Ivanka Trump, the daughter of President Donald Trump, said she is not concerned about criticism of her work in her father’s administration.
Ivanka Trump, the daughter of President Donald Trump, said she is not concerned about criticism of her work in her father’s administration.
“Whether my contribution ultimately lives up to the expectations of some of the harshest critics? Only time will tell. But I will not be distracted by the noise, ” she said in a Financial Times interview posted Thursday.
She said she does not publicly disagree with her father’s administration because she values teamwork.
“To voice dissent publicly would mean I’m not part of the team. When you’re part of a team, you’re part of a team. That doesn’t mean everyone in the White House has homogenous views—we don’t, and I think that’s good and healthy—but that doesn’t mean we’re publicly undermining (each other) and this administration, ” the first daughter said in the interview.
Trump knows that her White House career is tied to her father’s.
“There is zero doubt in my mind that I am here because my father was elected. I have no problem with the acknowledgment of that. It’s a truth, ” she said.
However, she appears to have had little effect on the president’s actions, according to presidential historian Douglas Brinkley in the Financial Times.
“Anything we thought a few months back about how she was going to be a moderating influence on Trump has not come to fruition. If she’s having a major policy influence, it’s really being done in a subterranean fashion, because there are no clear signs of it, ” Brinkley said.
“I think it benefits the president to be able to hear from people who both agree and disagree with him on any given issue. And then, ultimately, the president makes his own decision, ” Trump said.
Some critics judge her unfairly, she said.
“Some people have created unrealistic expectations of what they expect from me. 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, ” she said.
“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.
Among her critics is MSNBC host Mika Brszezinski.
“Who represents women in WH? We hoped it would be Ivanka. Sad, ” Brszezinski tweeted Aug. 30.
She said that she attempts to focus on priorities such as establishing paid family leave and promoting women in science, but sometimes wants to do more.
“While sometimes my heart wants me to fully engage on any host of issues outside of my responsibility or expertise, I try really hard to stay in my lane and execute on the initiatives I came to DC to take on, ” she said.
The end result of her involvement with the presidency will be what she and her husband Jared Kushner are able to accomplish, she said.
“We are not going to look back when this thing is over and say, “Oh, there’s a bad story’… we’re going to look back and say, ‘Did we achieve our goals?'”
