Ivanka Trump, Traitor by Diana Rojas (p 50)

(Originally published in 'AMERICA'S FUTURE: poetry & prose to prepare for tomorrow' |Sept. 2025)

This time around, my eldest son did not laughingly diagnose me with Trump Derangement Syndrome. He didn’t blame me for not having supported Bernie. He didn’t smirk when I scolded him for pathologizing political dissent. He didn’t repeat his diagnosis that America was screwed anyway when I told him it our duty to resist.

This time around, he saw I had no energy. But when I grumbled that I was throwing in the towel, unplugging, disconnecting, retreating to fiction, he flashed anger at me.

“Don’t you dare,” he said. “Your generation is complicit. You owe it to us to help get us out of this mess.”

Last time, eight years ago, I had burst into tears upon seeing the headline “Trump Triumphs.” But within days I channeled those tears of rage into determination and let myself be supercharged by the multitudes at the DC Women’s March. I had ideas. I glowed with empowerment, feeling that I alone could fix things by writing articles on climate and sustainability issues to prove that I was still in. I vowed to do my part to find ways to cure the country from the terminal disease called MAGA.

And then midway through his first term, I stumbled on my best idea yet: I’d focus on changing Ivanka Trump’s mind, turning her against her father, forcing her to become the agent for change before her father and family ruined it for everyone.

Before my great idea, I just hoped she would go down with the ship when it sank. Every morning of Trump I, I’d pray. I had left theism behind when W took office (not because of him, but the timing was such), but with Trump I found myself turning to a god, gambling, hedging my bets, praying that Trump would die. My prayer went something like this: “Please God, let Trump die in disgrace, hopefully having been caught in bed with his beloved Ivanka, so she can go down with him, too. If you do this, I’ll go back to church. Amen.”

Why such Ivanka hate? Why did she, and all her hangers on and all her admirers, infuriate me? Because Ivanka should have known better! I had spent my adolescence and college years in the New York/New Jersey area when Donald Trump was just a douchey, tacky, blatantly racist grifter among grifters. His daughter grew up with him and should have seen firsthand that her father was a piece of dog doo. She should have been embarrassed to join him, she should have been rolling her eyes in the way children do when their parents humiliate them with their mere presence. There were those who thought her smart and able; an asset to the country. Not as dangerous as her dad. Not I. She was in many ways worse than her father because her devotion to him and his MAGA cause promised that, even if  my prayers to my erstwhile god or Trump’s fast food habit caused him to drop dead, his stupidity would live on through her. 

Instead of hate, my grand idea then was to hope that change could/would happen through enlightenment of Ivanka, espousing, if not the radical love the nuns taught us, then at least the idea of repentance and human capacity for change. It was my patriotic duty to show her the light.

First things first: I invested in a t-shirt depicting the Trump Baby balloon, the word Pendejo written under it. Every few days I’d don my Trump Pendejo t-shirt, harness the dog and walk the 1.4 miles from my house to Ivanka Trump’s Kalorama residence. Along the way, I’d pass the Trump Eats Ivanka’s Pussy stickers that some other hero had randomly affixed to poles in the neighborhood, and I’d rub them, like a talisman, for strength and luck. I rehearsed the words I’d say, clearing my voice every few blocks so that I could better project. If she saw her, went the plan, I’d stop, full-frontal her in my Trump Pendejo shirt, point at her and yell: “Traitor!”

I’d disregard decency and manners. I wouldn’t care who saw me, nor care if the Secret Service came rushing out to shush me. I especially wouldn’t care if Ivanka’s kids were with her and had to ask her later: “Mommy, what’s a traitor?”

Ivanka needed to be told that she was a bad person. And if her kids witnessed this lesson, so much the better for it: we’d nip the future MAGA babes in the bud. Upon hearing my accusation, she’d reflect, decide she didn’t want to ruin the America her children were growing up in. Didn’t she espouse religion, after all? Didn’t she have a duty to a higher cause? She could be turned, I decided. She could be penitent.

I did not consult my son. I feared his derision. He was not raised with religion.

I persisted at this plan for weeks, with no luck, no Ivanka, just lots of miles logged walking. Then one weekend, my oldest sister Ana came to visit. Ana is a no-nonsense type of chick. She suffers no fools. She’s bossy. While I had been busy pretending to be Italian in high school to win a dime store crown at a two-bit Italian pageant (another essay for another day), Ana was wearing the big Miss Costa Rica USA crown, showing off  her brains in chats with the country’s Nobel prize winning president and the Dalai Lama. 

When I told Ana of my plan, she laughed out loud. 

“You’ve really lost it. But whatever,” she said, rolling her eyes at me. “I’ll go with you.”

We harnessed up the dog and I put on my Trump Pendejo shirt. We chatted idly along the way, but every few blocks I’d make sure to remind my sister: “Remember, if we see her, we stop, we turn to her, we both yell Traitor! Two voices are stronger than one.”

