Will Ivanka be the most powerful first daughter in history?
WHEN Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader of the House of Representatives, called Donald Trump shortly after the November 8 election, they talked about domestic policy and infrastructure. But when Pelosi raised the subject of women’s issues, the presidentelect did something unexpected: He handed the phone to another person in the room – his 35-year-old daughter, Ivanka.
Around the same time, Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook and the author of the bestselling women’s empowerment book Lean In, reached out to Ivanka Trump, hoping to begin what aides from both sides described as “a dialogue”.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, a policy adviser to Hillary Clinton at the State Department and the author of Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family, had met Ivanka Trump about a year ago at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit. She also sent word to the incoming first daughter a week after the election, saying that she hoped to be in touch with her after her father took office.
“She is really serious about the ‘care agenda’ and can be a strong inside force,” Slaughter said in an interview.
A month and a half before her father is scheduled to be inaugurated, Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, 35, are key advisers to the president-elect, with Ivanka poised to be perhaps the most influential first daughter since Alice Roosevelt Longworth. They have attended meetings with political advisers, job seekers, foreign leaders and real estate developers eager to sell $2 million apartments as “president-elect branded”.
They are also triaging calls and emails from their own left-leaning high-powered friends and acquaintances who are hoping to find a voice for their causes in the Trump administration.
Even Leonardo DiCaprio has weighed in. The Oscarwinning actor recently met with Ivanka Trump privately and gave her a copy of his climate change documentary, Before the Flood, according to aides to both people.
But as her platform gets bigger, she is also coming in for some criticism that her primary agenda may be the further enhancement of the Ivanka brand she carefully built over the past decade.
In that time, she has published a New York Times bestselling self-help memoir (with another book scheduled for next spring), started a fashion and jewellery brand, costarred with her father on The Apprentice and become a fixture at fashion shows and at charity balls.
Messages about empowering women have been woven into her sales pitch, which blends inspirational mottos with “shop this look” appeals on her website, ivankatrump. com.
She said on 60 Minutes last month that when her father becomes president, she will just be a “daughter”. She has said she will use her “heightened visibility” to champion working women.
Some prominent figures remain sceptical of Ivanka’s commitment to their causes.
Stella Schnabel, the actress and daughter of the artist and director Julian Schnabel, seemed personally affronted by what she saw as Ivanka’s support of her father’s positions. “I had a playdate with Ivanka. I went to Mar-a-Lago!” Schnabel said.
“I always thought her father was tacky. But she’s elegant and classy and strong. So I can’t understand this. She is not a hateful, racist person. She’s just not.”
Tell that to mogul Barry Diller, a social acquaintance for many years, and one who in 2009 did a business deal with Kushner.
‘She’s a lovely woman’
“I think it’s delusional to believe there’s any difference between Mr Trump and his children on any of his extreme positions,” Diller, a Clinton donor in the 2016 campaign, wrote in a recent email.
For a long time, Ivanka’s popularity owed (at least in part) to her ability to smooth out her father’s rough edges.
Where Donald was brusque, Ivanka was tactful. Where Donald came off self-centred and easily distracted, she was self-effacing and sharply focused, traits she displayed from her earliest days growing up on the Upper East Side.
Ivanka Trump worked briefly as a model as a teenager, before entering Georgetown University. Two years later, she transferred to her father’s alma mater, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
After graduation, she began to get photographed around town, at parties like the opening of the Tribeca Film Festival and the annual Frick Gala, where she stood out as a refreshing change from a generation of hard-partying heiresses like Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie and Casey Johnson.
By then, she was working for her father at the Trump Organization, but she built a social life that in many ways eclipsed that of her father.
When Ivanka and Kushner broke up during their courtship, a reconciliation took place on Rupert Murdoch’s yacht – a rapprochement that was brokered by her friend Wendi Murdoch, who at the time was married to Murdoch.
Soon, Ivanka converted to Judaism and got married to Kushner at Bedminster, her father’s private golf club in New Jersey. They have since had three children.
As with many people eager to move up the New York social ladder, the couple engaged in philanthropic endeavours. But they didn’t leave strong footprints. Indeed, to look at Trump’s charitable deeds is to find echoes of her father’s muchchronicled pattern of claiming a lot while giving just a little.
Once the election began, the UN Foundation, which is nonpartisan, officially parted ways with her. “We cut all ties with her, but there weren’t any, anyway,” said Beth Nervig, a spokeswoman for the organisation.
During the Republican National Convention, at which her father officially accepted the party’s presidential nomination, scrutiny of Trump began to take a more negative turn.
Although her own speech was widely praised, friends were taken aback by the coarseness of some of the other speakers (like those who encouraged chants of “Lock her up”) and wondered when she would speak up to denounce them.
In September, Ivanka got testy with a reporter from Cosmopolitan who grilled her about what were apparently inconsistencies between her professions of feminism and the campaign she defended so ardently.
“She doesn’t complain about anything, and she rarely expresses weakness,” said Maggie Cordish, a friend since college. Cordish says her interest in the cause of working women is heartfelt: “She elevated issues that weren’t part of the Republican agenda because she cares about them.”
The Hollywood mogul David Geffen, a longtime supporter of Democratic candidates, said he has a fondness for Ivanka and Kushner, even though he did not vote for her father in the election.
“She’s a lovely, intelligent woman, and Jared has been a loyal son-in-law. Trump depends on him. He’s a very smart guy. Is he a genius? No, but guess what: The geniuses all lost.”