Jump to content
IGNORED

Ivanka and Jared 2: Tarnished Gold


samurai_sarah

Recommended Posts

7 hours ago, Howl said:

I did a quick google search and found that Ivanka and Jared are both government employees, and subject to the same ethics requirements as all other government employees

Wasn't there a big hoopla at the beginning of the presiduncy that Jared and Ivanka were unpaid advisors, not actual employees? Huh. Who'd've thought that was a lie? 

  • Upvote 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

31 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

?

?

  • I Agree 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 3/6/2019 at 6:29 AM, fraurosena said:

Wasn't there a big hoopla at the beginning of the presiduncy that Jared and Ivanka were unpaid advisors, not actual employees? Huh. Who'd've thought that was a lie? 

Well, at first she claimed she was just going to be a daughter (in that 60 Minutes interview), so....

  • Upvote 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

New book about Treason Barbie and Ken: "‘My Dad’s Not a Racist’: Book Describes Ivanka Trump’s Defense After Charlottesville"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — When Gary D. Cohn was considering resigning as the top White House economic adviser after President Trump blamed “both sides” in a deadly white nationalist protest in Charlottesville, Va., his first stop was a meeting with Mr. Trump’s children.

In a conversation in August 2017 with Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and senior adviser, Mr. Cohn was shocked by her reaction to his concerns, according to a new book about Ms. Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner.

“My dad’s not a racist; he didn’t mean any of it,” Ms. Trump said of the president’s refusal to condemn white nationalists outright. Appearing to channel her father, she added, “That’s not what he said.”

Mr. Cohn ultimately did not resign over the Charlottesville episode, instead leaving after losing a battle over trade policy last year. In a statement late Monday, Mr. Cohn said: “Ivanka and Jared brought me into the administration. We worked well together and continue to be friends to this day.”

But the episode permanently changed his view of Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner, who are often painted as moderating influences on the president, according to “Kushner Inc.,” by the journalist Vicky Ward.

The book, which will be published by St. Martin’s Press on March 19, seeks to tell the behind-the-scenes story of Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner’s rise to extraordinary power in the White House. Ms. Ward has said she spent two years interviewing 220 people for the book, granting many of them anonymity.

Her account is not a flattering one, and White House officials have dismissed the book and any coverage of it.

She portrays Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner as two children forged by their domineering fathers — one overinvolved with his son, one disengaged from his daughter — who have climbed to positions of power by disregarding protocol and skirting the rules when they can. And Ms. Ward tries to unravel the narrative that the two serve as stabilizing voices inside an otherwise chaotic White House, depicting them instead as Mr. Trump’s chief enablers.

The portrait that emerges, according to Mr. Kushner’s camp, is far removed from reality. “Every point that Ms. Ward mentioned in what she called her ‘fact checking’ stage was entirely false,” Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Mr. Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement. “It seems she has written a book of fiction rather than any serious attempt to get the facts. Correcting everything wrong would take too long and be pointless.”

Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner wanted to control who could travel on trips funded by the State Department, Ms. Ward wrote, citing a source at the department. Ms. Trump also often requested to travel on Air Force planes when it was not appropriate. When Rex W. Tillerson, the former secretary of state, would deny the requests, the couple would invite along a cabinet secretary, often Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, to get access to a plane.

Over the past two years, Mr. Trump has waffled on whether he wanted his children serving in his administration. When he hired John F. Kelly as his chief of staff, a move that Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner supported at the time, he gave an early directive: “Get rid of my kids; get them back to New York.”

Mr. Trump complained, according to the book, that his children “didn’t know how to play the game” and generated cycles of bad press. Mr. Kelly responded that it would be difficult to fire them, but he and the president agreed that they would make life difficult enough to force the pair to offer their resignations, which the president would then accept.

Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner, however, have outlasted those plans, and Mr. Trump’s desire for them to leave the West Wing has come and gone in waves, associates said. Mr. Kelly resigned in December, and the couple has only gained in power since his departure.

If there is sympathy in Ms. Ward’s book for her protagonists, it is found in explaining how they grew up. Ms. Trump, she wrote, was wealthy but isolated. When she went to tour Choate Rosemary Hall, the elite Connecticut boarding school where she would attend high school, Ms. Trump arrived in a white stretch limousine. But she emerged from the car all by herself. “No one was there with her,” said her tour guide, who remained anonymous in the book.

Mr. Kushner’s father, meanwhile, had been grooming his son since childhood to become his successor in the family real estate company, Kushner Companies. When Mr. Kushner went away to Harvard, Ms. Ward wrote, his parents had a business associate keep an eye on him — by taking him out for dinner and reporting back on his activities — to make sure he was not dating non-Jews or doing drugs.

When Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump decided to get married, both sets of parents were skeptical. Ms. Trump eventually won over the Kushners with her commitment to a grueling religious conversion regimen and her apparent intense desire to become part of a close-knit family.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, did not understand why his daughter had to change her religion for anyone, even though he liked Mr. Kushner. He would joke that Ms. Trump could have married Tom Brady, the quarterback for the New England Patriots, and once joked to Robert K. Kraft, the team’s owner, that “Jared is half the size of Tom Brady’s forearm.”

 

  • Upvote 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites

"So will we ‘lock up’ Ivanka and Jared for violating government email policy?"

