Ivanka Trump

• 1. Introduction

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  Ivanka Trump, an American businesswoman born on the 30th of October 1981, once described her own position in two short sentences. In October 2015 she said: "As a citizen, I love what he's doing. As a daughter, it's obviously more complicated." She was talking about her father, Donald Trump, who would go on to serve as the 45th and 47th president of the United States. She was his second child.

  Her path to that moment was unusual. She was a Manhattan teenager who appeared on magazine covers, a boardroom judge on television, a hotel developer and the head of her own fashion label. Then she became a presidential advisor in her father's first administration, from 2017 to 2021. How did those careers fit together? What did she actually do inside the White House? And why did her business interests draw such sharp questions from ethics experts?

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• 2. Manhattan and Boarding School

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  Ivana Marie Trump was born in Manhattan, New York City, the daughter of the Czech-American model Ivana, whose maiden name was Zelníčková. For most of her life she has been called Ivanka, a Slavic diminutive of her first name. According to her late mother, she speaks French and understands Czech.

  In 1990, when she was nine years old, her parents divorced. She has two full brothers, Donald Jr. and Eric, along with a half-sister, Tiffany, and a half-brother, Barron.

  Her early schooling took place at Christ Church and the Chapin School, both in Manhattan. At 15 she switched to Choate Rosemary Hall, a boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut. She graduated from Choate in 2000 and spent two years at Georgetown University. She then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. She graduated cum laude with a bachelor's degree in economics in 2004.

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• 3. Covers and Boardrooms

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  In May 1997, while still a boarding school student, Ivanka Trump appeared on the cover of Seventeen. Her mother later explained that the modeling happened "on weekends and holidays and absolutely not during the school year." She appeared in campaigns for Tommy Hilfiger, Thierry Mugler and Versace, and in advertisements in Elle, Vogue, Teen Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. She also did runway work.

  Later magazine covers included Forbes, Forbes Life, Marie Claire, Golf Digest, Town & Country, Elle Décor, Shape and Stuff. Vanity Fair placed her on its International Best Dressed Hall of Fame list in 2007 and again in 2008.

  In 1997, at the age of 15, she co-hosted the Miss Teen USA Pageant. Her father partly owned that pageant from 1996 to 2005.

  Television gave her a more business-minded role. During the fifth season of her father's show The Apprentice, she filled in for the businesswoman Carolyn Kepcher on five episodes. She first appeared in week 2 to help judge the Gillette task. Like Kepcher, she visited the task sites and talked with the teams. She also worked with the season's winner, Sean Yazbeck, on his chosen prize project, the Trump SoHo Hotel-Condominium. By the sixth season she had replaced Kepcher as a primary boardroom judge, and she kept that seat on Celebrity Apprentice.

  In 2006 she was a guest judge on the third season of Project Runway. She returned as a guest judge on season 4 of Project Runway All Stars in 2014 and 2015.

  In October 2009 she published her first self-help book, The Trump Card: Playing to Win in Work and Life. The ghostwriter Daniel Paisner says he co-wrote it.

  In 2010 she and her husband, Jared Kushner, played themselves in Season 4, Episode 6 of Gossip Girl. Others have played her far more often. On Saturday Night Live she has been portrayed by the cast member Vanessa Bayer and by the guest hosts Margot Robbie, Emily Blunt and Scarlett Johansson. Maya Rudolph played her on the show in 2005 and impersonated her again on Late Night with Seth Meyers in 2017. She has also been played on The President Show and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. On RuPaul's Drag Race, a satirical version appeared in "Trump: The Rusical" in the eleventh season, played by Mercedes Iman Diamond. A Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj remix of "Flawless" gave her a shoutout, and Madame Tussauds made a wax sculpture of her. In 2019 Jennifer Rubell's art exhibition Ivanka Vacuuming showed a model resembling her sweeping up crumbs thrown by spectators.

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• 4. Hotels and Jewelry

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  In February 2012 Ivanka Trump led her family company's answer to a request for proposals from the General Services Administration. The prize was the historic Old Post Office in Washington, D.C., and the Trump Organization was chosen to develop it. She then oversaw the $200-million conversion of the building into a luxury hotel, which opened in 2016. Her title was executive vice president of development and acquisitions, and she was responsible for the company's domestic and global real estate expansion. Before that, she had worked briefly for the real estate firm Forest City Ratner after Wharton. She also led the purchase and redevelopment of the Doral Hotel, a 700-room resort in Miami.