Ana laughed, patting my arm in an attempt to calm me. “Your son might have a point,” she said, smirking.

She wouldn’t rub any of the Trump Eats Ivanka’s Pussy stickers along the way for strength or luck. She called them uncouth. Ana still goes to church.

Upon our approach to the Kalorama house, we both saw it at the same time: movement. There were people, beyond the one or two Secret Service agents, out front. Something was going on. Even Ana got pumped, the idea of imminent action exciting her despite not having taken it seriously enough earlier. 

“This is it!” I whisper-screamed to her. “This is great! Now BOTH of us can yell at her.”

Ana had gotten into the spirit of things by then.

“Be ready!” she warned me, a huge smile across her face.

We got closer. We looked for Ivanka’s bleached head, but didn’t see it. Instead, we saw a couple of brunettes, Latinas who looked like us, or our relatives: the nannies, fussing over Ivanka’s children. Ivanka’s daughter, Arabella, the oldest of her three children, was holding a fluffy, little white dog. She was moving its paw up and down in greeting to us as we approached the house, across the street. The two little boys –her brothers, Ivanka’s sons, Donald Trump’s other grandchildren – were looking excitedly, expectantly, at my sister, me, and my dog, Ruby.

“DIANA!” Ana gasped, grabbing my forearm hard, whisper-screaming with urgency. “It’s the children. THEY’RE INNOCENTS! DIANA! Don’t do it!”

We stopped in front of the house. We were arguing.

“Who cares about the children,” I whisper-screamed back. “They need to hear this. They need to know who their mother is. This is the future of our country we’re talking about!” 

Ana wouldn’t release my arm from her chastening hold, knowing that I always obeyed her, knowing that I was an empathetic being despite being a heathen.

“My doggy wants to say hi,” said Arabella in a child’s voice, the white paw still being moved up and down by her.

I hesitated. I wanted justice for our father, who had died hoping Trump would be removed from office. For our mother, who daily mourned on the group chat the fate of her chosen country. For myself, consumed as I was by my need to Do Something. For the Spanish-only speaking, unwitting construction workers who – at that very moment that we were standing out front arguing about carrying out my plan – were rebuilding the side retaining wall at the Trump-Kushner Kalorama manse, unaware of the hideous irony of their job.  I thought of all the damage the Trumps had already done. I thought of all the damage they would do tomorrow. This might be the closest I’d ever get to Ivanka, whose children would surely tell her about the encounter, ask her what a traitor was, ask her why the woman walking her dog was so angry. Ask her why that woman had a funny picture of grandpa on her shirt. 

I am an American. I owed it to my country. This was my duty. 

But Ana wouldn’t let go of my forearm.

I turned and faced Arabella, holding my dog’s leash across the front of my shirt to cover her grandpa’s caricature. I quickly cleared my throat, which was suddenly dry. And then, after all the planning, the practice, all the anticipation, all the worry, I met the moment. With a friendly smile on my face that one reserves for children, I chirped:

 “My doggy says hi back.”

Ana let go of my arm, relieved.

Arabella Kushner,13, and her mother Ivanka Trump twinned in red wool coats to the National Prayer Service a day after her grandfather’s second inauguration on a cold day in January 2025. The day before he was sworn in, she borrowed her mother’s coat – which Ivanka had worn during her stint as advisor to her presidential father in his first term. “Like mother like daughter!” Hola Magazine reported.

I don’t care anymore, I told my son. I just don’t have it in me anymore, I said.

But I lied. I was bitter at the reporting about Arabella’s clothes, but it was the only reporting on the Trump II inauguration that I bothered to look at. I ignored the rest, or just peeked at the pictures of the new oligarchy standing among the assembled Trumps, the children now grown into miniature versions of their parents. Are the children, indeed, innocents?

I’m despondent that we’ve come to this. That nothing we did, no amount of energy, no amount of goodwill, truthful reporting, thoughts and prayers, improved jobs reports, civility on the Democratic campaign trail, the prospect of a woman in the White House, none of it worked.

Instead, my country opted for the douchey, tacky, blatantly racist grifter among grifters. Again. His children and grandchildren beamed their support when he took his oath.

I’m trying to hate them, the Trumps, the hangers on, the new oligarchs. But I can’t be bothered anymore.

In between Trump administrations, I’d threaten to find a new country if he even came to office again. I said the shame of my fellow citizens, my extended family members, people I called friends, voting him into office again would be too much to bear.

But I’m not going anywhere. My son is not wrong. Somehow I’m complicit – was it through lack of caring or lack of action? Did I indeed focus too irrationally on Trump and his family the first time around and, as a result of this persistent unbalance in my attention and actions, take democracy for granted? Should I have long ago let go my belief that, at their core, most people are good and will make the right decisions – an opinion that sometimes makes my adult children roll their eyes at me? 

I don’t have a plan this time. I don’t even have a new walking route. I have nowhere to go. I am an American. This was my country.

Somehow I will have to figure out a way to take it back.