Spoiler

You may want to sit down while I tell you some shocking news: It appears that in 2016 when Republicans were contorted in paroxysms of rage and shouting “Lock her up!” over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, they may not have been motivated solely by their deep concern for secure communication management.

It's now clearer than ever that all their feigned outrage about Clinton's electronic communication didn't stop Trump administration officials from violating government policy when it came to their own. Even members of Trump's own family:

House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) said Thursday that an attorney for Jared Kushner told him in December that the president’s son-in-law uses the encrypted messaging application WhatsApp for official business, including with people overseas. [...]

The use of messaging services such as WhatsApp could run afoul of White House policy and the Presidential Records Act, which prohibits White House officials from sending a record “using a nonofficial electronic message account” unless the messages are copied to an official account within 20 days.

According to a Feb. 22, 2017, directive from the White House Counsel’s Office, all White House personnel are required to “conduct all work related communications on your official EOP email account” except under “emergency circumstances.”

If you’re surprised that Kushner would disobey a directive not to use outside communication tools to conduct government business, I might remind you of the time after the 2016 election when he suggested to the Russians that they set up a secret communication channel inside the Russian embassy so the Trump team could talk to the Kremlin without U.S. intelligence agencies knowing about it. Even the Russians thought the idea was insane.

In addition, Ivanka Trump has also been using private email to conduct government business. This is a story that comes up periodically; back in October 2017, we learned that Jared, Stephen Bannon, Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn, and Stephen Miller had all used private emails for government work.

And last fall The Post reported that, throughout much of 2017, Ivanka Trump "often discussed or relayed official White House business using a private email account with a domain that she shares with her husband, Jared Kushner.”

Meanwhile, do you remember how outraged Republicans were when Clinton had her lawyer separate personal emails from work-related ones and forwarded only the latter to the government? Ivanka Trump did exactly the same thing.

We should say that these actions would not violate the Presidential Records Act if every email and message is copied to a government account within 20 days. I’ll let you speculate on whether Jared Kushner — who had to amend his financial disclosures at least 40 times because of errors and omissions — has been diligent and conscientious about screenshotting all of his WhatsApp messages and forwarding them to government accounts, as he claims he has been doing.

But after the campaign Donald Trump ran in 2016, you would think it would take an absolutely stunning amount of arrogance to do what Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and others in the administration have done. And that’s true. But it’s also an acknowledgement that all the criticism about Clinton’s emails was utterly phony from the beginning, and everyone knew it. It was play-acting, pretend, feigned outrage, nothing more than a channel through which Trump voters’ misogynistic rage at Clinton could be expressed.

They were shouting “Lock her up!,” but they might as well have been shouting “Burn her! Burn the witch!”

The only problem was that, even if Trump, his family, everyone who worked for him and his voters all knew it was a put-on, the media treated it not only as if the outrage were sincere but also as if the underlying conduct were the single most important issue in the presidential campaign.

Through their coverage choices, they told us there was literally nothing — not health care, not foreign policy, not the economy, not climate change, not whether Trump was compromised by the Russian government, nothing — as critical to explore and understand as whether Clinton violated government policy on email management. As one study found, “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.”

But now that Trump is president, we can all agree that it was a big joke, and the only reason to criticize Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner is the charge of hypocrisy, a charge that never amounts to much anyway. We don’t have to entertain the idea that they should be jailed. We’re all too savvy and clever for that.

But perhaps we might consider not letting Republicans shape the media’s coverage with their next pretend outrage about, oh I don’t know, whether Elizabeth Warren’s great-great-grandfather was a Cherokee, so we can focus on things that actually matter. Or is that too much to ask?

 

  • Upvote 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

"Hotel Heiress Ivanka Trump Proposes Cutting Student Debt By Making Student Loans Harder to Get"

Spoiler

On Monday, White House senior adviser and nepotism poster child Ivanka Trump unveiled a proposal to limit the kinds of loans grad students and the parents of undergrads can take out to pay for education. The logic is that by providing fewer ways for students to pay for their tuition, it will eventually help drive tuition costs down, a convoluted approach that puts pressure on borrowers instead of on schools directly.

This sort of thinking makes sense coming from an hotel heiress who insists being born into absurd wealth is a disadvantage in life, and whose father regularly lied about his net worth to secure loans himself. It's also far less ambitious than, say, working to bring down the interest rates on student loans, which are set to rise for the second year in a row.

Some fun facts about debt: Millennials carry, on average, about $36,000 in debt. That's certainly a lot, but, according to a study by Northwestern Mutual, it's also pretty much the same as the averages for Baby Boomers and Gen Xers. The difference is that while for the older generations the biggest source of debt is from mortgages, for millennials it's from personal education loans.

Collectively, 44 million borrowers owe a total $1.5 trillion in student loan debt, an increase of more than 300 percent since 2004, and the rates on student loans specifically are markedly higher than other kinds. Even if those figures don't affect you directly, such widespread, massive debt is a drag on the economy overall, and the Federal Reserve found earlier this year that it was causing a decline in home ownership. In theory, Congress and the White House should be motivated to do something about the crisis.

The move also comes after the Trump administration unveiled its latest budget, which calls to eliminate the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. It's a program that relieves borrowers of their remaining student debt after 10 years of working in public service, and education secretary Betsy DeVos has been steadily working to hamstring it since her appointment. Now, Donald Trump just wants it scrapped entirely. He would need to get the Democrat-controlled House on board. But, like most presidential budgets, it's meant to convey the administration's values, which, yet again, is a middle finger to non-rich students and their families.

