Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Ivanka Trump swooping in to save Ukraine. Nato may not be giving Volodymyr Zelenskiy the no-fly zone he wants, but he can at least take solace in the fact that he has the full force of Saint Ivanka by his side.
If you haven’t heard about the former first daughter’s latest selfless humanitarian exertions, it’s not because she has been modest about them. Ivanka has kept a low profile since her father lost the 2020 election, but has recently stepped back into the spotlight to ensure her good deeds don’t go unnoticed. On Friday, Ivanka updated her Instagram account for the first time since January with a post trumpeting the fact that she has helped deliver more than a million meals to Ukrainian refugees in Poland. Fox News also published a long puff piece full of adoring quotes from anonymous sources and a Florida pastor she is working with about how a plane full of food destined for refugees would never have got off the ground “if it weren’t for [Ivanka’s] immediate involvement”.
Don’t get me wrong, helping refugees should always be applauded. Hurrah Ivanka! But it’s easy to be cynical about a Trump’s charity; quid pro quo seems to be the family motto. Donald Trump withheld congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine in 2019, 90 minutes after a phone call with Zelenskiy in which Trump seems to have pressured him for a favour – the subject of Trump’s first impeachment. Weirdly, I don’t recall Ivanka being quite so concerned about the Ukrainian people back then. She was, after all, busy palling around with oligarchs in Vladmir Putin’s inner circle, such as Roman Abramovich.
People change, of course. I’ll be the first to admit that Ivanka is a very different person now to how she was when Dad was in power. She’s in the middle of fighting a fraud case for one thing and, very embarrassingly and inconveniently, Trump can’t prevent himself from calling Putin “smart”. There’s nothing like clinging to a crisis to help whitewash your image.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