  In 2007 she partnered with Dynamic Diamond Corp. to launch Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry, a diamond and gold line sold at her first flagship store in Manhattan. The brand relaunched its website in August 2010. In November 2011 the flagship moved from Madison Avenue to a larger space at 109 Mercer Street in SoHo. Jennifer Lopez wore the jewelry on the cover of Glamour, and Rihanna wore it on the cover of W magazine. Footwear News named the brand its "Launch of the Year" in 2010. In 2015 the designer Carolina Herrera presented her with the Breakthrough Award at the Accessories Council Excellence Awards.

  The label grew beyond jewelry into clothes, handbags, shoes and accessories. Department stores in the United States and Canada carried it, including Macy's and Hudson's Bay. In December 2012, members of 100 Women in Hedge Funds chose her for their board.

  Honors from other groups followed. In 2012 the Wharton Club of New York gave her the Joseph Wharton Award for Young Leadership. In 2014 Fortune put her on its 40 Under 40 list, and in 2015 the World Economic Forum named her a Young Global Leader. Time listed her among the most influential people in the world in 2017. In 2020 the National Association of Manufacturers gave her its Alexander Hamilton Award.

  In July 2018 she shut the fashion company down. She said she wanted to focus on public policy, and the source also points to falling sales and closer scrutiny of overseas manufacturing. The brand had also been tied up in a legal dispute, which ended in a settlement out of court.

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• 5. The Campaign Trail

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  At Trump Tower in 2015, Ivanka Trump introduced her father as he announced his run for president. She endorsed the campaign and appeared publicly to support and defend him. In January 2016 she voiced praise for him in a radio ad that aired in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire. She stood beside him after the early-state results and spoke briefly in South Carolina. Yet she could not vote for him in the New York primary of April 2016. She had missed the October 2015 deadline to change her registration to Republican.

  In July 2016 she introduced her father at the Republican National Convention, immediately before his own speech. She spoke about equal pay for working mothers and affordable, high-quality child care. "One of my father's greatest talents is the ability to see the potential in people," she said, and she told the crowd he would "Make America Great Again." The Washington Post said the speech showed him "in a warmer-than-usual light." Viewers called it "one of the best - if not the best - of the night" and the "high point of the convention." An earlier Post article had asked whether her policy positions sat closer to Hillary Clinton's than to her father's.

  Her political history made that question fair. In 2007 she donated $1,000 to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. In 2012 she endorsed Mitt Romney. In 2013 she and her husband hosted a fundraiser for the Democrat Cory Booker and gathered more than $40,000 for his Senate campaign. At the 2016 convention she said: "Like many of my fellow millennials, I do not consider myself categorically Republican or Democrat." During her father's presidency she became an "unapologetically" pro-life, "proud Trump Republican." In 2018 she changed her New York voter registration from Democratic to Republican.

  She attended the presidential inauguration and helped coordinate some logistics, including venue rates and meals at the Trump International Hotel. The inaugural committee paid with privately raised funds, which is common for such events.

  On the 6th of January 2021 she declined to address the rally at the Ellipse, though she attended it. During the riot at the U.S. Capitol, she urged her father to post a video on Twitter condemning it. In June 2022 she told the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack that she did not believe the election was stolen. She said she accepted William Barr's conclusion that the fraud claims had "zero basis."

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• 6. West Wing Portfolio

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  On the 29th of March 2017, Ivanka Trump was appointed "Advisor to the President," which made her a government employee. For the first two months of the administration she had advised her father unofficially. She took no salary and received no government health benefits in her four years at the White House. She also headed the newly created Office of Economic Initiatives and Entrepreneurship. In late April 2017 she hired Julie Radford as her chief of staff.

  Before the end of that month she planned to travel with Dina Powell and Hope Hicks to the first W20 women's summit in Germany. German women's organizations, the National Council of German Women's Organizations and the Association of German Women Entrepreneurs, ran it as a preparatory meeting before the July G20 summit. At the conference she spoke about women's rights. That month she and the World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim, also wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times on women's economic empowerment.

  In July 2017 she attended the G20 Summit in Hamburg with the U.S. delegation. There she launched We-Fi, the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative, a U.S.-led World Bank effort worth a billion dollars. In August her father announced that she would lead a U.S. delegation to India that fall. In September 2017 she gave an anti-human trafficking speech at the United Nations General Assembly and called trafficking "the greatest human rights issue of our time." Theresa May, then British prime minister, hosted the event and personally invited her.

  In February 2018 she led the presidential delegation to the closing ceremony of the PyeongChang Olympic Winter Games. She dined with South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the Blue House. After the Osaka G20 summit in June 2019, she joined her father to meet North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, inside the demilitarized zone. She called it "surreal."

  In 2019 she pushed her Women's Global Development and Prosperity Initiative by visiting Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Argentina, Colombia, Paraguay and Morocco, all recipients of U.S. development aid. The program aimed to widen access to vocational training, capital and networks for working women and to lift limits on their economic participation. Both houses of Congress introduced bipartisan bills to write it into law.