 

  • Upvote 6
Link to comment
Share on other sites

@GreyhoundFanI'm trying to think this through.  If potential students have trouble getting loans, I'd expect some of them to delay college, start off at community colleges, or not go to college.  At least some, if not most, would want or need to work but would only be able to get jobs requiring their training thus far - high school education or undergrad degree (for those wanting grad school loans).  I think this would tend to put more people into the job market, short-term, but they'd be working for less money than they would if they had additional education.  Wouldn't Trump benefit from increased short-term job numbers (assuming there are enough lower-paying jobs to be filled), even if the long-term effects are potentially very damaging to the economy/population?

Meanwhile, I'd expect the more expensive, elite colleges to have no problem filling their seats with a higher proportion of students from wealthy families.  These students, once their educations are complete, would then also encounter less competition for the higher paying jobs; i.e., the rich would stay richer.  The expensive, elite schools could continue to make sure to attract extremely talented but poor students through scholarships supported by wealthy alumni.  I expect the community colleges would also have no trouble filling their seats, and would become more competitive.  I believe this would leave schools with mid-range costs and reputations trying harder to fill seats with students who can and are willing to pay vs. delaying college or not attending college.  Would they lower their costs to become more competitive with the elite and community colleges, and how long might it take to do so?  Also, how would they go about competing with each other? 

Next, if it becomes more difficult for lenders to provide loans to potential students then wouldn't they object to the loss of potential interest income?  If so, how might they try to fill that "gap"?  Would they be trying to sell more generic loans at higher interest rates to those they could get to take them?  If so, students could have larger loans to pay than they do now.

To sum it up, my sense is that Trump's proposal would provide at least a short-term edge to wealthy students/families, community colleges, and US job numbers.  I tend to think, if the mid-range schools were to decrease their costs, that the quality of education and student facilities/services might (in some cases) suffer substantially.  If so, I think there would be another large problem added to the first...but this might not become fully evident until after the 2020 elections.

  • Upvote 6
  • I Agree 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

"Jared Kushner dismisses concerns raised by White House whistleblower on security clearances"

Spoiler

Presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner on Monday dismissed concerns raised by a whistleblower about the White House’s security clearance process, saying President Trump’s administration has faced “a lot of crazy accusations” during the past two years.

Kushner, a senior White House aide, sat for a rare interview with Fox News following the revelation that Tricia Newbold, a longtime White House security adviser, had told a congressional committee that she and her colleagues issued “dozens” of denials for security clearance applications that were later approved despite their concerns.

Newbold, an 18-year veteran of the security clearance process who has served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, said she warned her superiors that clearances “were not always adjudicated in the best interest of national security.”

Kushner, who Trump ultimately demanded be granted a permanent top-secret clearance despite concerns of intelligence officials, told Fox host Laura Ingraham that he “can’t comment for the White House’s process.”

“But I can say over the last two years that I’ve been here, I’ve been accused of all different types of things and all of those things have turned out to be false,” he added. “We’ve had a lot of crazy accusations, like that we colluded with Russia.”

Kushner was referring to conclusions of a report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III delivered to senior leaders at the Justice Department. After reviewing the report, Attorney General William P. Barr sent a four-page letter to Congress last week, saying Mueller “did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

During the Fox News interview, Ingraham noted that Newbold had said she has “grave concerns” about the security-clearance process and asked Kushner if he poses a “grave national security concern to the country.”

Kushner laughed and said: “Look, I can say that in the White House I work with some phenomenal people and I think over the last two years the president’s done a phenomenal job of identifying what are our national security priorities. He’s had a great team in place that are helping implement it, and I hope I’ve played a good part in pushing those objectives forward.”

 

  • WTF 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites

"Jared Kushner identified as senior White House official whose security clearance was denied by career officials"

Spoiler

The senior White House official whose security clearance was denied last year because of concerns about foreign influence, private business interests and personal conduct is presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, according to people familiar with documents and testimony provided to the House Oversight Committee.

Kushner was identified only as “Senior White House Official 1” in committee documents released this week describing the testimony of Tricia Newbold, a whistleblower in the White House’s personnel security office who said she and another career employee determined that Kushner had too many “significant disqualifying factors” to receive a clearance.

Their decision was overruled by Carl Kline, the political appointee who then headed the office, according to Newbold’s interview with committee staff.

The new details about the internal debate over Kushner’s clearance revives questions about the severity of the issues flagged in his background investigation and Kushner’s access to government secrets.

Last year, President Trump directed his then-chief of staff, John F. Kelly, to give Kushner a top-secret security clearance, despite concerns expressed by career intelligence officers.

Security clearance experts said the issues raised in Kushner’s background investigation were significant.

“It’s a big deal,” said David Kris, a senior Justice Department official during the administrations of presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and a founder of the consulting firm Culper Partners.

“The kinds of concerns that she mentioned are very serious,” he said. “Senior staff at the White House — and particularly relatives of the U.S. president — are incredibly attractive targets for our adversaries seeking to gather intelligence or exert covert influence.”

White House officials declined to comment Wednesday. An attorney for Kushner referred questions to the White House.

