Ivanka Trump Doesn’t Understand Her Favorite Philosophy

Author Ryan Holiday slammed Trump’s daughter for reducing Stoicism to a bauble, showing along the way how nonpolitical influencers can find their anti-authoritarian voice.

A bronze statue of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. (Photo by Abdullah Guclu/Anadolu via Getty Images)

ASIDE FROM MARCUS AURELIUS, Epictetus, Seneca, and maybe Zeno of Citium, there is no name more commonly associated with Stoicism than Ryan Holiday. He’s the author of several hugely popular books that introduce the ancient philosophy to a general audience and offer practical tips on how to incorporate its wisdom into everyday life, including The Obstacle Is the Way and The Daily Stoic. The latter is also the name of Holiday’s podcast and newsletter, as well as his Instagram and YouTube pages, which have a combined 5.4 million followers and subscribers.

In a recent interview, Ivanka Trump expressed her admiration for Stoicism. “Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is so informative on so many levels,” she observed. “He once wrote that the soul becomes dyed the color of its thoughts. And I think about that all the time.” In a video response, Holiday acknowledged that Ivanka got the quote right and seems to understand a core principle of Stoicism. But that’s where the plaudits ended. Ivanka is “just not living or acting in accordance with it in any way.” He addressed her directly: “If you did, you’d have an intervention with your dad.” He continued: “The only similarity you have with the Aurelius family is that you’re a Commodus! And so are your shitty brothers.”

An immediate consensus formed in the MAGAsphere that Holiday had “crashed out” and allowed his TDS to override his Stoicism. Noted philosopher and expert on ancient thought Michael Shellenberger¹ declared that “What Holiday demands of Ivanka contradicts the Stoic philosophy he claims to teach.” This argument hinged on a single line from Meditations: “For many things are done by way of discreet policy; and generally a man must know many things first, before he be able truly and judiciously to judge of another man’s action.” Shellenberger continued:

Holiday does not entertain the possibility that Ivanka has thought carefully about her relationship to her father, that she has considered and rejected the path of public denunciation, or that her loyalty might itself reflect a moral commitment. Instead, he assumes that her silence about her father proves her unethical.

Shellenberger is welcome to his fantasy about all the good work Ivanka is doing behind the scenes, but the rest of the world can see that she served as an adviser during the first Trump administration; hasn’t said a word about the corruption, cruelty, and authoritarianism of the second; and happens to be married to a man who is using his connection to the president to make gigantic piles of money.

Jared Kushner is a ubiquitous presence in American negotiations in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran, and he isn’t shy about blending business and diplomacy. “What people call conflicts of interests, Steve [Witkoff] and I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world,” Kushner told CBS. He’s trying to raise $5 billion for his private equity firm from Middle Eastern governments even as he represents the United States in the region. The color of Kushner’s soul appears to be dyed green, but I’m sure Ivanka has given him a stern lecture about the Stoic virtue of placing the pursuit of justice over self-interest.

MAGA activist Chris Rufo attacked Holiday, too. He quote-posted a clip of Holiday giving a speech about the brutality of Trump’s immigration crackdown, which included these comments:

My 9-year-old tried to make a sign this morning that said “Fuck ICE,” and I’m both proud and horrified. I’m proud of him; I’m horrified at them. . . . There are children my boy’s age in detention facilities without their parents. There are children my boy’s age who are afraid to go to school. Their parents are afraid to go to work.

Rufo presented Holiday’s statement of entirely appropriate moral alarm as an unhinged rant: “Imagine building your persona around studying the lives of the great Roman emperors and then adopting the language and mannerisms of a hysterical middle-aged woman who binges NPR and invents stories about her brave-and-stunning daughter resisting Trump. Ruthkanda Forever!”

This is rich coming from Rufo, who worked himself into a righteous frenzy last year when Cracker Barrel changed its logo. The “Cracker Barrel campaign,” he declared, was all about “creating massive pressure against companies that are considering any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’” He concluded with a great battle cry: “The Barrel must be broken.”

