Ivanka Trump Is Trying To Rebrand Donald Trump as a #GirlDad. Girl, No.

On the final night of the Republican National Convention, Ivanka Trump did something truly, deeply relatable—she tried to explain to strangers that her loud, publicly embarrassing dad is actually a very nice guy.

“I recognize that my dad’s communication style is not to everyone’s taste,” the first daughter said at the RNC, introducing her father as he prepared to accept his party’s nomination for president. "And I know his tweets can feel a bit…unfiltered,” she added, her eyes sparkling with merriment. “But the results speak for themselves."

I relate to Ivanka Trump, because I am also, often, embarrassed by my dad’s behavior in public. Dads are frequently embarrassing—over confident and under socialized, they are prone to unsettling amounts of loudness and honesty. Haven’t we all felt that rising panic when a dad has “a few questions” for the waiter? Or when a dad decides to wear a new “fun shirt” out of the house for the first time?

Once I went to a comedy club with my dad and and the headliner tried to make fun of him, and instead my dad got up and started addressing the room about an anti-death penalty initiative he was spearheading in the community. So I can empathize with Ivanka Trump, whose dad has spearheaded weakening insurance protections for people with preexisting conditions and then stood by and smirked as over 180,000 Americans died of a disease he refused to contain. 

Wait—no, I can’t.

Embarrassed laughter about your dad’s social media is for when he writes a Facebook post that just says, “Dana Can You Send us the piCtures…hi from next door …, tim .” It is not for when your dad tweets a video of a supporter yelling about “white power.”

Ivanka Trump has been one of her dad’s sharpest political weapons since the beginning of his first presidential campaign. Her calm rhetoric, history as a supposed liberal, and—as tricky as it is to discuss—immaculate, hyper-European beauty, cast a soft filter over her father’s talent for cruelty and enthusiasm for violence. 

In 2016, she served as Trump’s decency whisperer, insisting persuasively that there was a good, fair man behind all the mockery of disabled people and bragging about grabbing women by the pussy.

In her repeat performance RNC speech this week—set against the backdrop of mass death, an unrestrained pandemic, and a president who seems to be encouraging the implosion of the postal service—she was working overtime. “This evening I want to tell you about the leader I know and the moments I wish every American could see,” she said. “I want to tell you the story of a president who’s fighting for you every day from dawn 'til midnight.”

That phrasing works to intimate that there is another side to Donald Trump—a humane, loving, deep-down decent side. That he is a good parent, and a good parent to a girl, in particular. Parenting a girl well, if you are a man, is supposed to indicate that you are a protector, and that you aren’t a creep, and that you have a base level of respect for women.

It’s sweet when people like the late Kobe Bryant, who coined the phrase “girl dad,” or Chrissy Teigen, who helped popularize it, use it with good intent—it redresses the idea that men understand so little about girls that they can’t really appreciate them, even when those girls are their daughters. But it doesn’t work for a president, who is not America's dad, but rather an elected official who has been steadfastly working to—among other things—create a situation in which women who want to terminate their pregnancies are so without access to safe abortion that they have to cross state lines during a pandemic to exercise their bodily autonomy. 

“My father has strong convictions,” Trump went on in her speech, smiling lovingly, welcoming us all into the adorable world of dads who have endearingly bad manners but are always there with a big hug and a plan to separate immigrant children from their parents for life. “He knows what he believes and he says what he thinks. Whether you agree with him or not you know where he stands.”

A fun example of a dad having a strong opinion is when my dad bought a Lorde CD because he saw it at a Starbucks check-out counter and likes to play it in his Toyota and say, “Now she’s got talent.” Calling a Colin Kaepernick a “son of a bitch” for peacefully protesting police violence is not a sign that your dad is a grouchy-but-sweet truth teller. It is a sign that your dad is a racist. Stoking anti-Asian bigotry by encouraging people to associate a deadly pandemic with Chinese people and Chinese culture isn’t being an adorable straight-shooter. Being an adorable straight-shooter is when my dad walks up to men on the street and point blank asks them to take me on a date.

What Ivanka Trump is doing really is insidious—insisting that because her dad is good to her, because her dad, allegedly, carries on a secret life in which he speaks longingly about the happiness of Wisconsin dairy farmers, we should give him another shot. 

As an adult, Ivanka has made it her job to testify to Donald Trump’s humanity. There is a sense that there must be something very deeply good in him, to have produced a daughter who has such careful comportment, such photogenic children, such immaculate hair. But Ivanka Trump has amassed power and personal profit in her shrewd ability to provide a cover for her father’s flirtations with white supremacy and indifference to the survival of regular Americans.

Being a #GirlDad means being like, “Sweetie, why don’t you wear that nice dress to see grandma?” and meaning a Paul Frank shirt dress you bought at a J.C. Penney in 2009. It doesn't mean giving your daughter an office in the West Wing.

Jenny Singer is a staff writer at Glamour. 

Originally Appeared on Glamour