Friday, April 12, 2019

The First Daughter

You could tell by his eyes, the way they popped and gleamed and fixed on someone behind me. Only one person gets that kind of look from Donald Trump. “Oh!” the president said. “Ivanka!”

Ivanka Trump lifted her hands, astonished. “I forgot you guys were meeting—I was just coming by!” she said. “Uh-oh!”

  The Atlantic
Yeah, she forgot. So why didn't she excuse herself and leave?
It was a Tuesday afternoon, and it was apparently vital to inform Trump, at that very moment, that Siemens had pledged to expand its education and training opportunities to more workers as part of Ivanka’s workforce-development initiative. She also wanted to remind him that tomorrow would be the inaugural session of the program’s advisory board, and that Tim Cook would be joining the meeting.

“She loves doing it,” Trump said, presumably to me but while looking at Ivanka. “And she wants no credit. Just like me, she wants no credit.” They both started laughing.
Just like him.
For months, I had tried to secure an on-the-record interview with Ivanka to talk about her White House role and her life in Washington, D.C., but she had repeatedly declined. So I was surprised to receive a call one morning from Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, telling me that the president himself was available to talk about his daughter. We had spent 20 minutes, until Ivanka walked in.

[...]

[Trump] wanted to be clear: He was very proud of all his children. “Barron is young, but he’s got wonderful potential,” he said. “And Tiffany’s doing extremely well. Don is, uh, he’s enjoying politics; actually, it’s very good. And Eric is running the business along with Don, and also very much into politics. I mean, the children—the children have been very, very good.”

But Ivanka, whom he sometimes calls “Baby” in official meetings, is “unique.” If Trump sees any of his children as his heir apparent, it’s Ivanka. “If she ever wanted to run for president,” he said, “I think she’d be very, very hard to beat.”

Ivanka is the only child the president ever considered for an administration post. “She went into the whole helping-people-with-jobs, and I wasn’t sure that was going to be the best use of her time, but I didn’t know how successful she’d be,” the president said. “She’s created millions of jobs, and I had no idea she’d be that successful.”

The “millions of jobs” claim is not true.
Do tell.
Through Ivanka’s work as an adviser to the president, companies such as Walmart and IBM have pledged to provide re-skilling opportunities over the next five years, mainly to people with jobs already.

[...]

“She’s a natural diplomat,” Trump said. “She would’ve been great at the United Nations, as an example.” I asked why he didn’t nominate her. “If I did, they’d say nepotism, when it would’ve had nothing to do with nepotism. But she would’ve been incredible.” Warming to the subject, he said, “I even thought of Ivanka for the World Bank … She would’ve been great at that because she’s very good with numbers.”
She's good with numbers, so of course, the World Bank.
“She’s got a great calmness … I’ve seen her under tremendous stress and pressure. She reacts very well—that’s usually a genetic thing, but it’s one of those things, nevertheless.”
He can't even brag about his daughter without bragging about himself.
“She’s got a great calmness … I’ve seen her under tremendous stress and pressure. She reacts very well—that’s usually a genetic thing, but it’s one of those things, nevertheless.”

[...]

The world may have gone off script, but Ivanka still follows the teleprompter. When she ran her multimillion-dollar lifestyle brand, she worked relentlessly at “cultivating authenticity,” as she put it. She dreamed up a world full of serendipitous moments and marvelous coincidences, with the pastel-hued bags and shoes to match. Ivanka told W magazine, at age 22, “There are very few things we can control in life, but how we project ourselves is one of them.”


        



[W]hen she moved to Washington, Ivanka deployed a version of her signature approach—planning “impromptu” visits at the White House instead of at Trump Tower; posing for “candid” Instagrams at international summits rather than at the Met Gala. What her friends say she couldn’t understand was why, this time, many people weren’t buying it—why it was no longer the authenticity they saw, but the cultivation.

[...]

