by Doug Wead
Years later, when Ivanka’s father was running for president, Gayle King of CBS News would ask her about her role as a mother. How was she doing, raising a daughter of her own? “My parents taught me to be self-reliant,” Ivanka said. “They were not people who overflattered. They encouraged us and pushed us to be the best that we could be, but they also recognized that you gain confidence from small successes. And then bigger successes.”15
She told Oprah Winfrey, “I’ve never been interested in being a wild party girl, an ‘It girl.’ My dad is very strict. No drugs, no smoking. His brother died of alcoholism. It’s a horrible, horrible thing.”16
Eric Trump would bring up this same theme in my interviews with him. “Even when I was five years old, leaving to go to a friend’s place to play for an hour, my father would come up to me to say good-bye and then he would look down at me and say very seriously, ‘No drugs, no smoking, no alcohol!’”
Eric laughed as he remembered. “Imagine? I am a five-year-old kid!
“‘Okay, Pop.’”17
THE MAGIC OF THINKING BIG
In my conversations with other members of the Trump family and the Trump administration, this question kept lingering. What was behind Donald Trump’s success? One could see his weaknesses. It seemed after any great success he would unnecessarily self-destruct. It was something that happens to all of us, but Donald Trump’s moments were so visible. He was so transparent.
“Honest,” as Ivanka put it.
So what were the positives that transcended the negatives? How had he won the presidency? How had the economy turned around? How had ISIS been so easily tamed? My researchers and I tore apart his book The Art of the Deal. We had notes and markings on every page without drawing any firm conclusions. And then finally, one day, one interview with Ivanka yielded some good answers.
“He learned a lot from his own father,” she said. “They were builders. That’s one thing that some people get wrong. Dad is not primarily a marketer. He is good at that. He understands the bells and the whistles. But his real skill is as a builder, which he learned from his great mentor, his father.”
And yet Fred Trump, the father, had stayed in Queens, I pointed out. There he had built homes, apartments, and office buildings. He knew and understood every neighborhood and every block of that borough. He warned his son, Donald, to stick with what he knew, to stay in Queens, not to venture across the bridge into Manhattan, where the stakes were higher and the risks so much greater. But Donald Trump, who taught his children to think big, was not frightened by Manhattan.
“Donald Trump is a big thinker,” she said. “A big dreamer. He had the vision to cross over the bridge. He came to Manhattan and then ultimately we took that vision and extended it around the globe based on the brand that became synonymous with luxury at the highest level.
“I have to say, as a young girl growing up, he had this incredible pop-culture connectivity even prior to The Apprentice. I remember as a little kid his name would be on the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air or in a rap song. He would hang out with Puff Daddy. When I was young I would ride around with him and they would go to movie premieres together. He and my mother were sort of this golden couple.”
What does he expect from his team? I wanted to know. What’s it like to work for Donald Trump?
“In the Trump organization he was always an incredible mentor. He gave a bold vision for the company. He would give people room, they would have the freedom to perform, but he would always be watching and encouraging and making sure that his vision was being followed. I think he is running the country the same way, although some people in his administration are just starting to figure that out.”
But what was the secret? I persisted. What was the common denominator? What principle did he apply to all of these ventures? To building, to television entertainment, to politics?
“There is one principle,” Ivanka said, “going back to my childhood, something that he would always tell us. And it has become a quote that he is quite famous for. It’s no secret, really. He would say, ‘If you’re going to be thinking anyway, think big.’
“That,” Ivanka insisted, “is very much his philosophy.” It was his approach in business and entertainment and finally in politics. He would swing for the fences. He wouldn’t try for a single. He would try for a home run.
“That principle has yielded incredible results. It applies to every one of his buildings. Each in its own way defined the skyline of a city, often breaking records like the ninety-two-story building in Chicago, which was the tallest building built in North America in decades. This applied to The Apprentice, which was not limited to a network or cable.
“When he entered politics, they told him that he had to run for governor first, or the Senate. He should at least run for Congress. He needed a constituency, a field army to be successful. A group of political workers who had experienced a campaign together and who knew how to get things done. No one had ever been elected president as a businessman. Yes, Ronald Reagan had been in show business, but he had served two terms as governor and run for president once and lost before he had finally won.
“So, once again, it was the same thing. Against the advice of many experts, he ran for president. Think big. Don’t try to hit a single. Go for the home run.”
Ivanka laughed. “He’s not an elitist about it. He believes everybody should think that way.”
A SCARY THOUGHT COMING DOWN THE ESCALATOR
Within the family, Trump’s pursuit of power had not been totally unexpected. He had been asked about running for president for years. He was usually coy in such interviews. Often, when asked, he would say no, but then, before letting the question go entirely, he would yank it back suddenly, like a fisherman who had hooked a fish. And when he had kept the discussion alive, he would admit that he was occasionally tempted. There were so many things that the country needed to do, he would say. In the end, while sometimes coming close to making the announcement, he would never finally take the plunge.
“He asked me about two weeks before to introduce him when he announced his candidacy,” Ivanka remembers. “But he was so casual about it. He said, ‘I’m going to do this thing. Do you want to introduce me?’” She laughed when she remembered the moment.