In an interview Monday with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Kushner said he could not comment on the White House security clearance process, but dismissed the idea that he posed a risk to national security.

“But I can say over the last two years that I’ve been here, I’ve been accused of all different types of things, and all of those things have turned out to be false,” he said.

Kushner’s legal team issued a statement in February saying that “White House and security clearance officials affirmed that Mr. Kushner’s security clearance was handled in the regular process with no pressure from anyone.”

Kushner, who is a senior adviser to Trump and married to his daughter Ivanka, was unable to obtain a permanent security clearance for more than a year as his background investigation dragged on — a situation that troubled senior White House officials.

Newbold told the House Oversight Committee that Kushner’s background investigation raised concerns about foreign influence, outside business interests and personal conduct, according to a document released by the committee.

The specific issues flagged in his background check remain unknown. But The Washington Post reported last year that foreign officials had privately discussed ways to try to manipulate Kushner by taking advantage of his complex business arrangements, financial difficulties and lack of foreign policy experience.

Among the nations that discussed ways to influence Kushner were the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel and Mexico, current and former officials said.

Kushner also came to his post with complex business holdings and a family company facing significant debt, including more than $1 billion owed on a Manhattan office tower at 666 Fifth Avenue.

In 2016, at the same time Kushner was helping to run Trump’s presidential campaign, he and company officials spoke with potential foreign investors about becoming partners in the building, including investors in China and Qatar.

Those deals never materialized. In August, Brookfield Asset Management, a Canadian company, announced it was purchasing the office tower.

A person familiar with Kushner’s security clearance, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters, noted that Kushner was interviewed by both the special counsel and congressional lawmakers investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign.

“Not one allegation has been proven, and no one has in any way been able to show any foreign influence or improper business investments,” the person said.

While Kushner’s security clearance was pending, he held an interim top-secret clearance that at one point also gave him access to some of the government’s most sensitive materials, including the president’s daily intelligence brief, The Post has reported.

Last February, his clearance was downgraded to secret as part of an effort by Kelly to rein in the number of White House officials without permanent clearances who had access to highly classified material.

Trump then personally directed Kelly to give Kushner a top-secret clearance — a move that made Kelly so uncomfortable that he documented the request in writing, according to people familiar with the situation.

As president, Trump has the authority to grant such clearances. But congressional Democrats have raised questions about the risks that could be overlooked by such a decision.

“It shows a disregard for the national security of the country if the professionals in the intelligence community believed Jared Kushner shouldn’t get a security clearance, and the president overrode that decision to give him one,” said House Intelligence Committee member Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.).

Kushner’s permanent top-secret clearance was granted May 1, according to internal White House personnel logs obtained by The Post. The notation was made by someone with the initials “CLK,” the same as Newbold’s then-boss, Kline.

On the same day, Ivanka Trump also obtained her clearance, the logs show.

Newbold told the House Oversight Committee that Kline had overruled her denial of Kushner’s clearance. She said he did so without addressing the disqualifying factors raised by the staff and merely noting that “the activities occurred prior to Federal service,” according to a committee document.

An attorney for Kline declined to comment.

In a memo Monday, Republican staff members on the House Oversight Committee said that Newbold did not have “direct knowledge” about why Kline overruled her recommendation to deny a clearance to “Official 1.” They also described Newbold as a disgruntled employee.

In her testimony, Newbold said that when Kushner applied for an even higher level of clearance, another agency contacted her to determine “how we rendered a favorable adjudication,” an inquiry she said reflected that agency’s “serious concerns.”

The agency was not identified in committee documents. The CIA is the agency responsible for granting White House officials access to government information classified above top secret.

In all, Newbold alleged that 25 individuals have been given clearances or access to national security information since 2018 despite concerns about ties to foreign influence, conflicts of interests, questionable or criminal conduct, financial problems or drug abuse.

[White House whistleblower says 25 security clearance denials were reversed during Trump administration]

Newbold, who worked on security clearance matters in the White House for 18 years under Republican and Democratic administrations, said she reluctantly came forward as a whistleblower over concern for national security.

“I would not be doing a service to myself, my country, or my children if I sat back knowing that the issues that we have could impact national security,” she told the committee, according to its summary of her interview.

Newbold said that she faced retaliation internally after she raised concerns about the clearance process. At one point, she has alleged, Kline moved clearance-related files to a shelf beyond the reach of Newbold, who has a rare form of dwarfism.

The House Oversight Committee’s Democratic majority voted this week to issue a subpoena to Kline to testify about his role in approving the security clearances. The panel’s vote was one of the first moves in the Democratic-controlled House to compel the White House to provide information about the Trump inner circle.

The White House has said that the Oversight Committee has no authority to question the president on security-clearance matters and has refused to provide the committee with documents.

Republicans on the panel have attacked Cummings’s inquiry, saying that he has politicized the discussion of the clearance issue and that he “cherry-picked” excerpts of the closed-door interview with Newbold. They complained that GOP members were unable to attend because they were told about it only the previous afternoon.

Newbold’s lawyer, Edward Passman, said Republican staffers were present for the hearing and aggressively questioned Newbold.

 

  • Upvote 2
  • WTF 3
  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't get how it is even possible that a security clearance denial can be overridden. 