Imagine, if you will, building your persona around being a fire-breathing culture warrior and collapsing into hysterics because Cracker Barrel updated its logo. Holiday gave a personal speech about the horror of seeing masked agents of the state throwing people—including American citizens—into unmarked cars and dragging them to detention centers without informing their families or legal representatives. Rufo threw a fit about a comfort-food restaurant changing its branding.

The concept of Stoic virtue is foreign to Rufo, who has built his career as an unscrupulous MAGA demagogue. During the presidential debate with Kamala Harris in 2024, Trump declared that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were “eating the cats . . . they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Vice President JD Vance admitted that the whole story was a lie designed to generate attention: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” The same day Vance made this confession, Rufo published an article titled “The Cat Eaters of Ohio.” If Rufo attacks your political judgment and rhetoric, there’s a good chance you’re doing something right.

Holiday’s MAGA critics seem to assume that Stoicism preaches political quietism, but this isn’t true. Meditations is crammed with insights about the importance of civic responsibility, especially for those in power. When Aurelius warned that the soul will be dyed the color of one’s thoughts, he also gave himself a reminder that Ivanka might want to reread: “Take care not to be Caesarified”—or “stained purple,” as Holiday’s own site puts it. Some of Aurelius’s political observations were remarkably progressive for his time—he called for a “polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech.” Perhaps Ivanka urged her father to review this Stoic appeal as he attempted to have his political opponents thrown in prison for constitutionally protected speech, but I doubt it.

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HOLIDAY IS RIGHT TO INVOKE the Meditations to condemn Trump. Aurelius challenged populism and the “obsequious courting of the mob,” so it isn’t hard to imagine what he would think of Trump’s Truth Social feed. Like the other Stoics, Aurelius was a cosmopolitan—a tradition worthy of revival as Trump tramples the liberal international order. Part of Holiday’s frustration with Ivanka is that her father is about as close to a perfect inversion of Aurelius as it’s possible to imagine.

Aurelius has contempt for praise, while Trump ravenously seeks it, demanding tribute from allies, lobbying for a Nobel Peace Prize, and slapping his name and image on everything (including, ominously, the Department of Justice in Washington). Aurelius urges leaders to take full responsibility when things go wrong, while Trump had never taken responsibility for any bad outcome in his life. Aurelius believes it is morally necessary to do good with no expectation of reward, while Trump is only capable of thinking in transactional terms about how his actions will ultimately maximize his own personal benefits.

In his response to Ivanka, Holiday says, “Nobody loves seeing people talk about Marcus Aurelius and Stoicism more than me. This is what gets me out of bed in the morning. My life’s work is getting people to pick up Meditations. So, that’s awesome, I love to see it.”

But he couldn’t help but grimace at the spectacle of Trump’s daughter—who has benefited from his corrupt, authoritarian presidencies in innumerable ways without uttering a whisper of public criticism—congratulating herself for embodying Stoic virtue. “It’s not real, and it’s totally missing the point,” he said. Many influencers would view the president’s daughter talking about their thing as a marketing opportunity, and Holiday could have participated in Ivanka’s charade by celebrating her interest and inviting her onto the Daily Stoic. He could have parlayed her enthusiasm to expand his reach by capturing the MAGA podcast listeners who plump the audiences of mega-hit shows like the Joe Rogan Experience. He certainly didn’t have to risk alienating members of his own audience who may not share his politics; plenty of canceled subscriptions (attested in outraged X comments) could have been avoided if he had simply remained silent.

But Holiday has never shied from politics, and his audience should regard his moral candor as a sign of integrity and trustworthiness—not hysteria or Trump-hating derangement.

In April last year, Holiday was scheduled to deliver a lecture to the sophomore class at the U.S. Naval Academy. Before his talk, he was asked to cut remarks he had prepared about the removal of hundreds of books from the Nimitz Library—part of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s blitzkrieg against wokeness in the military. Holiday refused, and his lecture was canceled. In an essay for the New York Times about the ordeal, Holiday argued: “No people at any public institution should have to fear losing their job for pushing back on such an obvious overreach, let alone those tasked with defending our freedom. Yet here we are.” This was a time when institutional surrender to Trumpism was rampant: America’s biggest companies, law firms, media organizations, and universities were capitulating to the administration’s demands. Holiday had to “choose between my message or my continued welcome at an institution it has been one of the honors of my life to speak at,” and he chose to resist suppression in the name of that message.