“So I worked on it. I wanted to do it right. I wanted to give him a solid introduction. Something that would make him proud.”18
Donald Trump’s announcement for president was choreographed at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, when the candidate and his wife, Melania, rode down an escalator to a waiting crowd of supporters and journalists.
According to Ivanka, twenty minutes before the press conference, Donald Trump was still reworking the program. “Amanda, this is all wrong,” he said to a staffer, Amanda Miller. “I want ‘Phantom of the Opera.’ And, Ivanka, you have to walk out to ‘Memories.’”
“I thought, ‘Memories?’ Really?
“It was his whole playlist,” Ivanka laughed, as she retold the moment. “These were his favorites. ‘Rocket Man’ is on there too!”19
But Ivanka had to come down the escalator first, and she was alone.
Her father had planned this and envisioned it. He was ready. Ivanka was not. She saw all the cameras and was shocked by the size of the crowd.
“My friends asked me a week or two later, ‘How did you feel? Introducing your father? How do you feel about him running for president?’
“I told them that I always knew he had this civic urge, that there were things in the country that he felt were wrong and he wanted to fix them, but I never really knew for sure he would do it until he said it. So here I was announcing ‘the next president of the United States,’ in front of all those cameras, wondering if he would come down to the lobby and say, ‘Oh, no, I’m not running, after all,’ and I would be left standing there.”
The point was that if Donald Trump had been thinking about this for years, many of his friends and family were nevertheless caught by surprise. “So I spent zero time
thinking what it would be like when my father announced for president,” said Ivanka. “None of us did. We were wildly unprepared for the chaos.”20
A ROLE TO PLAY
The modern women’s movement has been conflicted over the concept of beauty. On the one hand, they protested the Miss America contest but then viciously turned on their own champion, the celebrity Ashley Judd, who they complained had gained weight.21 Judd had been ill and had been treated with steroids. But what should her weight matter to women’s activists?
Ivanka Trump was intolerable to some critics simply because she was a beautiful woman. Marin Cogan wrote that she “once seemed built in a lab to be covered by the high-gloss world of women’s fashion media.” Another writer described her as “perfectly crafted.”22
When she appeared on the cover of Town & Country in 2008, with the headline “Smart, Successful and Sexy” it was intolerable.23 The fashionistas would not allow it. In the progressive world of New York society, one cannot be both blonde and smart.
Ivanka had been a cover girl for decades. She had appeared on Seventeen in 1997. Ten years later she was crowned “the new Queen of Diamonds” in a cover story for Harper’s Bazaar. Forbes magazine ran her on its cover in 2014. She was now a wife, a mom, and “the emerging power behind the family empire.” In the two years leading up to the election of her father as president, she was the rage, appearing in a series of cover stories from Good Housekeeping and Redbook to Shape. A second Town & Country cover story was entitled “Vote Ivanka.”
Then abruptly, as if all of the publishers had met in a room and taken a solemn vow, the curtain fell. Ivanka Trump had agreed to work in her father’s White House. One last parting cover story appeared in the July 2016, in the Spanish-language version of Marie Claire. “¿Hasta Cuando Defenderas a Tu Padre?” it asked. “How long are you going to defend your father?”24
Ivanka was the same person. She had ideas about jobs, about families, about doubling the child credit as part of tax reform, about education and retraining, about ending the growing crisis in human trafficking. Her ideas were innovative and would soon become an important part of the economic recovery that was ahead. But Ivanka Trump had offended on two counts.
One, she had remained loyal to her father. Only betrayal was acceptable to the New York media, shamed by their miscalculation about the American voters in 2016 and finding themselves increasingly shamed by the great, ongoing Trump economic recovery.
Two, she was proving to be competent. Even effective. A competent cover girl?
In Washington, DC, where Ivanka had decided to work, a woman could not be both beautiful and smart. This was not the exotic world of Cleopatra and ancient Egypt. This was not a glamorous court in the Middle Ages where Diane de Poitiers could have both beauty and power. This was the United States of America, where women who mattered were Janet Reno, Loretta Lynch, and Hillary Clinton. Glamor was seen as a negative. Ivanka was a target.
SHE JUST GETS THINGS DONE
“Ivanka’s my secret weapon,” Donald Trump would tell anyone who would listen. When he needed a diplomat to finesse relationships with foreign leaders, he dispatched Ivanka. It was reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelt, who had sent his daughter Alice on a secret mission to Japan, right under the noses of the press. But Trump used Ivanka for economic and legislative chores as well. When tax reform was deemed impossible, he sent her to the toughest congressional districts, to try to capture the most unlikely supporters.
On March 17, 2017, Ivanka sat next to Chancellor Angela Merkel in a meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Staffers watched with curiosity and anticipation. They had seen Ivanka Trump in action. How people first reacted to her beauty and then were surprised by her humility and graciousness. It was an unexpected combination. Like fending off an opponent’s right only to be suddenly hit by a left uppercut that came out of nowhere. This was what the president himself had often talked about, how Ivanka would close the deal before they even had a chance to sit down.
