Chelsea Clinton has said that her friendship with Ivanka Trump ended when “she went to the dark side”.
Ms Clinton was interviewed on Bravo’s What Happens Live with Andy Cohen alongside her mother, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Host Andy Cohen asked the younger Ms Clinton about her relationship with the daughter of former president Donald Trump, whom her mother notably ran against and lost to in the 2016 election.
“We were friends,” Ms Clinton said of Ms Trump. “She is not the person I called when I was curious about something for my kids or if I was debating a life decision, but we were definitely friends ... and then she went to the dark side.”
She told Mr Cohen that she most recently spoke to Ms Trump in November 2016 after her mother lost the election.
Ms Trump and Ms Clinton were publically friendly until the 2016 campaign. Ms Trump served as a senior advisor to the president in the Trump administration, which has been repeatedly blasted by the Clintons.
In October 2020, Ms Clinton said on Bravo that she chose to end the relationship with Ms Trump because she had “no interest in being friends with someone who is not only complicit but actively taking part in this administration’s everyday collision of cruelty and incompetence”.
“I don’t think [Ivanka and Mr Trump] are the same by any standard,” Ms Clinton said at the time. “But I think she’s more than complicit. I don’t want to be friends with someone like that.”
At the start of 2016, both Chelsea and Hillary Clinton talked to People magazine about their respective dynamic with the Trump family and Chelsea said she’d “never had a relationship with Mr Trump”.
“My relationship has always been with Ivanka and certainly I do believe that friendship is more important than politics. I would never hold anyone accountable for what their parents or anyone else in their family said or did,” she added at the time. “I see Ivanka as Ivanka.”
