Ivanka Trump: Critics Have 'Unrealistic Expectations' Of How Much I Can Influence My Father

The relationship between President Donald Trump and his daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump is not what it appears to be, she says.

In an interview with the Financial Times published on Thursday, the president’s eldest daughter rebuffed the assumption that she holds much power of persuasion over her father, despite the innumerable reports claiming that she is often the one to convince him of something or attempt to change his mind.

Take the Paris climate accord. She reportedly organized five weeks of meetings to convince her father to not pull out of the agreement. In the end, he didn’t listen. 

“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.”

She added that voicing dissent publicly would “mean I’m not part of the team.”

“She tries to be supportive of her father and I think that she is able to both agree and disagree with him in private and share her feedback with him honestly and respectfully,” her husband Jared Kushner, also a Trump adviser, chimed in. “She’s worked with him for a long time – longer than anyone else in the White House.” 

The first daughter said she only wants to be judged on the policy issues she has decided to tackle herself, like gender equality in the workplace. 

Clarification: The headline has been amended to more accurately paraphrase Ivanka Trump’s remarks that her critics have “unrealistic expectations” of her influence, not that any influence on her father is “unrealistic.” Language has also been added to reflect that Trump was referring to public disagreements, not disagreements of any kind, in regard to her being “part of the team.”