When I first encountered Holiday’s work, I wondered whether his brand of meme-able public philosophy had value—was Holiday an important popularizer of Stoicism, or was he doing the philosophical equivalent of putting up motivational posters? But after reading and following his work for a few years, I’m certain the answer is the former. And this realization owes much to Holiday’s refusal to shrink from politics at a time when any true understanding of Stoicism would demand that he turn to face it more directly.

It’s a common misconception that Stoicism asks people to retreat from the public square and serenely accept injustice as an inevitable part of human life. Many seem to reduce the philosophy to a kind of ancient self-help program. Holiday is using his influence to dispel these misconceptions, and this has the added benefit of urging a large audience to take politics more seriously at a time when the stakes for American democracy couldn’t be higher.

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Watch a fall 2025 conversation between Holiday and The Bulwark’s Tim Miller on the ancient forerunners of the bootlickers in the Trump administration, and another from 2023 between Miller, Holiday, and JVL about being a dad.

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Perhaps this can serve as inspiration to other popular influencers who do generally apolitical work, but who are also deeply concerned about the institutional and cultural rot of Trumpism. For people in this sort of position who are worried about how their audiences might react to a more overtly political message, now is the time to set that reservation aside. They could face a backlash, of course—but they might also discover that many in their audiences appreciate the authenticity. But more importantly, they would be doing their own part to rescue American democracy from a would-be tyrant.

Any mass political movement must appeal to citizens who aren’t especially interested in politics. One reason Trump won in 2024 was his marshaling of influential but often relatively apolitical supporters, which is why his political opponents have been desperately searching the internet for Resistance Joe Rogan. But Resistance Joe Rogan doesn’t exist—precisely because the mass appeal of influencers who are defined by politics is automatically truncated in an extremely polarized country. Instead of constantly trying to find and harpoon this elusive white whale, opponents of Trump should lower their nets in pursuit of smaller but more plentiful fish. They could invite millions of Americans into the pro-democracy movement through thousands of channels that aren’t overtly political. As Trump’s approval rating continues to collapse, it’s time to pull as many frustrated Americans as possible away from quietism and toward civic engagement, responsibility, and action. That’s what keeping a free republic requires.

There are signs that this groundswell is already happening. The organizers of the No Kings protest in March reported that 8 million Americans participated, which would make it among the largest single-day protests in American history. When the Trump administration flooded the streets of Minneapolis with thousands of masked federal agents, citizens spontaneously organized a city-wide campaign to support their neighbors by reporting on ICE movements and providing food and other essentials to those in hiding. “I’ve never protested in my life,” one Minneapolis resident told a reporter. “I got work in the goddamn morning, just like everybody else.”

Many Minnesotans who had work in the morning braved the cold to capture on video horrors like the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. This footage then went viral—as Nicholas Grossman noted in an article for Liberal Currents, “Reddit was swamped with information about Minnesota, as anti-ICE posts dominated the main feed, and appeared in discussions of just about any topic. Knitting, biking, comic books, pop music, you name it.” Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel observed an explosion of political content from “normie, i don’t really talk about politics accounts.” He cited a golf influencer who posted a video from the driving range with the caption, “Reminder that this is a golf account, but golf is political because you can’t golf if you’re murdered by masked agents of the state.” Formerly apolitical influencers are increasingly willing to risk controversy to condemn authoritarianism, and the example set by big names like Holiday can inspire others.

Holiday isn’t a political pundit. He has dedicated his life to introducing Stoic wisdom to millions of people. But he recognized that this mission was no excuse to avoid politics—in fact, his Stoic principles required him to speak up. To put it in Stoic terms: He isn’t just talking about doing the right thing, he’s doing the right thing. We can hope that other influencers will follow his lead.

1. Just kidding! He’s a typical faux-heterodox Trump apologist.