Born with a silver spoon in her mouth, Ivanka Trump has followed in dad Donald Trump's footsteps
throughout her career, from the family business to the White House. But what was her journey
like during her earlier years? Let's take a look at the transformation of Ivanka Trump.
Ivanka undeniably lived a privileged life as a child. She was named after her mom Ivana,
Donald's first of three wives. Ivanka explained in a 2010 tweet,
"My actual name is Ivana. In Czech, Ivanka is the baby name for Ivana, like Bobby is to Robert."
In her Women Who Work memoir, Ivanka described the close bond she's always shared with her mother,
who influenced her young daughter while managing real estate deals for the Trump Organization
alongside Donald. Remembering Ivana as, quote, "impeccably dressed,
in full makeup and four-inch high heels" while inspecting a construction site, Ivanka wrote,
"It was my mother, unapologetically feminine in a male industry, who first embodied and defined for
me what it meant to be a multidimensional woman - a woman who works at all aspects of her life."
In the early '90s, Ivanka had plenty of attention lavished on her by her dad while growing up.
As a 10-year-old, she would place collect calls to Donald's office at the Trump Organization, and
would hear her father put her on speakerphone for his guests to observe. Ivanka told CNN in 2016,
"It was colleagues, it was titans of industry, it was heads of countries. He'd always tell everyone
in the room how great a daughter I was and say cute things and ask me about a test I took."
Looking back on her childhood, Ivanka recalled that her father wasn't always
home by dinnertime, but still showed his love. She added,
"He wasn't always physically present, but he was always available."
Ivanka was only 9 years old when her parents announced their divorce.
Donald was caught up in a tabloid scandal alleging he cheated with his soon-to-be second wife,
Marla Maples. In a 2016 interview with People magazine, Ivanka praised her parents for making
a true effort to shelter them from the heightened media attention. She added,
"They did a remarkable job protecting us from something largely outside of their control.
We didn't have newspapers in the house for a significant period of time and the TV wasn't
on when they weren't there. So they tried to mitigate the attention that that moment received."
Ivanka, who said she became closer with both [her] parents through the process,
thanked Donald and Ivana for, quote, "not disparaging the other in front of us."
Ivanka's teenage years were interrupted when she transferred from an all-girl school in New York
City to a famously wealthy boarding school in Connecticut at the age of 15. Speaking to Spin
in 1998, the then-teenage heiress hinted at her complicated on-campus reputation, saying,
"There's a deli near campus where I go sometimes, and one day, the owner says to me,
'Ivanka, can I ask you something? People in town are saying that you have a limo waiting
for you at all times to pick you up and drive you to your classes. Is that true?'"
Ivanka didn't speak highly of her boarding school years in retrospect, telling Marie Claire in 2007,
"I was all of a sudden in the prison of boarding-school life,
and all my friends in New York were having fun."
Not unlike her stepmother, Melania Trump, Ivanka also entertained a brief
modeling career during her late teens. Signing with the Elite Modeling Agency,
she landed a cover shoot for Seventeen in 1997 and walked the runway in Paris the following year.
"I model because I love to model. And it's something that I enjoy doing."
However, speaking with Marie Claire in 2007, Ivanka dismissed her modeling experiences as,
quote, "not an endgame" for her more serious ambitions. She explained,
"I didn't particularly enjoy the act of it. It's as ruthless an industry as real
estate - the people you meet in that business are just as fricking tough."
Ivanka echoed the mean-girl mentality of the modeling world
during a Harper's Bazaar interview. She said,
"[My real-estate peers] have nothing on a group of catty 16-year-old female models
without parental supervision. That is a mean, tough, aggressive business,
and it taught me to build a callus to the projections of others."
Ivanka attended the same college as Donald and her brother, Donald Jr.
In 2004, Ivanka graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton
School of Business after transferring from Georgetown University before her junior year.
Praising her educational experience in a 2009 Philadelphia magazine interview, Ivanka said,
"Wharton helped me to quickly ease into the world I'm in. [...] It really just
teaches you how to analyze and dissect problems."
She also confessed to putting her real estate connections to use while in school,
claiming with a laugh,
"I did sell a few condos while I was at Wharton. To classmates who were looking,
or their parents. Not in exchange for test scores. For checks."
Ivanka's life changed in 2007, when the mid-20s real estate exec met future husband Jared Kushner,
the son of a New Jersey real estate family who had recently purchased The New York Observer. While
speaking to Vogue in 2015, Ivanka described how the two were introduced during a business lunch,
set up by friends who thought they could simply do business together. She explained,
"They very innocently set us up thinking that our only interest in one another
would be transactional. Whenever we see them we're like, 'The best deal we ever made!'"
Sparks clearly flew, and Ivanka and Jared married two years later at a ceremony at
her family's Trump National Golf Club in the Garden State. Jared praised Ivanka to Vogue as,
quote, "the CEO of [their] household," while Ivanka wrote in her Women Who Work memoir,
"Jared is a tremendous source of inspiration and support."
With a job at Trump Organization, Ivanka's career was already buzzing when she decided
to branch out into the fashion world. She launched her jewelry collection in 2007,
writing in her Women Who Work memoir,
"Women were interested in buying jewelry for themselves - and were
no longer waiting for a man to do it for them."
