“I hate the word ‘surrogate.’ What does that mean?” Ivanka Trump said on a stage on Wednesday morning at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Laguna Niguel, California. “At one point, major newspapers were writing that I was running to be a Vice-Presidential candidate. I’m, like, ‘No, I’m a daughter. I don’t express my views on policy, with one exception.’ ” That exception, she said, was affordable child care, and she proudly took responsibility for employing her daughterly influence to convince her father, Donald Trump, to incorporate a child-care tax deduction and dependent-care saving accounts into his policy platform, because matters affecting working women were “very core to her professional mission.” Still, she insisted, “I’m not a surrogate. I’m a daughter.”
Ivanka was appearing at the Fortune Most Powerful Women conference, an annual gathering of some of the most accomplished women in corporate America. She had spoken at the conference before, but this year the stop took on an obviously larger significance. Rather than simply reaffirming her celebrity presence among the female entrepreneurs and C.E.O.s of Fortune 500 companies in attendance, Ivanka was trying to salvage her brand, which is built around young professional women and working mothers, two groups who appear to be recoiling from her father’s Presidential candidacy in large numbers.
In addition to her role at her father’s company, the Trump Organization, where she is the executive vice-president, Ivanka runs her own sub-brand, producing a line of sheaths, blouses, and cocktail dresses aimed at women who go into an office every day. Her eponymous Web site supports that brand with tips for preparing family-friendly dinners on busy weeknights and reducing stress with yoga at your desk, and her Instagram feed (with 1.2 million followers) offers a window into a world of aspirational affluence in which her three children always appear in spotless pinafores and polo shirts and Ivanka herself seems unconcerned about the possibility of getting spit-up or tomato sauce on her own silks, satins, and cashmeres. She has a book coming out in the spring, called “Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success,” in which she attempts to position herself as an up-and-coming Sheryl Sandberg. (“Today's generation of women is the first to be able to unabashedly embrace the fact that our lives are multidimensional,” the Amazon writeup promises. “For us, it’s about working smarter, not harder; integrating our personal passions and priorities with our professional goals in order to architect lives we love.”) Unfortunately, the darker forces of her father’s political campaign are threatening to ruin everything.
There are a few people surrounding Donald Trump who, for their own reasons, have chosen to step in front of the bus of his campaign—his wife, Melania, for one, and even Rudy Giuliani. They arguably didn’t have much to lose, and stood to gain significantly, if things had worked out. The one person who does appear to have a great deal at stake in terms of reputation and personal ambition in Trump’s flame-throwing final stand is Ivanka Trump.
Ivanka’s success is built on the Trump brand and the Trump name; her persona derives from her image as her father’s protégée. Donald Trump also needs his daughter by his side. When he seemed boorish, offensive, ignorant, or even predatory—at times, an hourly occurrence—a modern, emancipated daughter was there to soften the father’s edges. She and her siblings were enlisted to help marshal the “millennial vote.” Through it all, the immense free publicity generated by Trump’s ability to dominate cable news dovetailed conveniently with Ivanka’s business. She embraced the family philosophy of turning everything into an opportunity for personal enrichment; the morning after she introduced her father at the Republican National Convention, she broadcast on Twitter an image of herself wearing one of her fashion label’s dresses on the stage with the exhortation: “Shop Ivanka’s look from her #RNC speech.”
Appearing at the Fortune conference in her own “cap-sleeve embellished sheath dress,” a red number with a high slit up the side ($148 at Lord & Taylor), Ivanka tried to present a challenging argument, that she was both an important influence on her father yet completely removed from anything he did. When Nancy Gibbs, the managing editor of Time magazine, who interviewed Ivanka onstage, asked about the tape that was recently made public in which Trump boasted about grabbing and assaulting women, Ivanka said that she had accepted his apology.
“He recognizes it was crude language. He was embarrassed that he said those things, and he apologized,” she said, maintaining a calm, unflappable demeanor and talking-point discipline in a high-pressure situation, something that her father generally is unable to do. “That’s not language consistent with any conversation I’ve ever had with him, or any conversation I’ve ever overheard, so it was a bit jarring to hear. I think he was sincere in his apology.”
She went on, “When things have happened in this campaign that have been tough for us as a family . . . when things have been said that are mischaracterizations, that are false, and not consistent with his intent, we talk about it. We have a very open dialogue.”
Most of the women at the summit had paid ten thousand dollars to be there, and Gibbs played to her audience when she turned the conversation to business. “You’ve spent a lot of time building a very successful retail brand, whose sort of core theme was about female empowerment, and yet that identity, for the moment, has been overtaken by your role as one of the most visible members of the inner circle of the Republican nominee, who just in the last two weeks has body-shamed a Miss Universe contestant and appeared in that tape and suggested that other women who have accused him were too unattractive to have been assaulted,” Gibbs said at one point. “Does that put you in an impossible position?”
A look of exasperation passed across Ivanka’s face before she composed a smooth, careful response. “My brand was launched far before the Presidential cycle commenced and will continue long afterwards,” she said. “I’ve always tried to maintain complete separation between that and the campaign. With that said, you know, one of the challenging things is just operating, living one’s life, with the intensity and the scrutiny of this process is a very hard thing actually to do.”
She went on to say that nothing could prepare a person to be the child of a Presidential candidate, and that the media has been “vicious” to her and her family. It was hard not to feel a bit sorry for her when she described being followed by a pack of photographers on the way to drop her children at school in the morning. Ivanka said that she often didn’t recognize the person—her father—the press portrayed.
Still, the example of media unfairness that she complained most about involved not the mistreatment of her father but of the Trump business. The choice seemed an intentional part of her effort to align herself with Trump the Brand, not necessarily Trump the Politician. Gibbs followed up by asking whether, in light of the fact that the Trump brand is defined by “winning,” her father was prepared to concede the election if he lost.
“Well, look, my father is in this to win it,” Ivanka said. She said that she’d heard many anecdotes about people, male and female, who planned to vote for Trump but were too embarrassed to go public with it. “I’m not interested in talking about alternative outcomes, and of course I think my father will always do the right thing,” she said. “That’s the type of person he is.” She added, “He’ll either win or he won’t win, and I believe he’ll accept the outcome either way.”
Donald Trump’s strategy all along has been to force a change of subject in the national discussion by making outrageous statements or insinuations at critical moments, a technique he employed effectively once again after talk of sexual-assault allegations against him began to dominate the press. After her interview at the Ritz-Carlton, Ivanka flew to Las Vegas to accompany her father to the final Presidential debate. Toward the end, Chris Wallace, the moderator, asked Donald Trump essentially the same question that Gibbs had asked his daughter. The father’s answer probably didn’t surprise the daughter, but it might have dismayed her. He had, for the moment, chosen the politician over his brand: “I will look at it at the time. I will keep you in suspense, O.K.?”
