By Rebecca Nelson, Cosmopolitan
Eve* remembers the day it happened: December 27, 2016. She was doing her geometry homework at her house in Tennessee when her phone lit up.
“I literally almost started crying because I was so happy,” she says, recalling the moment she read the notification on her screen. “I just could not believe my eyes.”
The real Ivanka Trump — blue checkmark and all — had followed the Instagram fan account Eve, now 16, runs dedicated to the first daughter.
When Paige, a 14-year-old in Indiana, realized Ivanka had followed her account, she started screaming with delight. “It was really crazy and surreal,” she says. “I was just really happy.”
And when Suman Choudhary, a 24-year-old in Jaipur, India, found out the first daughter had followed her, she just about died. “Oh, my goddddd,” she says. “Like, how could that happen? I never dreamed of that.”
Ivanka Trump — who is also a special assistant to the president — has had a tough first year in Washington. Critics have accused her of being ineffective in government (and relying on nepotism to get there), complicit in her father’s agenda, and hypocritical for complaining about the viciousness of politics. They also torched her self-help book, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success.
On Instagram, however, none of that seems to matter. There are dozens of accounts dedicated to the first daughter, chronicling her every selfie, every fashion choice, every megawatt smile. Most post at least once a day, with effusive captions (“I cannot get over this beauty!”) and plenty of hashtags (#teamivanka, #ivankaforpresident, #beautiful). Culled from Ivanka’s personal Instagram or Snap story or cribbed from the Daily Mail, among other places, the photos depict all aspects of the first daughter’s life, from international trips to Hanukkah celebrations with her kids. Ivanka herself follows 40 of them. (A spokesman for the first daughter did not respond to requests for comment.)
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