Going on to launch her own line of clothing and shoes in 2011, Ivanka added,
"I was really proud of the fact that my collections captured a femininity and a
sense of fashion that working women hadn't been able to express even just a decade before."
When Donald launched his presidential campaign in June 2015,
Ivanka notably took the stage to introduce him to the crowd. She would stay by her
father's side until his eventual victory in 2016, frequently hitting the campaign trail,
with Politico praising her as Donald's "most powerful surrogate." She also appeared in
television ads aimed at mothers to pitch Donald's alleged support for working women.
Similarly, Ivanka served as a powerful voice, defending her father against his widely-criticized
verbal attacks on women, including his war of the words with Megyn Kelly in 2015.
"I have zero respect for Megyn Kelly,
I don't think she's very good at what she does, I think she's highly overrated."
At the time of her dad's rhetoric regarding Megyn, Ivanka claimed to CNN,
"Look, my father is very blunt, he's very direct, he is not gender specific
in his criticism of people. So I don't think that he's gender-targeted at all."
"You can see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever."
Wearing a pink sheath from her own fashion line,
Ivanka stumped for her father at the Republican National Convention in July 2016, with her
appearance garnering rave reviews from Donald's supporters and the press alike. As CNN reported,
"[Ivanka revealed] a softer side of the billionaire businessman in a way that
almost no other convention speaker has done so far."
Meanwhile, convention delegates praised her speech as, quote,
"perfect" and "amazing" to the Associated Press.
However, critics pointed out that while Ivanka's rhetoric about pay equality and
affordable childcare was impressive, her proposed policies were in fact more similar
to Hillary Clinton's platform than that of her father. Ivanka told the RNC audience,
"In my father's company, there are more female than male executives. Women are paid equally for
the work that we do, and when a woman becomes a mother she is supported, not shut out."
"Gender is no longer the factor creating the greatest wage discrepancy in this country.
Motherhood is."
When Donald won the 2016 presidential election in an upset over Clinton,
Ivanka was ready and willing to step into a national role - and with all the fashion
influence that the position entailed. For her father's inauguration ceremony on January 20th,
2017, she drew praise for her winter-white ensemble during his outdoor swearing-in,
wearing a white jacket and trousers accessorized with an American flag pin.
According to USA Today, Ivanka's choice of a white ensemble may have been a reference
to the suffragette movement, with the first daughter's look, quote, "[packing] style and
subliminal messaging, giving a nod to women and the push for equal rights."
Ivanka's half-sister, Tiffany Trump, also chose a white look for the ceremony.
As a senior advisor to her father's administration, Ivanka has enjoyed perks of
her new life as a public official - including her visit to the 2018 Winter Olympic Games,
which she attended on behalf of the Trump administration. To comply with ethics laws,
Ivanka stepped down from her position with the Trump Organization in order to assume a
role in the White House, with her husband Jared Kushner leaving his roles with Kushner Companies
and The New York Observer in order to also accept an advisory role with the president.
Still, their business decisions didn't exactly leave Ivanka and Jared financially struggling,
as the couple reportedly "earned at least $36 million in outside income" in 2019,
according to The Washington Post.
Years into her White House tenure, Ivanka maintained a powerful role while allegedly
beginning to isolate herself. White House insiders cited by The Atlantic claimed that
Ivanka entered a, quote, "bunker period" around the fall of 2017, participating less frequently
in meetings and only involving herself in issues central to her passions for women and education.
A source described former chief of staff John Kelly's reaction to Ivanka, revealing,
"He kind of walked in and looked at Ivanka like, 'What the f--- is Barbie doing in the West Wing?'"
Meanwhile, Ivanka's own brother Don Jr. told the outlet that Ivanka's role
in the administration had affected her reputation among her wealthy friends.
Speaking about her rosy past, he explained,
"She was loved by all the people in the world she wanted to be loved by.
I can't say she's not disappointed by them turning on her. [...] 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."
Despite Ivanka's seemingly less-visible White House role, she still bore the brunt of
criticism in 2020 for several appearances that were widely seen as missteps. In a July 2020
ad campaign, Donald's oldest daughter told Americans to, quote, "Find Something New,"
urging those unemployed amid the pandemic to pursue new careers. The campaign, of course,
was lambasted by critics on social media for its lack of sensitivity toward out-of-work Americans,
with Ivanka responding to one negative tweet by claiming,
"This work has never been more urgent."
Ivanka was also lampooned for posting a photo of herself posing with a can of Goya black beans,
part of the Trump administration's mutual support of the Goya brand,
which prompted Democratic senators to accuse Ivanka of violating ethics laws.
Ivanka's tweet containing a Bible verse, which she shared in the midst of America's
widespread Black Lives Matter protests, didn't go over any better with her critics.
The White House fate of Ivanka remains unknown. Speaking to Face the Nation in December 2019,
Ivanka cast doubt on whether she'd return to the Trump administration
if her father won a second term, saying her,
quote, "kids and their happiness" would determine her choice. She explained,
"My decisions will always be flexible enough to ensure that their needs are
being considered first and foremost. So they will really drive that answer for me."
"The politics is truthfully less interesting."
Ivanka did indicate that her work with
the administration remained unfinished, however, saying,
"We've done so much, but it's not enough yet."
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