Ivanka Trump posted a pair of headshots on Instagram Tuesday to mark the Lunar New Year, wearing a cream-colored suit and diamond stud earrings. For this, she was branded culturally insensitive by the internet's self-appointed etiquette police.
The alleged offense: wearing a light-colored outfit while wishing people a happy holiday. White and near-white colors are said to be discouraged during Chinese New Year celebrations. That was enough for outlets and commenters to declare a full-blown "cultural faux pas."
Her caption was generous, thoughtful, and entirely inoffensive. She noted that 2026 is the Year of the Fire Horse and wrote:
"The Year of the Fire Horse calls us to courage, to energy, to intention, and to fearless creation. It is a year for bold ideas, decisive action, and turning vision into something enduring."
She also expressed personal excitement about projects she's been working on, closing with "Happy Lunar Year" and including the Mandarin characters 新年快乐. None of this mattered to the people looking for a reason to be offended.
The backlash, such as it was, consisted of a handful of unnamed social media commenters, quoted by the Daily Mail. One wrote, "Ever inappropriate, Ivanka." Another asked, "Why's she acting like this is her culture?" A third declared, "They are so tone deaf that it's almost comical."
That's it. Three anonymous comments. No named critics. No cultural organizations issuing statements. No actual Chinese or Chinese-American public figures are weighing in. Just a few stray voices on social media, scooped up and presented as a controversy.
This is the formula, and it works the same way every time. A Trump family member does something perfectly ordinary. Anonymous commenters complain. A media outlet packages those complaints into a story with words like "slammed" and "blasted" in the framing. The outrage isn't organic. It's manufactured from scraps.
The entire premise rests on the claim that wearing white during the Chinese New Year is a serious cultural misstep. Set aside that the suit was cream-colored, not white. Set aside that the sourcing for this cultural rule traces back to a single undated Glamour UK article with no quoted experts. Even if the convention exists in some traditions, the leap from "some families prefer red during the holiday" to "a woman in New York posting on Instagram committed a faux pas" is enormous.
Cultural traditions are not monolithic. Chinese New Year customs vary across regions, generations, and families. The confident assertion that Ivanka Trump violated some universal rule reveals more about the accusers than the accused. They don't actually care about Chinese cultural norms. They care about finding a new angle to criticize someone named Trump.
Notice the contradiction baked into the criticism. One commenter asked why Ivanka is "acting like this is her culture." So the objection is both that she celebrated the holiday wrong and that she shouldn't have celebrated it at all. If she'd ignored Chinese New Year entirely, the same people would call her exclusionary. If she'd worn red, they'd accuse her of performative cultural appropriation.
This is the infinite loop that public figures on the right face with cultural engagement. There is no correct move. The rules exist only to generate violations, and the violations exist only to generate content. It's a closed system that produces nothing but grievance.
Ivanka Trump, a 44-year-old mother of three, wished people a happy Lunar New Year on social media. She wrote about courage, bold ideas, and gratitude. She included Mandarin characters. She also shared an Instagram story of her 14-year-old daughter Arabella riding a horse on the beach, a fitting image for the Year of the Horse.
Days earlier, she attended a charity event honoring St. Jude's Children's Hospital, wearing a white beaded fringe cocktail dress that once belonged to her late mother, Ivana Trump, who passed away in 2022. That detail didn't make it into the outrage cycle because it's harder to build a hit piece around a woman wearing her dead mother's dress to a children's cancer charity.
The story here isn't a cultural faux pas. It's the media's relentless need to find one. Every holiday, every post, every outfit becomes a potential indictment when your last name is Trump. The commenters will keep commenting. The outlets will keep packaging it. And the rest of us will keep recognizing the pattern for exactly what it is.
