Ivanka, then, will start out as the most prominent woman in her father’s White House. And while I’m not sure she’ll always delight in playing hostess, I do think she is intrigued by the potential to serve as an envoy from President Trump to skeptical blue America. She has, after all, already brokered meetings between her father and Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio, two of the country’s most visible environmental activists. She was already a powerful voice in the campaign, and before that she was the most visible representative of the Trump brand, next to her father.
She’s already participated in calls and meetings between Trump and heads of state, including Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Argentine President Mauricio Macri — signaling that her father trusts her diplomatic instincts, but also raising questions about conflicts of interest between her role as a member of the first family and her post in the Trump Organization, which has business dealings in both of those countries.
One way to view Ivanka’s unapologetic assertion of herself as a policy adviser is that she’s already cleared the bar that Lady Bird warned her daughters about: “Don’t do anything you wouldn’t mind seeing on the front page of the newspaper.” Ivanka has lived her whole life understanding this maxim and is prepared for the White House in a way that presidential daughters who came before her, including Luci and Lynda Bird Johnson, Tricia and Julie Nixon, and Jenna and Barbara Bush, weren’t. She always appears unflappably cool, calm and collected. And while it is nothing new for presidential children to give campaign speeches (Lyndon Johnson routinely graded his daughters’ speeches) it is rare to have a presidential daughter so eclipse the president’s wife. Melania made only two big speeches during the campaign — including her embarrassing remarks at the Republican National Convention when it appeared that she had cribbed from Michelle Obama’s 2008 Democratic National Convention speech. By contrast, Ivanka was a constant presence, traveling the country to places that wouldn’t automatically be seen as likely campaign stops for a glamorous New Yorker, avoiding major gaffes and being widely viewed by political observers as an asset to her father’s political operation.
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