Not to be outdone, meanwhile, the First Lady has launched a $150m lawsuit against the Daily Mail in the US, arguing that by repeating false allegations about her past – for which the media organisation publicly apologised last autumn – it spoiled her chances of building “multimillion-dollar business relationships for a multi-year term during which plaintiff is one of the most photographed women in the world”. The White House insists the First Lady has absolutely no intention of exploiting her position for private gain, but is less clear about why her lawyers seem to be suing over the loss of any ability to do so.
Ordinarily, of course, no presidential spouse or daughter should find themselves in the limelight like this. After all, Ivanka and Melania aren’t to blame for what the administration does. Families shouldn’t be fair game.
But this isn’t just any family. It’s Washington’s own version of the Kardashians, a business strategy made flesh, and, unlike Samantha Cameron – who at least waited until her husband resigned before launching a fashion label – the Trump clan have had remarkably few reservations about using the presidential limelight to shift merch.
After the wannabe First Daughter addressed the Republican convention last autumn in a pink dress from her own collection, she promptly tweeted details for anyone keen to “shop Ivanka’s look!” Melania’s official biography on the White House website included references – deleted only after protests – to her jewellery line’s availability on the shopping channel QVC. The family is the brand, or perhaps vice versa, and it’s a bit late now to try to disentangle them.
For it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Trump flogging perfume, David Beckham selling underpants or Davina McCall promoting spatulas for Lakeland. People aren’t really buying your stuff, which is much like anyone else’s stuff. They’re buying you. They’re paying for a little bit of the magic to rub off, which is why celebrities go to inordinate lengths to preserve that magic.
To shift serious quantities of pants, Beckham needs to be every inch the sportsmanlike hero: down-to-earth, caring, a doting father and husband, and preferably not involved (as this week’s leaked emails implied) in an alleged tax avoidance scheme, however legal.
Victoria Beckham similarly must stay thin enough to wear her own clothes; Katie Price’s marriages must remain eventful enough to generate free publicity for an empire ranging from bonkbuster novels to jodhpurs; and glossy-haired “wellness” bloggers must live in terror of getting so much as a winter sniffle, let alone a spot. Who would buy the green juice recipes if their authors weren’t visibly glowing with health?
If you are your product, you can’t deviate from the brand message. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson – found dead this week at the age of 45 – was an accidental pioneer in the field, somehow turning a life of going to parties into a career as posh column fodder and luxury clothes horse. But when the gap between her real life and the brand became too wide, everything fell apart. Nobody wants to buy a little piece of confusion and sadness. And herein lies a cautionary lesson for the Trumps.
The essence of their brand, boiled down, isn’t just luxury. It’s success, the bigger and the brasher and the blowsier the better. So what if Vanity Fair thinks the food in Donald Trump’s restaurants is awful, or liberals can’t stand his angry, racist rhetoric? So long as ordinary Americans can’t get enough, criticism can be dismissed as snobbery.
It’s the same trick pulled by his rivals, who call their TV series Keeping Up With the Kardashians for good reason; even the name implies that everyone else is watching, so you better had too unless you want to fall behind the herd. The lifeblood of these brands is controversy, which only fuels the sense that you can’t risk missing a single episode, and if anything they’re strengthened by attacks from outside the target audience. Nothing endears the Kardashians to teenage girls like knowing that their mothers think it’s trashy.
But what they do fear is the puncturing of the hype. To acknowledge that millions of perfectly ordinary Americans aren’t buying it, that Kim Kardashian can’t actually break the internet simply by photographing her bottom, that much of what Donald Trump touches turns not to gold but to the opposite, would be fatal because so many of their fans are swept along by the fact that everyone else seems to love it too.
Hence Trump’s pathological obsession with the size of his inauguration crowd, his insistence that unfavourable polling must be “fake news”, and the fact that his most over-used insult is “failing”. His policies don’t sell themselves on being meticulously built to last, or ethical, but on mass appeal – so any suggestion that they’re not actually selling like hot cakes must be crushed at all costs.
Liberals should beware false hope here. Trump’s supporters remain as devotedly loyal as ever, and as president he holds all the political aces. He’s hardly going to be brought down by falling handbag sales.
Still, there’s a certain grim satisfaction in watching a man who deliberately blurs the lines between his business and high office being hoist by his own petard. Trash America’s brand too far, President Trump, and you might just take your own down with it.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist and former political editor of the Observer.
