If you’ve been holding onto hope that Ivanka Trump might be a voice of reason inside the White House, it’s time to let go — President Donald Trump’s oldest daughter said recently she doesn’t hold any special powers of persuasion over her father.
Since Trump entered the White House earlier this year, many have assumed — or at least hoped — Ivanka possessed an ability to temper or control her father’s knee jerk and often contentious decisions, but in an interview published in the Financial Times on Thursday, she said those beliefs are nothing more than fantasies.
“Some people have created unrealistic expectations of what they expect from me,” she said. “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.”
From the travel ban to the transgender military ban, President Trump has skipped from unpopular decision to unpopular decision, and Ivanka has been catching a lot of blame for her father’s policies.
Truthfully, the public knows very little about what Ivanka has and hasn’t tried to do to shape policy coming out of the White House, but in the few instances where we know Ivanka has tried to assert her influence, she’s actually often failed.
Case and point? The Paris climate agreement.
Sources said Ivanka and husband Jared Kushner pleaded with the president not to withdraw from the landmark climate deal and Huffington Post reported the first daughter organized five weeks of meetings on the subject. He didn’t listen.
But it’s not just that President Trump might not listen to his daughter — Ivanka said voicing dissent would “mean I’m not part of the team.”
As a White House adviser, Ivanka doesn’t want to be judged by the policies of her father and asked only to be blamed for the policy issues she has decided to tackle herself, like gender equality in the workplace.