  • I Agree 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

"‘She’s very good with numbers’: Trump says he considered his daughter Ivanka to lead the World Bank"

Spoiler

President Trump considered nominating his eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, to be president of the World Bank in part because “she’s very good with numbers,” according to a new interview published Friday.

Speaking to the Atlantic, Trump lavished praise on his daughter, a 37-year-old White House adviser, and suggested she would be suitable for other administration positions, including U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

“She’s a natural diplomat,” Trump said. “She would’ve been great at the United Nations, as an example.”

Asked why he didn’t nominate her, Trump replied: “If I did, they’d say nepotism, when it would’ve had nothing to do with nepotism. But she would’ve been incredible.”

Trump added: “I even thought of Ivanka for the World Bank. . . . She would’ve been great at that because she’s very good with numbers.”

Trump wound up nominating David Malpass, the Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, to be president of the World Bank in February. Malpass was unanimously approved by its executive board last week.

In the Atlantic interview, the president also praised Ivanka Trump for possessing “a great calmness.”

“I’ve seen her under tremendous stress and pressure,” he said. “She reacts very well — that’s usually a genetic thing, but it’s one of those things, nevertheless.”

“If she ever wanted to run for president, I think she’d be very, very hard to beat,” Trump added.

According to the Atlantic, Trump made clear he was also proud of his other children.

“Barron is young, but he’s got wonderful potential,” Trump 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.”

 

  • Upvote 1
  • Disgust 4
  • WTF 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 4/2/2019 at 5:07 PM, Dandruff said:

Nothing to see here folks...I'm a good guy, we are good guys, it is good.

So move along, move along, we're all just moving along.  There is nothing behind Door 2.  Yes, there's some blood coming out from under Door 2, but don't be concerned.  Nothing. To. See. Here.  

  • Upvote 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

"Inside Ivanka’s Dreamworld"

Spoiler

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 first daughter (though not the only daughter), wearing a fitted black mockneck and black pants, her golden hair fastened in a low twist, glided across the Oval Office. 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.

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, doing just that.

In our conversation, the president 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.” At 37, she is old enough. But Ivanka has never talked with her friends about running for office, and the president said she has never expressed any interest about that to him. Still, while Don Jr. might be a hit at political rallies, 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. (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.) But it’s true that when jobs open up in the Trump administration—a frequent occurrence—Ivanka is at the top of her father’s mind. “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.”

The president went on: “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 added: “She’s got a tremendous presence when she walks into the room.”

The Oval Office drop-in did not come as much of a surprise. 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.” That discipline has meant, as her brother Don Jr. told me, that “you can put Ivanka in virtually any environment and she’ll thrive.” In the White House, she has projected herself as a cosmopolitan peacemaker, dedicating her efforts largely to issues such as women’s economic empowerment, workforce development, and the fight against human trafficking. She is not a conservative, she enjoys telling people. She is a “pragmatist.”

One evening earlier this year, the former deputy national-security adviser Dina Powell, on behalf of Ivanka, invited lawmakers, donors, and ambassadors to Washington’s Metropolitan Club to celebrate the passage of the Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act, an effort Ivanka had led to promote gender equality in the developing world. “People say Washington doesn’t work,” Ivanka told the gathering, according to an attendee who paraphrased her remarks. “But this room tells you bipartisanship is possible.” She made no mention of the fact that, outside, thanks to her father’s insistence on building a border wall despite bipartisan opposition, the U.S. government was mired in the longest shutdown in its history.

There were two competing reads on Ivanka that evening. Some of those present praised her to me as a serious adviser pushing positive change amid unending chaos. Others condemned her as a dutiful daughter content to pretend that the chaos doesn’t exist. (“Then why did you go?” I asked one of her critics. “As a favor to Dina,” this person insisted.) Ivanka has always been subject to unsavory interpretations—the price of being a Trump. But she has also been adept at defining herself apart from her father. There is an advantage to being surrounded by men people don’t like. So when 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.

Ivanka Trump begins most mornings at about 5:30 a.m., when Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood is still dark. She shares a 6,870-square-foot white colonial home there with her husband, Jared Kushner, a senior adviser to the president, and their three children. 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.

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.

Talk of divorce was immediate back in New York. The tabloids were ravening. Reporters accosted Ivanka as she walked to school. In The Trump Card, the memoir she published at 27, Ivanka recalled one “idiot” asking, in the aftermath of the “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had” New York Post headline, whether Maples’s claims were true.

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.

According to her mother, Ivanka was destined to be disciplined, polished, and tactful—she made sure of it. “I did not spoil my kids,” Ivana told me on the phone from Miami, where she spends the winter months. “They had no choice … I kept them busy, busy, busy.” She signed her daughter up for skiing, ice-skating, and tennis lessons, as well as singing classes (“She was okay”). There were several years of ballet, including a role in The Nutcracker at Christmastime, which Ivana’s “old friend Michael Jackson” came to watch. Ivana was careful never to give her children “too much money,” because when “girls get too much money, they buy the drugs, they go to nightclubs—none of that Ivanka ever did.” The craziest things ever got was probably the day a 14-year-old Ivanka came home with blue hair. “I freaked out,” Ivana said. “I bought the Nice ’n Easy in the palest blond and put it all over.”

