Ivanka Trump's collectible quotations

Trump's book is full of bullet-point lists, meaningless business-speak and inspirational quotation

You might think, spending enough time on Instagram or Pinterest, that Susan Sontag’s primary contribution to the world was a line of inspirational postcards.

This Sontag quotation on love gets used a lot, rendered in a swirly script: “I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.” It gets shared and liked, and maybe your followers think you combed through her journals to carve out that bit of wisdom just for them.

Complicated thinkers like Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou and even Friedrich Nietzsche get reduced to paper dolls that you can dress up to insert into any scenario.

In her latest book, Ivanka Trump, first daughter and senior White House adviser, seems to like playing with paper dolls a lot. Ms. Trump’s “Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success” is full of bullet-point lists, meaningless business-speak and inspirational quotation after inspirational quotation. It reads more like the scrambled Tumblr feed of a demented 12-year-old who just checked out a copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations from the library.

Who has time to read a whole book these days anyway? How can we, when we’re all so focused on success, and by success I mean trying not to fall through the cracks of the precarious financial, medical, occupational and emotional framework of today’s society?

Whisper that inspirational mantra through clenched teeth to your reflection and paint that smile on your face, girl! Oh, and try not to break a leg on your way to work or your medical debt will lead you to your eventual bankruptcy and ruin.

These inspirational guides for working women are all the rage, and somehow they manage to be successful even when the women behind them are not. In that sense, there is not much difference between the Ms. Trump who oversaw a now-abandoned building project in Azerbaijan and #Girlboss Sophia Amoruso, whose business filed for bankruptcy protection last year.

Both want to make themselves icons of the new working women, and both use their shiny image to distract you from their apparent reluctance to let their employees take maternity leave. Or their associations with corrupt systems of power — it’s all so trivial.

But who needs context anyway? All we need are these soothing words of wisdom to help us get through the day. Here’s a good one, in “Women Who Work”:

If you want to achieve greatness, stop asking for permission. — Eddie Colla, street artist

One wonders if Ms. Trump put this on a magnet for her father before he started signing executive orders barring immigration from predominantly Muslim countries and ruining our health care system:

If family comes first, work does not come second. Life comes together. — Anne-Marie Slaughter

What does that even mean? It doesn’t matter if you feel inspired by it. Nor does it matter that Ms. Slaughter has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration. She’s not here to control how her words are used, nor are the other liberals and commentators who count themselves among the resistance, like the actor Cynthia Nixon and the Girls Who Code chief executive Reshma Saujani, who took to Twitter to protest her inclusion in the book.

Ms. Trump does occasionally, and one assumes accidentally, hit upon some sympathetic figures to quote:

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. — Edith Wharton

The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud. — Coco Chanel

Wharton, despite being one of the great American writers, was a “rabid imperialist,” as she called herself, and she had a bad habit of touring corners of the French empire and praising the French for taming the savage natives who inhabited them. She might have a “good for you” pat on the back for President Trump’s bombing in Syria.

As for Chanel, biographers say she used the Holocaust to her advantage, both dating a Nazi intelligence officer and trying to cheat Jewish businessmen she had dealings with. One imagines she wouldn’t balk at the Trump administration’s failure to mention Jews in a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January.

Ms. Trump writes about the importance of “curating authenticity.” Not experiencing or developing authenticity, doing the hard work of figuring out what your personal values or philosophy is, but simply surrounding yourself with the authenticity of others and hoping it rubs off.

The reader can feel her frantically trying to associate herself with greatness in all areas of her life, to the point where she is blind to the deeper meanings in people’s words or actions, like the part of the book where she quotes Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and then four pages later asks her reader, “Are you a slave to your time or the master of it?” Later, she quotes unironically from one of the greatest minds of history, who demanded you question every assumption, every firmly held belief.

As for me, all I know is that I know nothing. — Socrates

Indeed.