Rebranding Ivanka
The President’s favourite child and most trusted confidante is at the heart of the new White House.
IT IS not an easy gig being the grown-up First Daughter. One minute you’re the official dish of liberal internationalism, Justin Trudeau, humble-bragging about “a great discussion with two world leaders about the importance of women having a seat at the table”. The next, your clothes line is being dumped into discount stores and social media is slam- ming your recommendations of religious tolerance towards synagogues, on the grounds that your father has not been so open-minded about treatment of Muslims.
Brand Ivanka is a powerful entity, but in the combustible world of The Trumps, also an unstable one.
On the plus side, the 35-year-old is close to the heart of the President’s inner circle — and in functional West Wing terms, a lot more so than Melania, her stepmother, who does not look likely to take on the public-facing aspects of the First Lady role with huge enthusiasm. In the final throws of the campaign and during the sometime erratic transition of the Trumps to power, Ivanka has been one of the most consistent characters. I watched her alongside her father on the trail: a sleek, sphynx-like figure, whispering and laying a calming hand on his elbow just before he went on stage — most likely a “calm down” gesture to dissuade him from unnecessary fights in the last days of the race. When he uses his coded signal to get someone out of the way — “Look after these good people” — it is Ivanka who most often distracts or shuffles them off to an aide’s ministrations.
When she addressed a room of influential women in New York recently, including the veteran journalist Tina Brown and designer Tory Burch, about her advocacy for working women, even staunch Democrats came away muttering words like “gracious” and “not entitled”. Unlike her father, Ivanka cultivates a quiet, patrician way of speaking, the result of an expensive school education in Manhattan and Connecticut — the equivalent of boarding school in the shires for wealthy New Yorkers. It’s a reminder that the Trumps frequented a New York of well-heeled Democrat circles before Donald’s political ambitions led him to (loosely) embrace the Republican Party.
Now she is a stranger in Washington, the tough company town of US politics. On the convoluted White House flow chart, she has no official role. It is her husband, the property mogul Jared Kushner, 36, who advises the President, albeit in an uneasy stand-off with Steve Bannon, pugnacious ideologist of Trumpism and architect of his controversial rapprochement with Russia.
A source on the transition team notes: “Nothing got done in detail in those first days without Ivanka’s agreement. She has the advantage of knowing how her father operates hour to hour. She would get into the design detail of where he’d like a lamp or where he likes to sit on the sofa (in the middle) when receiving guests.” But fixing the cushions is far from the limit of her ambitions. She was present at the White House for meetings with the visiting US head of the mighty Blackstone financial group and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan. And signalling her interest in weighty parts of the US constitution, she was a guest yesterday at the Supreme Court, listening to part of a case on arbitration agreements involving care homes and their status in federal law. Her five-year-old daughter Arabella accompanied her, which might look like an early bid for female legal empowerment, or simply cute window-dressing, depending on your level of cynicism.
A key hire is Dina Powell, a long-standing Goldman Sachs high-flyer — and head of the Wall Street giant’s foundations focused on women’s empowerment in business. “That was a smart move,” says Vicky Ward, a New York business writer who specialises in disentangling the opaque world of Manhattan high net-worthers.
Citing Powell’s appointment, even the President (then elect) seemed to have reached for the corporate feminism pamphlet in an encomium which read: “[Powell] has been recognised for her strategic oversight of key programs and initiatives and is a leader in both economic growth and the crucial empowerment of women in various aspects of business development and entrepreneurial endeavours.”
An Arabic speaker — Egyptian by birth, with a network of top contacts in the Middle East from her days working for the Bush administration — Powell is, in effect, chief adviser to Ivanka, with a powerful Rolodex of her own across the main parties in Washington. There is speculation that Ivanka is assembling a squad to balance the shoot-fromthe-hip ideologists close to her father, to appeal to women who may not be Trump fans but are quietly unconvinced by the liberal feminist arguments against him. It is Ivanka who could swing the vote his way for a second term.
All White House teams are prone to infighting but this one looks particularly divided. The abrupt sacking of Michael Flynn as National Security Adviser illustrated how quickly the favour of President Trump can translate into embarrassment and exile. Ivanka is, of course, unsackable — rumoured to be his favourite child, she built her business career inside the Trump Empire, first in her father’s property business
‘Nothing got done without Ivanka’s agreement. She alone knows how her father operates’