When Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader of the House of Representatives, called President-elect Donald Trump shortly after the November 8 presidential election in the United States, they talked about domestic policy and infrastructure. But when Pelosi raised the subject of women’s issues, the president-elect 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 best-selling 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 Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at the US State Department and the author of Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family, had met Ivanka 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.
Perhaps most important, she said, “I don’t know anyone else.”
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 (Dh7.35 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 Oscar-winning actor recently met Ivanka 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 Trump brand she carefully built over the past decade.
In that time, she has published a New York Times best-selling self-help memoir (with another book scheduled for next spring), started a fashion and jewellery brand, co-starred 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.
Sceptical
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. (After the show, Ivanka was criticised for her company’s attempt to market the Ivanka Trump $10,800 diamond and gold bracelet she wore during the interview. She later apologised and said her brand was due for a “readjustment.”)
Some prominent figures remain sceptical of Ivanka’s commitment to their causes. “I don’t think it’s useful to denigrate the image she projects as a working woman and as a mother and a wife, but there are limits to it,” said Faye Wattleton, the former president of Planned Parenthood. “It’s easy to talk about self-help when you have access to the best medical care in the world by virtue of your birth. It’s not so easy when you can’t earn a living wage and you have children to support. And we have not heard her speak out on those hard survival issues.”
Last month, artists like Dan Colen and Nate Lowman, both of whose works Trump has collected, lent their names in support of a “Dear Ivanka” open letter, one that included statements like “I’m black and I’m afraid of Jeff Sessions” and “My mom is going to be deported”, but that also said, “We wanted to appeal to your rationality and your commitment to protecting the rights of all Americans, especially women and children”.
The two were among the 200 or so attendees last Monday night at a protest outside the Puck Building, which Kushner owns and where the couple has an apartment.
Also there was artist Marilyn Minter, expressing puzzlement that Ivanka would be associated with an ideology that Minter says she found personally troubling. “She’s supposed to be a feminist,” Minter said.
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 of Ivanka, as she stood beside shoe designer Arden Wohl, an acquaintance of the future first daughter for two decades and who counts Trump among her 33,000 Instagram followers. “I always thought her father was tacky. But she’s elegant and classy and strong. She had a great group of friends when she was at Trinity,” Wohl said, referring to the Upper West Side private school Ivanka attended. “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. “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. “They’ve had every opportunity to publicly modify them and have not done so.”
There has even been some dissension within family ranks.
Supermodel Karlie Kloss has recently been involved with Kushner’s younger brother, Joshua, a New York entrepreneur, yet spent the fall making her strong opposition to a Trump presidency known to near-total strangers. Shortly before the election, she posted an Instagram shot of herself filling out an absentee ballot and put the hashtag #Imwithher below it.
Joshua Kushner in July and August “liked” a number of vociferously anti-Trump tweets from his Twitter account.
Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue, was a mentor to Ivanka, a person who ran two profiles of her in the Conde Nast magazine and, at one point, offered her a job there. (Ivanka wrote in her memoir, Trump Rules, that she turned it down.) But as the election drew near a close, as Wintour bundled millions of dollars for Clinton, the two fell out of touch.
After the election, Wintour wept as she talked to her staff members about the need to move forward in the face of a stinging defeat. Asked to comment about her relationship with Ivanka, Wintour politely declined through a spokeswoman.
For a long time, Ivanka’s popularity owed (at least in part) to her ability to smooth out her father’s rough edges.
Tactful
Where Trump was brusque, Ivanka was tactful. Where Trump 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 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 Organisation, but she built a social life that in many ways eclipsed that of her famous father.
Trump and his older sons are not fixtures of the New York power scene, but Ivanka and Kushner, who bought the New York Observer in 2006, are more socially nimble.
She was seated front row at Carolina Herrera shows at New York Fashion Week, walked the red carpet at the Glamour Woman of the Year gala at Carnegie Hall and was a guest at dinners with movie star Hugh Jackman and media heir James Murdoch.
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 good friend Wendi Murdoch, who at the time was still married to Murdoch.
Soon, Ivanka converted to Judaism and got married to Kushner at Bedminster, her father’s private golf club in New Jersey, wearing a Vera Wang dress, as a Getty photographer snapped away. They have since had three children.
Occasionally, there were naysayers: Gossip items in Gawker and Page Six. But slights about the couple were few.
“They’re ideal politicians,” said Peter Davis, the society journalist Kushner hired in 2011 at his wife’s suggestion to edit a magazine called Scene. “Because you come away from any interaction thinking they’re great and nice and don’t have any deeper feeling about them.”
