On last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live, host Scarlett Johansson skewered Ivanka Trump in a an ad for Ivanka’s fake signature fragrance: Complicit. Johansson, in a floor-length sequined dress, promenades through a champagne-and-chandeliers ballroom, as the voiceover croons, “She’s beautiful. She’s powerful. She’s…complicit.”
The voiceover continues, asking, “A feminist, an advocate, a champion for women. But…like, how?” The ad closes with the tagline: “Complicit: the fragrance for the woman who could stop all this, but won’t. Also available in a cologne for Jared.”
Given Trump’s raging ego, toxic fragility, and overall instability, suggesting that Ivanka “could stop all this” is probably exaggerated and unfair, but the rest of this spoof felt spot-on. Despite her relatively progressive speech at the Republican National Convention, in which she promised that her “colorblind and gender neutral” father would “fight for equal pay for equal work” and “focus on making quality childcare affordable and accessible for all,” Ivanka has toed the line on Trump’s repulsive immigration and budget-slashing measures. Thus far, she has exercised precious little moderating influence on the White House’s far-right policies–except, perhaps, for her reported role in the survival of Obama-era protections for the LGBTQ employees of federal contractors.
In addition, Ivanka has used the currency of her wealth, motherhood, and white femininity not only for her own personal gain–which, you do you–but more damningly, to gild her father’s disgusting policies with a veneer of respectability. She and Jared are big-city New York liberals! No one with such a measured, accomplished daughter running his empire could be a misogynist! Look, she’s sitting in his White House chair! Now go buy her clothes!
Normalizing this White House is wrong when the press does it, and it’s wrong when Ivanka does it.
Plus, putting out a signature fragrance also just feels so Trump family; celebrity fragrances are a passionless exercise in money-making, branded on the person’s name rather than any sort of quality. It’s their kind of product.
(Via Vanity Fair and Time; image via screengrab from SNL’s video)
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