The world may be running out of new ways to make fun of Donald Trump, but his daughter Ivanka—the inflammable rayon glove on the iron fist—has gotten off relatively easy. Sure, Slate’s Christina Cauterucci called her a “mitigating agent for a sadistic, fascist regime,” but that plays into her own mythos: she’s mitigating. This week’s Saturday Night Live might leave more of a mark, since it takes aim at something Ivanka Trump might care about: what other rich people think of her.
The sketch puts host Scarlett Johansson—doing a passable Ivanka grimace—into a perfume ad’s tacky fantasia of class and wealth, advertising a fragrance designed especially for Trump’s daughter. “She’s a woman who knows what she wants and knows what she’s doing,” the narrator assures us, blurring the language of self-empowerment with the language a prosecutor would use to beat an insanity defense as other socialites give her the evil eye. Of course, Ivanka’s not going to claim she was crazy on her inevitable 2020 apology tour. She’s gonna claim she just loved her dad so much, and she tried hard to make him do good things, and she never imagined things would go so wrong, and by the way, have you seen her new clothing line? Keep this clip handy, and don’t believe her.