Jared, who calls his wife “Ivanks,” makes her coffee and breakfast, often crackers with cottage cheese and sliced fruit. Depending on the day, Ivanka might lead a hair stylist to her office, where the desk has been cleared so he can arrange his tools. Her request is almost always the same: sleek and straight, parted down the middle.
Not sure why she needs a stylist for that.
The branding education of Ivanka began in Aspen, Colorado, in 1989, just after Christmas. Donald Trump had taken his wife, Ivana, and their three children—11-year-old Don, 8-year-old Ivanka, and 5-year-old Eric—for a week-long stay at the Little Nell hotel. He had also brought along his 26-year-old mistress, Marla Maples, dispatching his airplane to pick her up in Tennessee and stashing her in a penthouse not far from his family. A few days into the trip, they all collided at a restaurant on the mountain. During the screaming match that ensued between her and Ivana, Maples let out a triumphant cry: “It’s out! It’s finally out!” The kids didn’t say a word.
What kids that age would?
Ivanka did not view her father’s philandering as a personal betrayal. Her grievances were more cosmic. She mourned the breakdown of the order and routines she’d cherished. She dwelled less on the divorce itself than on the fact that she hadn’t seen it coming. Traumatic as it was, Ivanka wrote in her memoir, she chose to use the experience as a way of giving her life “shape and meaning.” The divorce might have educated her on all the things she couldn’t control, but it also affirmed for her the one thing she could control, at least up to a point: her image.


It has been said that Donald Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person—the hot blondes, the private jets and wine bottles and steaks bearing his name in big block letters. Ivanka presented herself as something closer to a rich person’s idea of a rich person—a young Jackie Kennedy, whispery voice and all, who just happened to be trapped in a tacky gilded cage. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School with an economics degree, she went on to enjoy success as an entrepreneur with a jewelry line and, later, a full fashion label. In interviews, she came across as a woman whose wealth never blinded her to the plight of others or the importance of hard work.

[...]

[P]eople close to the family understood Ivanka’s devotion to her father. In the thick of his birther phase, Trump revisited the idea of running for office, either governor of New York or president of the United States. Always by his side, every step of the way, was Ivanka. She was there on a series of afternoons in Trump Tower in 2013 and 2014, scribbling notes as a murderers’ row of her father’s confidants—Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, Michael Caputo—gamed out a potential campaign. “She was quiet in the meetings,” Caputo told me, “but Mr. Trump would turn to her and ask her questions. It became clear to me that he trusted Ivanka more than anyone.”

[...]

By 2015, when Donald Trump announced his bid for president, her company’s profits suggested that many women saw Ivanka the way I did. If anything, her life had become even prettier. She had launched her clothing line, and had signed a contract for a book about how to be just like her. She was a Woman Who Worked; she would soon have her third child. All of which made for a somewhat jarring image that infamous June day when Trump came down the escalator to warn of a Mexican-rapist invasion while Ivanka, ever the fount of respectability, stood alongside him.

[...]

During the election, Ivanka never said outright that she supported abortion rights, for example, or was concerned about climate change, yet many people felt sure of both. Ivanka did not offer an opinion on immigration or the need for a border wall, yet the conventional wisdom was that her views must be different from her father’s. She wrote thank-you notes. She spoke in complete sentences. Because she embraced the manners of polite society, she surely embraced its politics, too.

[...]

By saying nothing to anyone, Ivanka could be everything to everyone. Having Ivanka as a focus proved convenient to many Republicans, especially white suburban women, straining to rationalize support for a nominee whose style they detested. Following Trump’s victory, even some Democrats pinned their hopes on Ivanka. Hadn’t she met with Planned Parenthood? Al Gore? It all seemed reason enough to believe that the new first daughter would keep her father’s worse impulses in check.

[...]

In august 2016, three months before the election, Ivanka posed for a multipage spread in Harper’s Bazaar. [...] It referred to Ivanka as Wonder Woman.

