Donald Trump’s daughter used to blame classmates when she broke school rules while portraying a more polished persona claims her former school friend. Lysandra Ohrstrom met Ivanka Trump when the women attended Chapin, an all-girls school in New York.
Ms Trump’s ex-best friend wrote in Vanity Fair about their friendship and how they were “inseparable”.
Ms Ohrstrom wrote: “She had the Trump radar for status, money, and power, and her dad’s instinct to throw others under the bus to save herself.”
She also claimed that in their mid-20s, Ms Ohrstrom recommended the book Empire Falls about working-class people in a small town in Maine to Ms Trump.
According to her former friend, Ivanka replied: “‘Ly, why would you tell me to read a book about fucking poor people?’ I remember Ivanka saying.
“‘What part of you thinks I would be interested in this?’”
Ms Ohrstrom is a journalist who writes for The Observer and Huffington Post and stood in Ivanka and Jared Kushner’s wedding as a maid of honour.
She and Ivanka were close until immediately after the wedding in 2009.
Ms Ohrstrom claimed the friendship collapsed after Ms Trump did not take enough interest in her new job.
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The former best friend also said that behind her polished persona, President Trump’s daughter sometimes portrayed “rougher, more Trumpian edges”.
She wrote: “Ivanka would regularly relay stories of teachers or observers who had commented that she had the most innate talent they had ever seen for whatever new pursuit she was taking up.”
The journalist said she wrote the article in Vanity Fair to show her version of Ms Trump.
She wrote: “It was easy to ignore the dozens of press inquiries that flooded my inbox when Donald Trump announced his candidacy because I didn’t think he had any chance of winning.
“Then, when Ivanka joined her dad’s administration, I was sure she would step in to moderate her father’s most regressive, racist tendencies—not out of any moral commitment, but because caging young children and ripping up global climate agreements was not a good look in the halls of Davos.”
Ms Ohrstrom also said she decided to write the essay despite the risk of being called hypocritical.
She added: “Although friends and family have warned that this article won’t be received the way I want, I think it’s past time that one of the many critics from Ivanka’s childhood comes forward – if only to ensure that she really will never recover from the decision to tie her fate to her father’s.”
According to Ms Ohrstrom, there are other people in the pair’s New York social circle who have also criticised Ms Trump in private.
She added: “But in public, we’ve stayed silent because that’s what we are taught to do.”