrstrom shortly after the 2020 election. As Ohrstrom writes:

One of the earliest memories I have of Ivanka from before we were friends is when she blamed a fart on a classmate. Some time later, she goaded me and a few other girls into flashing our breasts out the window of our classroom in what has since been labeled the “flashing the hot dog man” incident in Chapin lore. Ivanka had basically been the ringleader, but she pleaded her innocence to the headmistress and got off scot-free. The rest of us were suspended. 

According to Fox, Trump was ultimately not asked to return to Chapin, not because of the hot dog incident, but because the school was annoyed with how many classes she missed while trying to become a model. “She traveled to Mar-a-Lago to put together her modeling portfolio and lied to administrators about why she was missing school,” Fox recounts in her book.

Anyway, Ivanka would prefer if these stories were no longer discussed and for the press to focus on other matters, but, like, not about how she and her husband made up to $640 million while working in the West Wing or how they reportedly made their Secret Service details go to extreme lengths to “find a bathroom.” Acceptable topics would be about how she’s just a few short years away from returning to the White House in her own right and how Jared is just putting the finishing touches on his plan for world peace. Anything else, run by her office for approval. Sound good? Great.

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Somewhere in Mar-a-Lago, a busboy just got a 47-minute earful about how rich Trump is

Apologies to everyone else who will have to hear this for all eternity. Per the Washington Post:

In 1982, when Forbes magazine launched its rich list, a compilation of the 400 wealthiest Americans, a young Donald Trump made the coveted roster, but only to reflect that he held some ill-defined portion of his family’s real estate fortune. The publicity-hungry developer launched a decades-long campaign to gain a permanent position on the list, claiming an ever-ballooning net worth that would push him up the ranks of the nation’s richest people. Money, Trump said, was how people “keep score” in life.

This week, for the first time in more than a quarter-century, Forbes dropped Trump from the list entirely, reporting that the former president is now worth about $2.5 billion — the same as last year, but as the rich get richer, stasis won’t cut it on the rich list. Trump’s worth is down about $600 million since the start of the pandemic, the magazine reported, leaving him $400 million short of qualifying for this year’s Forbes 400.