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 Ivanka’s charitable deeds is to find echoes of her father’s much-chronicled pattern of claiming a lot while giving just a little. In 2010, she became a founding partner of the United Nations Foundation Girl Up initiative and then showcased her involvement on the Trump Organisation’s website, where it remains today as the first of just three outside causes the family supports, along with the New York City Police Foundation and the Police Athletic League.
Ivanka’s main contribution was to post a promotional link to her fine-jewellery collection, where she sold a Girl Up bracelet, with part of the sales going to the initiative.
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.
Ivanka did even less for the “blood diamond” cause.
In 2011, she announced she was starting a sustainable bridal jewellery line using ethically sourced Canadian diamonds. In an interview with Women’s Wear Daily, Trump talked about the “multitude of ways” she was planning on building her brand into “a truly socially engaged and responsible company”.
But using Canadian diamonds cost more, the line did not get traction, and it was soon abandoned, although Trump did manage in 2012 to accept a “Good” award from the Diamond Empowerment Fund, a nonprofit co-founded by Russell Simmons.
Along with Kushner, Trump made inroads on the benefit circuit, popping up at galas for New Yorkers for Children and the New York Public Library, where they were guests at other people’s tables. Last year, she attended an amfAR gala, where she was seated with Anthony Weiner and Wintour. She was also a fixture at the Glamour Women of the Year awards.
She and her husband also hosted a 2013 fundraiser for Cory Booker, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, at their Park Avenue apartment.
Ivanka was inclined to leverage her celebrity and give products that bore her name, as she did more than once with her acquaintance Mary Alice Stephenson’s charity Glam4good. “There were a couple of times I called on Ivanka to send shoes and product, whether it was battling breast cancer or dressing girls from homeless shelters,” Stephenson said. “They always sent. I think she’s a lovely person.”
Scrutiny takes negative turn
During the Republican National Convention, at which her father officially accepted the party’s presidential nomination, scrutiny of Ivanka 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. “So I think that you have a lot of negativity in these questions,” she said, according the transcript.
The next week, Ivanka got another signal that her father’s race for the presidency was not doing great things for her reputation or her own global brand. It took place in what was supposed to be her safe space: A closed-door gathering of her fellow plutocrats. In Aspen, Colorado, at the annual Weekend With Charlie Rose conference in September, Ivanka and Kushner, her husband, joined the likes of Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Ari Emanuel and Jeffrey Katzenberg at a dinner in the dining room of the Hotel Jerome. Hassan Minhaj, 31, the popular Daily Show comedian, was the entertainer at a Thursday night dinner and gently ribbed some of the more exalted guests about their wealth and power.
But his digs went deeper when Minhaj, whose parents emigrated from India to the US shortly before he was born, turned to Ivanka. “Why are you doing this?” he asked, his tone suggesting others in the room were asking the same question. Listing Donald Trump’s attacks on Muslims, like suggesting that they should be barred from entering the country, Minhaj implored Ivanka to stop abetting her father and then closed with a sharp-edged joke: “At the end of the day, your dad wants to deport my dad,” he said. She sat there, Minhaj said, “looking uncomfortable”.
When a now-infamous tape of Trump and Billy Bush came out a few weeks later, Shannon Coulter started a boycott of Ivanka’s brand over social media, with a #GrabYourWallet hashtag that went viral. “People think that because she’s polished and well spoken, that she isn’t like him,” Coulter said. “I think she is more dangerous because she is more polished.”
Then came Vicuna at the Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City, California, the latest work from the Tony-nominated playwright Jon Robin Baitz. His satire centred on a Trump-like presidential candidate and his lovely, loyal daughter, Srilanka, who struggles to stand by her monstrous father and power-hungry husband, and ends up a social and professional pariah as a result. (Trump’s surprise victory was a plot twist the playwright didn’t see coming.)
“Everyone who knows Ivanka says, ‘How could she support her dad like this?’” said Davis, the society journalist. “But she works for her father. The Trump motto is: Win at all costs.”
According to old friends, Ivanka — who, along with her husband, declined repeated requests for an interview for this article — is keeping a stiff upper lip. “She doesn’t complain about anything, and she rarely expresses weakness,” said Maggie Cordish, a friend since college who met her husband, a Baltimore real estate developer, through Ivanka. 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.
“I’ve known Ivanka and Jared for years,” he said. “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.”
— New York Times News Service