In a Seventeen-magazine feature in 1998, Ivanka showed off her dorm room at Choate Rosemary Hall, posing amid decor such as a sparkly Urban Outfitters lamp, a travel-size hair brush, algebra and trigonometry textbooks, and a Robert Doisneau poster she’d gotten “on a street in France for about a buck.” Around the same time Paris Hilton was emerging as the vacuous and club-happy heiress, Ivanka was blooming as her straitlaced foil.

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.

That Ivanka defied expectations was, at first, no more than a curiosity. Whether keeping her distance from the Trump brand was just a media-savvy calculation—a veneer masking deeper alignment—would matter more in the years to come. In 2011, Trump became the nation’s most high-profile “birther.” Over the next three years, he would question Barack Obama’s citizenship on television and tweet that he’d been told by an “extremely credible source” that the president’s birth certificate was a “fraud.” There's no record of Ivanka ever commenting on Trump’s conduct during those years, nor was she pressed, because of course she didn’t agree with him. There was no need to even ask.

For all that, people 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.”

I first met Ivanka Trump in the summer of 2013, when I was interning for the New York Observer. This was when Jared Kushner owned the paper, though I had never seen him, or Ivanka, in the office. But they were at the Plaza Hotel one evening for an event marking the Commercial Observer’s annual ranking of the real-estate industry’s most powerful people. We interns were checking coats.

When my shift was up, I ventured into the crowd. Ivanka was hard to miss—taller and prettier than everyone else. I was a fan, as were most girls I knew. We thought she had it all—her own company, a pretty family, a pretty apartment. When I saw an opening, I told her as much. She thanked me and told me she liked my dress. We took a photo together, which I posted on Instagram.

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.

The founding myth of Ivanka Trump is that she is a “moderating force.” It is difficult to trace how the idea took hold. Perhaps Trump himself unwittingly put it best when he described to me Ivanka’s decision to get involved in his presidential campaign: “I think it just morphed into something that happened.” 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.

Throughout the election, Ivanka maintained a pleasing blankness. According to a senior campaign official, she was not keen on taking part in campaign rallies. “She didn’t want anything to do with them,” the official told me, “even though she was by far the most requested surrogate.” 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. By then, Donald Trump had already committed a series of disturbing offenses on the trail—denigrating women, insulting John McCain. Ivanka still managed to present a facsimile of separateness. “She is standing like a statue, a magnificent statue, in a Carolina Herrera gown, with a baby on one shoulder and a cell phone on the other,” the Bazaar piece began. It referred to Ivanka as Wonder Woman.

Ivanka might have laughed had anyone predicted, as the stylist zipped her into that $6,990 Herrera gown, 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.

Don Jr. explained how life had changed for Ivanka. “She was loved by all the people in the world she wanted to be loved by,” he told me. “I can’t say she’s not disappointed by them turning on her. After the election, I found 10,000 emails saying, ‘Hey buddy, we were with you all along,’ and I’m like, No you weren’t, you piece of shit. I just think I figured it out a little bit earlier than she did that people were going to see us differently after my father won.”

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.”

Ivanka’s first months were spent navigating the rollout of her book. A week before the election, Ivanka had handed in the manuscript for Women Who Work, a guide to “rewriting the rules for success.” Her publisher was confident that the book, centered on what they understood to be her personal brand, would reach its intended audience of “working women in coastal cities,” a source with knowledge of the discussions told me. Trump wasn’t going to be elected, and Ivanka still seemed to have the cachet that had earned her a contract in the first place.

When Trump won, everything went to hell. According to the source, “We just really didn’t know what would happen, because we were now publishing a book to a community who didn’t like her dad very much.” The silver lining was that the publicity team was flooded with requests for interviews with the first daughter. Then, three weeks before publication, government ethics lawyers weighed in: Ivanka could not do a single appearance or interview to promote the book. Sales were dismal. Women Who Work was widely panned. Reviewers did not just excoriate the book; they excoriated Ivanka. She herself hadn’t changed: She was doling out the same #ITWiseWords she always had—“Prove smart is sexy,” “Seize the moments as they come,” “‘Now’ is the new ‘later.’” But for 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.

As the book’s sales struggled, 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. “It was always ‘This is going to look really bad. We’re going to get killed by the media,’” a former senior official told me. She phoned Tim Cook, asking him to press her father personally to stay in the agreement.

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.’”

Few things about the Trump administration are predictable, but it’s a safe bet that if the president makes a controversial move, an anonymously sourced reference to Ivanka’s distress will circulate soon after. At a Rose Garden ceremony in June 2017, President Trump announced that the United States would indeed withdraw from the climate accord. Six days later, Us Weekly published a story about Ivanka. The glossy cover line read, “WHY I DISAGREE WITH MY DAD: Balancing her personal ideals with love and loyalty to her father, the president’s daughter will always fight for what she believes in.” Citing a “source close to Ivanka,” the article said that she was “disappointed” by her father’s decision.

My own sources close to Ivanka insisted to me recently that neither she nor her team had anything to do with the Us Weekly cover. “Those kinds of leaks always came from people who hated her and wanted to make her look like an asshole to the base,” one person said. Still, the damage was done. The cover was instantly memed and mocked across the internet. 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.”

The climate decision marked the start of what one of the former senior White House officials I spoke with referred to as Ivanka’s “bunker period.” It was as though she began fashioning a snow globe for herself to inhabit. It would include an issue portfolio—empowering women, energizing the workforce—whose contents she reserved the right to change should something beyond their scope spark bipartisan appeal. No longer would she insert herself into every debate. If it was not in her portfolio, it was not her concern.