This time, the whole world was watching it happen in real time. They saw Chancellor Merkel and Ivanka in animated conversation. They saw the delight spread across the chancellor’s face.
The president, looking on from the other side of the Cabinet Room table, smiled knowingly. He had seen it in boardrooms, law offices, and sales meetings. Now it was happening in the Cabinet Room of the White House.
Later, when my interviews with the president turned to foreign policy and I asked about Chancellor Merkel and the unique American relationship with Germany, that specific Ivanka moment came up. If Ivanka was impressed with her father, well, he was obviously impressed with her.
Ivanka’s efforts to get the tax reform bill passed were critical. Local media did not always observe the rules dictated by network television producers in New York, meaning that Ivanka’s trips across the country, ignored by national media, received wide coverage in local papers and on local television.
When tax reform miraculously passed, all House members in districts that Ivanka had visited voted yes. She had been sent into difficult districts in California and New Jersey. In the Senate, the work she did with Senator Collins and Senator Corker was crucial.25
Did the incessant media attacks get to Ivanka Trump? How did it feel to have people who had never met her now openly proclaim that they hated her? How did it feel to have public figures call for the death of her father and her own family? She was once the cover story on magazines around the world. Now that she was actually making a difference, creating effective job-training programs, for example, leading the remarkable efforts to fight the flood of human trafficking, taking on issues that defied partisanship, she was attacked or ignored.
“I think I was a little blindsided by some of the ferocity. At least on a personal level,” Ivanka said. “But for me, I’m trying to keep my head down, not listen to the noise and just work really hard to make a positive impact in the lives of many people.”26
“There’s a story in Bob Woodward’s book Fear about you meeting with Steve Bannon,” I said. “You are in the office of the chief of staff, Reince Priebus. And Bannon is shouting at you. Angry at you. Saying, ‘You are just a fucking staffer!’ And you say, ‘I’ll never be a staffer. I’m the first daughter.’”27
“It never happened,” Ivanka said calmly.
“There’s no truth to it?” I persisted. This was a pretty famous story that the media prominently featured and constantly repeated.
“None whatsoever,” she said.
And then she added, “My life is too important for me to waste in rivalries and in personal vendettas. I choose not to do that. I choose to think the best of people. Most of all, I choose to be happy and aim for impact. This is really important to me. I have no time for bitterness.”
Ivanka had said something similar in her interview with Gayle King at CBS: “You can’t be a confident, secure person if you are not happy.”28
In her book, The Trump Card, Ivanka took Rudyard Kipling’s view of criticism. “I get it from both sides, the good and the bad. And I’ve learned to ignore it. To rise above it. I refuse to let the opinions of others define how I see myself.”29
“I value the opinions of those I love,” Ivanka once told me. “And those I work with. Anyone else? It’s all noise.”
In a subsequent interview, as journalists and writers like to do, I repeated some of the same questions, just in case I might get a nuanced, more revealing answer. Once more I asked her, “How do you handle the criticism?” I was glad that I did.
“On a human level,” she said. “On a very personal level, it can be very difficult, very challenging. Especially when it is wrong. Although, I’m pretty thick skinned.”
Then she added this line: “For me, the most important thing is the truth that I know.”
NOTES
1. Interview with Ivanka Trump, 2018.
2. https://www.vox.com/2017/3/22/15005508/ivanka-trump-white-house-nepotism
3. https://www.nbcnews.com/po
litics/white-house/ivanka-trump-named-assistant-president-new-role-n740241
4. Doug Wead, All the Presidents’ Children (New York: Atria 2003), 310.
5. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/us/politics/ivanka-trump-federal-employee-white-house.html
6. https://www.forbes.com/sites/denizcam/2017/11/01/why-ivanka-trumps-melania-as-a-worlds-most-powerful-woman/#3693db85732e
7. https://www.lifezette.com/2017/04/times-100-influential-people-list-includes-ivanka-donald-trump/
8. https://fortune.com/2017/08/17/40-under-40-bezos-zuckerberg-musk/
9. https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/life/833628/melania-trump-ivanka-trump-50-most-beautiful. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3469091/posts
10. https://www.businessinsider.com/ivanka-trump-vs-north-korean-kim-jong-uns-sister-kim-yo-jong-2018-2
11. https://politicalwire.com/2018/03/12/in-ivankas-office/
12. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from Ivanka Trump come from conversations and interviews conducted between 2017 and 2019.
13. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5h8Sncv3Pk
14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5h8Sncv3Pk
15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWGxWzFzdK4
16. https://www.msn.com/en-in/lifestyle/family/18-things-you-didnt-know-about-donald-and-ivanka-trumps-father-daughter-relationship/ss-BBzSPzL
17. Interview with Eric Trump, January 2019.
18. Interview with Ivanka Trump, White House, December 2018.
19. Interview with Ivanka Trump, White House, December 2018.
20. Interview with Ivanka Trump, White House, December 14, 2018.
21. https://www.opednews.com/articles/Beauty-and-the-Beast--The-by-Elayne-Clift-120504-209.html
22. https://www.politico.com/magazine/gallery/2017/02/ivanka-trump-magazine-covers-000711?slide=0