Ivanka Trump believes liberals are harboring “unrealistic expectations” of what they can expect from her as a moderating influence on her father’s presidency.
The comments came in an interview with the Financial Times, published on Thursday.
Trump said: “Some people have created unrealistic expectations of what they expect from me. That my presence, in and of itself, would carry so much weight with my father that he would abandon his core values and the agenda that the American people voted for when they elected him. It’s not going to happen. To those critics, shy of turning my father into a liberal, I’d be a failure to them.”
Donald Trump is known to value highly the opinions of family and close friends, often over the advice of experts. Some critics, such as Politico’s Michael D’Antonio, have suggested Ivanka is the president’s most trusted adviser.
There have been numerous reports that on issues from the bombings in Syria, to the abandonment of a possible anti-gay rights executive order, Ivanka Trump has been the primary influence on her father.
But Trump ignored his daughter’s advice when he pulled out of the Paris climate accord. Ivanka reportedly organized five weeks of meetings to convince her father not to withdraw. Those efforts were unsuccessful.
In the FT interview, Trump said she chooses not to publicly disagree with her father, even if she does in private, because she is a team player. “To voice dissent publicly would mean I’m not part of the team. When you’re part of a team, you’re part of a team,” she said.
“That doesn’t mean everyone in the White House has homogeneous views. We don’t, and I think that’s good and healthy – but that doesn’t mean we’re publicly undermining [each other] and this administration.”
Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, are considered to the left of the president, and belong to a social circle of what the FT calls elite New York liberals. According to the paper, Kushner and Trump “haven’t felt much of a chill in the liberal New York circles they ran in before the campaign. They know that friends who are happy to trash Ivanka anonymously in newspapers are usually not gutsy enough to do it to her face.”
The first daughter said she only wants to be judged on the policy issues she has been tapped to tackle herself, like gender equality in the workplace. However, she has faced significant criticism for failing to deliver.
She told the FT: “While sometimes my heart wants me to fully engage on any host of issues outside of my responsibility or expertise, I try really hard to stay in my lane and execute on the initiatives I came to DC to take on.”
However, as Kate Black, chief of staff at Emily’s List, the non-profit which seeks to get more Democratic women elected to office, told the FT: “If you’re going to say you’re an ally of women, you have to stand up for Planned Parenthood.”