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. That John Kelly despised both Ivanka and Jared is no secret. When the retired Marine general was brought on as chief of staff, in July 2017, he saw a couple “playing government,” a phrase he would utter frequently. “He kind of walked in and looked at Ivanka like, What the fuck is Barbie doing in the West Wing?” the source close to her said. But if Kelly saw Ivanka as a headache, Jared was a consciousness-altering migraine. Kelly had little idea what Jared did all day—he could be text-messaging Van Jones about criminal-justice reform or catching up with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (implicated in the murder last fall of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi). Kelly struggled to hide his contempt. At one senior-staff meeting, when someone raised a question relating to foreign policy, Kelly, according to a person in the room, observed that having a clear read on the answer was hard for him, given that “we have about three secretaries of state now.” Jared, who was present, remained silent.

“I think everyone started to appreciate that it was never like, ‘Oh, here comes Ivanka to blow everything up and take over,’ like it was with Jared,” a former senior White House official told me. 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. “When I hear people say, ‘Well, what are her qualifications? What does she think she can do?,’ it often comes from people who have done nothing, and who never will,” Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin, who has worked closely with Ivanka on workforce development, told me. “Ivanka could literally save an elderly woman from getting hit by a train and the people would blame her for disrupting the travel time.”

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.) In a recent interview, I asked a senior White House official whether Ivanka had spoken truthfully on The View. “Absolutely,” this person said, adding the qualifier that there was no involvement by the president as far as Ivanka or Jared knew.

All the same, Ivanka has not presented nearly as big a target as her husband has. In the president’s view, that’s because she’s “a very honest person,” as he put it to me. A more likely reason is that 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. By January 2019, Kelly too was out of a job. (The East Wing is only as welcoming as it needs to be. 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.” Ivana told me of Ivanka’s feelings toward Melania: “She likes her fine, because she didn’t cause me to break up the marriage like the other one—I don’t even want to pronounce her name.” Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, added that “they’ve always shared a close relationship and still do today.”)

Ask White House staffers today about Jared, and they’ll gripe that he operates as the president’s de facto chief of staff. Ask about Ivanka, and you’ll hear how she always says hello in the hallway and asks after your children. You’ll hear that she is a devoted mother. You’ll hear about the time she saw a positive piece of press on a colleague, printed it out, had her father sign it, framed it, and delivered it to that person as a gift.

Unlike other members of her family, Ivanka Trump declined to be interviewed on the record for this article. We did have an off-the-record conversation recently at the White House. Most offices in the West Wing are standard government-issue—black swivel chairs, walls an uninspiring beige. When Ivanka had settled into her second-floor quarters, she wanted everything to be white. White walls, white chairs, white window shades. One of the former senior White House officials compared entering Ivanka’s office to “walking into an Apple store.” Taped 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.”

On a small coffee table when I visited was a book called Playa Fire—about the Burning Man festival, as I’d later learn. Seeing it there revived many of the questions I’ve had about Ivanka and her inner life—questions that, after interviewing nearly 50 people who are close to her or know her, I still can’t answer. A conversation with her betrays few hints. The quality that people say they admire most about Ivanka is her “poise”; I’ve heard the word used about her probably 100 times. And she is poised. Not a word or a hair out of place. When you ask a question, no matter how innocuous, her eyes narrow at each word, as though she is positioning herself on a tennis court to return an opponent’s serve.

So I didn’t know how to explain this book on Burning Man, a gathering that seems to represent the opposite of everything I had come to know about Ivanka. When I told a longtime friend of Ivanka’s about the book, she laughed and said, “Really? Huh.”—unsure, too, of what to make of it. It could be that Ivanka’s secret self longs to escape her name and stop wearing sheath dresses and sway to EDM on hour three of an acid trip. It could be that Ivanka doesn’t want to do any of those things but wants you to think she does, because it would be unexpected and thus build intrigue. It could be that Ivanka simply received the book as a gift. But even then, her choice to display it would have been intentional, because Ivanka’s choices are only intentional. It could be none of these things. But when much of your life is a study in the art of projection, everything begins to feel like part of the project.

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.

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 has come to disdain the notion that her father’s agenda should be any different from what it is. She believes his critics have it all wrong. She is unwilling to concede that she ought to understand why someone might have interpreted her father’s Access Hollywood comments as misogynistic, or his remarks after Charlottesville as tone-deaf, if not racist. Ivanka knows Trump probably better than anyone, and she knows him to be good. In Ivanka’s snow globe, evidence to the contrary simply does not exist.

Succeeding as Ivanka Trump has always required a suspension of disbelief—on her part and on the part of others. It is how people were able to watch her father demand Obama’s birth certificate on television one night and then buy a pair of Ivanka’s Carra dress pumps the next day. But becoming part of the official White House staff linked Ivanka to Trump in a way no one could ignore. “I think it would’ve been a lot easier for her if she’d just stayed in New York and did what she was doing,” the president told me. “That’s always tricky, you know, if you have a business and now all of the sudden—let’s say 100 percent of the people like you, and now all of the sudden you have 50 percent of the people that love you, but the other 50 percent of the people, it’s less than like.”

