White House challenge: Balance roles of 1st lady, 1st daughter

WASHINGTON — When Melania Trump’s chief of staff announced at a staff meeting months ago that the first lady would be traveling to Africa for her first solo journey abroad, aides to Ivanka Trump, her stepdaughter, sent back a message: She was planning her own trip to Africa but just had not announced it yet.

Melania Trump spent five days last month in Ghana, Malawi, Kenya and Egypt, a trip that generated mostly positive coverage, topped off with a glossy network special. And soon the president’s eldest daughter and senior adviser will follow suit, traveling to Africa with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., one of the president’s most loyal defenders.

Stepmother and stepdaughter have given different reasons for their interest in the continent, which Donald Trump, who famously used an expletive to describe African countries, has yet to visit. Melania Trump used her trip to highlight poverty and her “Be Best” initiative, while Ivanka Trump’s trip, tentatively scheduled for January, will showcase her role as an informal White House liaison with members of Congress and her interest in economic empowerment.

But the competing visits also suggest the delicate balance the White House staff faces in managing the activities of both the first lady and the senior adviser to the president who has embraced the title of first daughter.

By all accounts, the two women have a complicated dynamic, and they coexist with little overlap in their roles. But they have not hosted a joint initiative carried out solely between their staffs since Melania Trump moved full time to the White House last year after spending the first months of her husband’s administration with her son in New York. They have rarely appeared together. And they clearly see their roles differently.

Melania Trump, 48, prefers to stay deeply private. Ivanka Trump, 37, has sought from the earliest days of the Trump administration to define her role as an adviser and policymaker, staking out a claim to an office in the West Wing, where the president and his staff are, after early reports of a Trump family office potentially being set up in the East Wing, the traditional domain of the first lady.

And while expanding her own

DOUG MILLS/ THE NEW YORK TIMES FILE First lady Melania Trump hands out teddy bears and blankets to young children and their mothers Oct. 2 at the Greater Accra Regional Hospital in Accra, Ghana. Ivanka Trump reacted to news of the first lady’s Africa trip by having her own aides send a message: She was planning her own trip too.