  At home she argued for doubling the child tax credit in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and for more money for state child care grants. She backed a bill funding paid family and medical leave for federal employees, which the Senate passed in December 2019. She also supported the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, which both houses passed and her father signed in 2019.

  In January 2020 she organized a Human Trafficking Summit at the White House. There her father signed an order creating a new position in his domestic policy office focused only on that issue. In June 2020 she joined William Barr, the special advisor Heather C. Fischer, nonprofit leaders and survivors at the White House to announce $35 million in grants. In September 2020 she stood in Atlanta with Barr, Georgia governor Brian Kemp, his wife Marty Kemp and Tim Tebow to announce $100 million more.

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• 7. Conflicts and Questions

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  In January 2017 Ivanka Trump resigned from her position at the Trump Organization. The company took images of her and her father off its websites, following official advice on federal ethics rules. Even so, she kept ownership of her businesses while in government. Ethics experts said that created conflicts of interest.

  The public cannot know exactly what she earned. She had to report her assets and liabilities only in ranges to the Office of Government Ethics. The combined incomes of Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, ranged from $36.2 million to $157 million in 2019. They were at least $29 million in 2018 and at least $82 million in 2017. In 2019 she earned $3.9 million from her stake in the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C.

  Between 2016 and 2017 she applied for numerous trademarks in China. Several were approved around the time of President Xi Jinping's 2017 visit to the United States. A Chinese official said the applications followed standard procedures, and a trademark lawyer noted that the timeline was not unusual.

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• 8. Faith, Family and Giving

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  In July 2009 Ivanka Trump converted to Orthodox Judaism after studying with Elie Weinstock of the Ramaz School. She had been raised Presbyterian. She took the Hebrew name Yael and called the conversion a "beautiful journey" that her father supported from the start. She and her husband keep a kosher home and observe the Jewish Sabbath. Before the 2016 election they visited the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe to pray. In May 2017 they joined her father on his visit to Israel, including a stop at the Western Wall. In January 2020 the Israeli-American Council gave her its "Friend of Israel Award."

  In college she spent nearly four years in a relationship with Greg Hersch. From 2001 to 2005 she dated James "Bingo" Gubelmann. In 2005 she began dating the real estate developer Jared Kushner, whom she met through mutual friends. The two broke up in 2008, then reconciled, and they married in a Jewish ceremony on the 25th of October 2009. They have three children: a daughter born in July 2011 and sons born in October 2013 and March 2016. On The Dr. Oz Show she revealed that she had experienced postpartum depression after each pregnancy.

  In January 2017 the couple announced plans for a family home in Washington's Kalorama neighborhood. Before that they shared a Park Avenue apartment in New York, chosen for its closeness to her Trump Organization work. Elle Decor featured it in 2012 with Kelly Behun as decorator. Since leaving Washington in 2021, the family has lived in Surfside, Florida. She, her husband and their children practice Brazilian jiu-jitsu under the Valente brothers. She also enjoys golf, surfing and horseback riding, and she plays piano and guitar.

  Writing for Vanity Fair in 2018, Sarah Ellison noted that everyone in the family seems to accept Ivanka as her father's favorite child. The siblings said as much themselves in a 2015 television interview with Barbara Walters.

  Her giving began in 2010, when she cofounded Girl Up with the United Nations Foundation. She also supports Jewish charities such as Chai Lifeline, which cares for children with cancer, and United Hatzalah. In 2014 she launched IvankaTrump.com and the Women Who Work campaign, aimed at young professional women. In May 2017 her second self-help book, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success, was published. Contributors included Adam Grant, Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin, Simon Sinek and Stephen Covey. Critics gave it mixed reviews. She gave $200,000 in royalties to the National Urban League and the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Half of the advance went to a Women's Entrepreneur Center at the National Urban League in Baltimore, after she visited the site with its president, Marc Morial.

  In 2021 and 2022 she joined Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya in a privately funded holiday food box program that delivered millions of meals across the country. In March 2022 she worked with the nonprofits CityServe, City of Destiny and Mercy Chefs to supply a million meals to Ukrainian families. In December of that year she bought generators for CityServe's partner churches in Ukraine, which had lost power. She also organized five cargo planes of requested medical supplies for Ukraine, with help from the first lady of Poland and the Polish ambassador to the UN.

  After leaving government, she and her husband joined his firm, Affinity Partners, in a $1.4 billion redevelopment of Sazan Island in Albania, which locals often call "Trump Island." In 2023 she co-founded Planet Harvest, a company that redirects surplus produce and makes consumer goods from excess crops.

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