Ivanka might have laughed had anyone predicted [...] that in less than a year she would find herself rebuffed by a D.C. workout studio she hadn’t yet heard of—Solidcore, a Pilates-based gym frequented by Michelle Obama. In February 2017, after Ivanka took a class there, the owner, Anne Mahlum, in a since-deleted Facebook post, accused President Trump of “threatening the rights of many of my beloved clients and coaches.” Suddenly, Ivanka was finding herself radioactive. Back in New York, when people had seen her at boutique workout sessions, they’d asked for selfies.

[...]

The disdain deepened when Ivanka joined the White House as an adviser, in March 2017. No one understood what she had been brought on to do. Not even the president. During our interview, I asked Trump how he had envisioned Ivanka’s role. “So I didn’t know,” he said without pause. “I’m not sure she knew.”
I'd guess she did. Otherwise, why move to DC to be in the White House at all?
When Trump won, everything went to hell.
For the entire world.
[F]or the first time, Ivanka was unable to disassociate from her father. She was no longer a Woman Who Worked. She was a Woman Who Worked for Donald Trump.

[...]

Ivanka turned her full attention—behind the scenes— to the Paris Agreement. Her father had promised on the campaign trail to withdraw the United States from the climate accord. If Ivanka could change the president’s mind, the planet might not be the only beneficiary.

In lobbying her father, Ivanka had important allies: her senior-adviser husband, Jared Kushner; National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn; and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. She also faced strong opposition: the chief strategist Steve Bannon; White House Counsel Don McGahn; and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt. Ivanka sat in on nearly every meeting about the accord. Her strategy was to appeal to her father’s obsession with good press.

[...]

Another former official recounted a meeting in the Situation Room. McGahn, Pruitt, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions had come armed with a “deeply technical” presentation on why the United States should withdraw. After the three men wrapped up, Ivanka stood to offer her own take. In tempered, breathy tones, she argued that the U.S. was under no obligation to pay the billions that Obama had promised, and referred to the deal several times as “aspirational.” She sat back down. “No one really knew how to respond,” the former official recalled. “Even Tillerson and others who wanted us to stay in were like, ‘Okay, thank you for that. Moving on.’”
Yeah, she'd be great at the World Bank.
I asked President Trump about his recollection of Ivanka’s voice in the Paris negotiations. “Ivanka was in favor of staying in,” the president said. “She expressed it, but I’m not sure she knew it as well as I did. I’m not sure she knew the costs of it … You know, that was one of my easier decisions, actually.”

[...]

Four former senior White House officials told me that Ivanka participated less in staff meetings as summer stretched into fall. On August 15, 2017, Trump caused an uproar when he delivered remarks from Trump Tower about the racist and anti-Semitic demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia. The president stated that “very fine people” had been among both the violent neo-Nazis and those who had opposed their presence—this after a white supremacist had driven his car into a crowd of protesters, killing one person and injuring about two dozen. Ivanka is a convert to Judaism, and her husband and his family are observant. But during the fallout from Trump’s comments, Ivanka and Jared were quietly on vacation in Vermont.

Some in the White House resent the couple for their convenient absences in moments of crisis. But few things have helped Ivanka endear herself to her colleagues more than the simple fact of not being Jared.

[...]

Sidelining herself on many issues might have helped Ivanka earn goodwill inside the White House, but it also fueled a public narrative that she was irrelevant. As recently as last month, CNN ran a story asking, “What does Ivanka Trump do?” She can point to several modest bipartisan accomplishments. She led the push to double the child tax credit in the GOP’s December 2017 tax-cut bill. As noted, she launched the first government-wide approach to help 50 million women in developing countries gain access to capital and vocational training. And she’s a key reason congressional Republicans are now debating paid family leave.

[...]

The specter of Jared’s involvement in various business deals and campaign events, including those probed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, has loomed large for more than two years, and has cast a shadow on Ivanka and her work. So have questions about how she received her security clearance and whether she conducted official business through her personal email account. In February, Ivanka told The View’s Abby Huntsman that her father “had no involvement pertaining to my clearance or my husband’s clearance, zero.” Since then, many outlets have reported that the president ordered Kelly to grant Ivanka and Jared top-secret clearances against the recommendation of security officials. (White House personnel logs I obtained show that the couple received their clearances on the same day: May 1, 2018.)

