Inside Ivanka's dreamworld

Succeeding as ivanka trump has always required a suspension of disbelief—on her part and on the part of others. It is how people were able to watch her father demand Obama’s birth certificate on television one night and then buy a pair of Ivanka’s Carra dress pumps the next day. But becoming part of the official White House staff linked Ivanka to Trump in a way no one could ignore. “I think it would’ve been a lot easier for her if she’d just stayed in New York and did what she was doing,” the president told me. “That’s always tricky, you know, if you have a business and now all of the sudden—let’s say 100 percent of the people like you, and now all of the sudden you have 50 percent of the people that love you, but the other 50 percent of the people, it’s less than like.”

One thing Ivanka misses about New York, said the source familiar with her thinking, is being in a world where she feels judged by her accomplishments, not the means by which she achieved them, not by “process.” For Ivanka, the policies she’s advanced in the White House are outcomes, and thus the things she should be judged by. Things like her father’s rhetoric, or how she received her top-secret security clearance, or whether she conducted official business through her personal email account, are insignificant. “Noise,” as she has put it to friends. That people might see them as anything more can only be explained, in Ivanka’s view, as a peculiar fixation of Washington.

Ivanka believes that this won’t harm her in the long term. She is intent on returning to New York when her time in the White House is over. Invitations to the Met Gala, dinners with girlfriends at Italian restaurants, charity events—she is said to be certain that they’re “all waiting” for her. And she could very well be right. Trump will not be president forever. Afterward, it will be easier for people to see the Ivanka that Ivanka wants to be seen. “Look, this crowd is not off reading Rosa Luxemburg at two in the morning,” says Rich Farley, a New York lawyer and the author of Wall Street Wars. “They invited Roy Cohn back with open arms.” Farley is sure: “The only unpardonable sin in New York society is poverty.”