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By VANESSA GRIGORIADISPrincess!®Comments
1 Vanessa Grigoriadis interviewed 60
friends and colleagues of the First
Daughter to find out what the post-
presidency will have in store for her and
who, at the end of the day, she really is
(“Ivanka Aeternum,” August 5–18).The
cover,anodtotheDaily News’ 1975ford
to city: drop deadheadline, prodded
@NicholasGazin to tweet, “I was thinking
the other day how Trump has a ‘Ford to
New York: Drop Dead’ moment at least
weekly and how strange that would be to
the people of the ’70s.” Many readers took
note of conservative commentator Doug
Wead’s assessment of Ivanka, with Cristina
Maza tweeting,“Throwing up a little after
reading Doug Wead say that very few women
in history have been both brilliant and beau-
tiful.”TheNewYorker’s Patrick Radden
Keefe praised the story: “I’d much rather
read the piece based on 60 interviews with
people who know the subject than on one
interview with the subject herself.” A few
found the profile’s tone mean-spirited, with
Kim Weitkamp writing, “Give me all the
negatives, all the dirt, and all the truthful
nasty politics; but let’s keep the middle-
school mean-girls crap off the page.”New
Yorkcontributor Hillary Kelly added her
own Ivanka story:“Ivanka was two years
ahead of me at Penn. I once saw her walking
down the street in sweatpants a day after I’d
read an article in which she’d declared it was
trashy to wear sweatpants to class.”
2 Andrew Sullivan asked whether Amer-
ica under Trump might soon go the
way of Rome in“OurCaesar”(August 5–18).
Erich -
tion of
has done his homework and recognizes that
the Republic stood for half a millennium
before its collapse. It might have been useful
to explore what kept it together for so long
rather than to shine the spotlight on devel-
opments that presaged the turbulence at its
end. There is an important message there
for those dismayed and alarmed by Trump’s
flouting of precedent and grasping after un-
checked authority. The critical glue that held
together the Republic was themos maio-
rum,a respect for tradition, established
norms, and principles that underpinned
loyalty to the nation.Insistence upon our
own ancestral values as a banner with which
to rally resistance to Trump’s transgressions
might be more effective than setting him
in the disheartening mold of Pompey and
Caesar.”Stanford classicist Richard Saller
wrote, “I have sympathy with Sullivan’s dis-
taste for this era in American politics, but his
essay is tendentious. Among the many dif-
ferences between Trump and Caesar (one of
the most gifted literary figures of his time),
the most important in explaining the fall of
the Republic is that the legionaries depend-
ed on rewards from their individual generals
in return for their loyalty, not on payment
from the state. The Republic collapsed when
Caesar’s legions followed him across the Ru-
bicon, just as Sulla’s legions and Pompey’s
legions had followed them for their rewards.
As Mr. Sullivan notes in passing, he cannot
imagine today’s army following the presi-
dent in the overthrow of the Constitution.
That difference is crucial.The true parallel
between imperial Rome and contemporary
America is that both had vivid narratives of
moral decline. The U.S. may be in decline, but
not because it is Rome.”Arthur M. Eckstein,
pro of at the University of
Ma , wr mans of the Republic
would have been deeply suspicious of the
American president—a one-man head ofstate and commander of the armed forces,
elected for four full years with a possible im-
mediate second four-year term. That way lay
tyranny. Though he is no Caesar, Trump is
accelerating the crisis of presidential power.
Since the 1930s, that power has inexorably
grown in response to internal and external
crises, no matter who held office.”3 Rebecca Traister explored what it
would mean to have a teacher in the
White House (“Elizabeth Warren’s Class-
room Strategy,” August 5–18). Vanderbilt
Law’s Ganesh Sitaraman tweeted, “It’s true.
@ewarren was a spectacular classroom
teacher ... I’m reminded of—and still inspired
by—her use of the socratic method to bring
out the best in students.” Another former
student, Representative Joe Kennedy III of
Massachusetts, wrote, “Liz Warren’s impact
has a way of sticking with you. Not just be-
cause she isn’t afraid to challenge you, to
keep you on your toes, to demand your very
best—but because the impact is the point.
Her career isn’t about lip service or box
checking or rhetoric for rhetoric’s sake. It’s
about communicating that the law—all
those abstract, hard-to-remember, hard-to-
define words on a page—is quite real for the
families it touches. Rebecca Traister cap-
tured the Warren approach beautifully. It’s
the reason she is a beloved teacher, a power-
house U.S. senator and—soon—a horizon-
shattering president of the United States.”correction: “The City’s Most Toxic Mu-
seum Boards” (August 5–18) incorrectly
referred to Thomas E. Tuft as the former
chairman of Lazard. He was the chair of
the firm’s global-capital-markets advisory.