[...]

Democrats are reluctant to go after the president’s children, especially a daughter whom many lawmakers have come to regard, rightly or wrongly, as relatively benign. When House Democrats issued a demand for documents from 81 individuals and organizations in Trump’s orbit, Ivanka was not on the list. An accommodating view of Ivanka has come to permeate the West Wing as well, which is perhaps what happens when you succeed in helping oust the bulk of officials who dislike you.

[...]

Asked whether the first lady and first daughter get along, the source close to Ivanka told me that they have a “desire to be mutually respectful” but that their relationship is certainly not “affectionate.” [...] Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, added that “they’ve always shared a close relationship and still do today.”
From the start the first lady seemed intent on continuing with what she used to do in New York, which was taking care of her family and being a good hostess, only on a grander scale. She organized the room-and-board arrangements for all the Trump kids and grandchildren during inauguration weekend, starting at the Blair House and moving into the White House once Trump had been sworn in and the Obamas had cleared out. Ivanka requested the Lincoln Bedroom, according to Emily Jane Fox's Born Trump. And when Melania hesitated at the idea of the traditional Inauguration Day walk with her son and husband to the White House, wondering if it would be safe enough, Ivanka reportedly said, "It's happening."

[...]

When it was announced that Melania would be visiting Africa in October in conjunction with her "Be Best" initiative, Ivanka sent a note over to the East Wing letting them know that she had been planning a separate trip to Africa, probably for January 2019, according to the Times.

[...]

According to Born Trump, Ivanka [...] acknowledged to a gossip columnist, reflecting on when Trump first met Melania, "It was much more difficult getting along with my dad's girlfriends when I was younger, because almost every woman who came into the house was a challenge to me."

  ENews
Could explain some of those pictures.
[In her West Wing office, [t]aped to the wall by her desk are letters that were cut out of construction paper in alternating colors—purple, neon orange, blue. The letters spell “JOBS CZAR.”

[...]

Ivanka may find it bizarre that, two years into the Trump presidency, many people regard her as party to what they see as destructive policies and hateful rhetoric. How is it her fault what the president ultimately decides to say or do? It would be impossible for her or anyone to moderate a man like Donald Trump out of his agenda. She feels like she was saddled with an unrealistic expectation from the outset—one that, according to former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who is close to Ivanka, she never had a chance of living up to. “If she is involved” in the president’s decision making, “she’s attacked. If she’s not involved, she’s attacked,” Haley told me.

  The Atlantic
Are we supposed to feel sorry for her? She doesn't have to be there.
In any case, it’s not clear that Ivanka disagrees with her father, for all the public perception of distance. When I spoke about Ivanka with Jared, the one comment from that conversation he was willing to make publicly had to do with how much she resembles her father. “She’s like her dad in that she’s very good at managing details. Her father is meticulous with details and has a great memory,” he said in a recent interview in his office. “He really knows how to drive people, and I think she’s the same way—results-oriented and also an excellent communicator.”

[...]

Ivanka believes that this won’t harm her in the long term. She is intent on returning to New York when her time in the White House is over. Invitations to the Met Gala, dinners with girlfriends at Italian restaurants, charity events—she is said to be certain that they’re “all waiting” for her. And she could very well be right. Trump will not be president forever.
If we're lucky.
Afterward, it will be easier for people to see the Ivanka that Ivanka wants to be seen. “Look, this crowd is not off reading Rosa Luxemburg at two in the morning,” says Rich Farley, a New York lawyer and the author of Wall Street Wars. “They invited Roy Cohn back with open arms.” Farley is sure: “The only unpardonable sin in New York society is poverty.”

If she decides to stay in Washington, she’ll also be just fine. Washington is a city where people are even quicker to forgive—to reclassify whatever once outraged them as nothing more than noise.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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