One thing Ivanka misses about New York, said a source familiar with her thinking, is being in a world where she feels judged by her accomplishments, not the means by which she achieved them, not by “process.” For Ivanka, the policies she’s advanced in the White House are outcomes, and thus the things she should be judged by. Things like her father’s rhetoric, or how she received her top-secret security clearance, or whether she conducted official business through her personal email account, are insignificant. “Noise,” as she has put it to friends. That people might see them as anything more can only be explained, in Ivanka’s view, as a peculiar fixation of Washington.

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. 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. Take that January evening at the Metropolitan Club: a gathering of people who privately bemoaned Ivanka’s complicity in this and that but who were happy to show up. Happy to sip the white wine, applaud the usual platitudes, and enjoy the soft air of comity. Call it a favor to Dina. Or call it what it really is: Polite society, in the end, will always take back those who are polite.

 

  • Upvote 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

So Ivanka went to the Ivory Coast:

I love some of the replies:

Spoiler

image.png.a20d74f95c10f8e17e0fe85950cc9691.png

image.png.3c2b2690f783623f94838c4f9f83f459.png

She also went to Ethiopia:

Spoiler

image.png.68c29a7392690cbabb8418de67061bab.png

image.png.55ae63264806db5810acf8226defefc0.png

 

 

  • Upvote 4
  • Thank You 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

"Ivanka Trump says she passed on her father’s offer to lead World Bank"

Spoiler

Ivanka Trump said Wednesday she’d turned down her father’s offer to lead the World Bank, and wouldn’t reveal whether he’d approached her about any other jobs in his administration.

Trump, who serves in the White House as a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, was rumored earlier this year to be in the running for president of the global financial institution, though her father ultimately went with David Malpass, a U.S. Treasury Department official.

In a profile of his daughter published last week, the president acknowledged for the first time that he’d thought about selecting her because “she’s very good with numbers.”

But in an interview during a trip to Africa this week, Ivanka told The Associated Press that her father had in fact “asked me about that,” saying that he pitched it to her as a question.

“But I love the work that I’m doing,” she said of her current role, which includes advocacy on issues like workforce development and women’s empowerment. Instead, she noted, she and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin led the selection process, “bringing multiple candidates to the president ultimately for him to make the final decision.”

Calling Malpass a “strong preference,” she said the pair were “very aligned” and predicted that he would do an “unbelievable job” leading the bank, which provides loans to help eradicate global poverty.

The president lavished his oldest daughter with praise in the interview published last week, asserting that she could run for president if she wanted to, and he suggested that he’d considered nominating her to replace Nikki Haley as his U.N. ambassador.

“She would’ve been great at the United Nations,” the president said, indicating that only public scrutiny held him back. “If I did, they’d say nepotism, when it would’ve had nothing to do with nepotism. But she would’ve been incredible.”

Ivanka deflected when asked by the AP if her father had approached her about other vacancies in his administration.

“I’ll keep that between us,” she responded. But while her father has talked up her presidential bona fides, calling her a “natural diplomat,” she told the AP she has no plans to run for office in the future.

 

  • Disgust 1
  • WTF 4
Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Ivanka Trump says she passed on her father’s offer to lead World Bank"

  Reveal hidden contents

Ivanka Trump said Wednesday she’d turned down her father’s offer to lead the World Bank, and wouldn’t reveal whether he’d approached her about any other jobs in his administration.

Trump, who serves in the White House as a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, was rumored earlier this year to be in the running for president of the global financial institution, though her father ultimately went with David Malpass, a U.S. Treasury Department official.

In a profile of his daughter published last week, the president acknowledged for the first time that he’d thought about selecting her because “she’s very good with numbers.”

But in an interview during a trip to Africa this week, Ivanka told The Associated Press that her father had in fact “asked me about that,” saying that he pitched it to her as a question.

“But I love the work that I’m doing,” she said of her current role, which includes advocacy on issues like workforce development and women’s empowerment. Instead, she noted, she and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin led the selection process, “bringing multiple candidates to the president ultimately for him to make the final decision.”

Calling Malpass a “strong preference,” she said the pair were “very aligned” and predicted that he would do an “unbelievable job” leading the bank, which provides loans to help eradicate global poverty.

The president lavished his oldest daughter with praise in the interview published last week, asserting that she could run for president if she wanted to, and he suggested that he’d considered nominating her to replace Nikki Haley as his U.N. ambassador.

“She would’ve been great at the United Nations,” the president said, indicating that only public scrutiny held him back. “If I did, they’d say nepotism, when it would’ve had nothing to do with nepotism. But she would’ve been incredible.”

Ivanka deflected when asked by the AP if her father had approached her about other vacancies in his administration.

“I’ll keep that between us,” she responded. But while her father has talked up her presidential bona fides, calling her a “natural diplomat,” she told the AP she has no plans to run for office in the future.

 

Of course she declined leading the World Bank. It would have meant she actually had to... *shudders*.... work. 

  • I Agree 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

It took me three seconds to Google "Who is the Russian ambassador to US"  

Got back "Anatoly Antonov

The Ambassador of the Russian Federation to the United States of America is the ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary from the Russian Federation to the United States of America. The position is currently held by Anatoly Antonov as of September 1, 2017."  

Google even helpfully included a picture of the guy.

  • Upvote 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • GreyhoundFan locked this topic
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.



×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.