Ivanka Trump played an essential part during her father’s first presidential term. She and Donald Trump have always gotten along well, and when he entered the White House for the first time in 2017, he did so with Ivanka by his side as she began working as a consultant.
Ivanka’s time at the White House was a mix of good and bad. At one point, she was reportedly trying to force her way into a meeting with Queen Elizabeth II. After leaving the White House, Ivanka decided that enough was enough and that her time in politics was over. Then a new book revealed that Donald Trump once tried to get her help on a political issue—but that she refused to help him.
Suffice to say that Ivanka played a massive part in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, serving as a consultant to her father. She joined him on the campaign trail and made several crucial speeches at events, including at the Republican National Convention in 2016. Understandably, it was a tough keeping all these things going simultaneously.
“My life is chaotic right now,” Ivanka told People Magazine in 2020. “I’m exhausted 90 percent of the time … Being a mother is the most rewarding experience, but also the most wild and stressful.”
After Donald’s success, Ivanka landed a part in her father’s administration right away, alongside her husband, Jared Kushner, and brothers, Eric Trump and Donald Jr. She worked as an advisor focusing on “the education and economic empowerment of women and their families as well as job creation and economic growth through workforce development, skills training, and entrepreneurship.”
Even though the job required hours and hours of work, Trump hired his family members as unpaid White House advisors. While Ivanka’s time at the White House was enlightening and undoubtedly offered her unique experiences, it also marked the beginning of a few problems.
Ivanka herself was criticized by people who thought she should have used her influence to stop Donald Trump from implementing several policies. Some of those people, previously good friends, wanted nothing to do with her as things progressed.
Ivanka Trump at the White House
Bill and Hillary Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea Clinton, was often seen with Ivanka at different events with Ivanka and her socialite friends. However, after the Trump administration assumed its position in the White House, Chelsea hasn’t spoken to Ivanka, who once was a registered Democrat.
In 2018, Clinton, speaking with Stephen Colbert, explained: “I have not spoken to her in a long time. It’s clear that she has supported policies and decisions that I don’t agree with. I’ve been very vocal about my opposition to President Trump.”
She added: “I think anyone who works for the president certainly should expect to be scrutinized for not only whatever decisions she or he is making, but also for whatever decisions the White House is making on any given day.”
Chelsea Clinton told Watch What Happens Now in 2020 how she really felt. She said, “I have not spoken to her since 2016 and I have no interest in being friends with [her]. We were in touch at the beginning of the [2016] campaign but it’s just really hard when there’s someone who’s actively embracing their candidate — whether it’s their father or not … I don’t want to be friends with someone like that,” Clinton added.
Losing some of her close acquaintances was understandably tough for Trump’s oldest daughter. In November of last year, the New York Post reported that Ivanka was disappointed that her friends “turned their back on her” during her tenure at the White House in her father’s administration.
“Ivanka hated all the criticism and the threats and was unhappy about how a lot of their friends turned their back on them,” an unnamed source said. “She feels it’s bad for her family … and negative in general in her circle of friends. She wants as normal a life as she can arrange for her and her family.”
Stores wouldn’t sell her clothes.
But it appears losing friends wasn’t the only setback for Ivanka during her time in the White House. In 2017, several retailers, including Neiman Marcus, Burlington, and Nordstrom, dropped Ivanka’s clothing brands. She launched a clothing line focusing on affordable women’s office wear in 2011, but when her father became president, the stores decided to punish her.
Later, in 2017, Ivanka decided to shut down her fashion company entirely. After her tenure at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, former press secretary Stephanie Grisham revealed some quite unflattering stuff about her.
Grisham was the White House press secretary for nine months before being transferred to First Lady Melania Trump’s office. She also served as the White House communications director.
In Grisham’s 2021 memoir, I’ll Take Your Questions Now, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, were the subject of plenty of criticism. The Washington Post wrote that Grisham was “particularly negative” about the couple and described several specific incidents in her memoir. One had to do with Ivanka Trump and none other than Queen Elizabeth herself.
As reported by the Washington Post, Ivanka and Jared tried to force their way into a scheduled meeting with Queen Elizabeth during a presidential visit to the UK. According to Grisham, she and her husband wanted to join Donald Trump and Melania Trump at the meeting, which was a serious breach of protocol regarding a state visit. However, due to the limited capacity of the helicopter, the two were shut out.
“I finally figured out what was going on,” Grisham writes in her book. “Jared and Ivanka thought they were the royal family of the United States.”
Ivanka Trump states she is done with politics
Ivanka and her husband held senior positions within the White House staff, though neither had government experience before Donald Trump took Office.
Grisham further reveals in her book that Ivanka Trump frequently mentioned “my father” during staff meetings. She also referred to Kushner several times as “the Slim Reaper,” claiming that he would often involve himself in other people’s projects, only to then leave and let them take the blame when things went south.
“I had shared with Mrs. Trump many times my opinion that if we lost reelection in 2020 it would be because of Jared,” she writes. “She didn’t disagree with me.”
Ivanka designed Trump hotels before her White House life, and when he was a TV star on The Apprentice, she was in the television boardroom. But in January 2021, after working with her dad in Washington, Ivanka said she was done with politics.
“I love my father very much. This time around, I am choosing to prioritize my young children and the private life we are creating as a family. I do not plan to be involved in politics,” Ivanka Trump said as Donald announced his new presidential campaign.
Instead, Ivanka prioritizes a calm family life in Florida with her husband and the couple’s three children. If there is any advice she will give her father, it will be in private, CNN reported in December.
“She loves being with her children”
A source familiar with her thinking said that if Ivanka Trump chooses to weigh in and have influence during her father’s second term, “It’s never going to be something that people are going to see publicly.”
“Her children are in a sweet spot where they’re all critical ages, they’re tweens and teens, and it’s short – it’s really brief. She loves being with her children, and she’s found a lot of peace and happiness in her private life,” longtime Trump family friend Maggie Cordish told CNN.
“I know today the cost they would pay for me being all in, emotionally, in terms of my absence at such a formative point in their life, and I’m not willing to make them bear that cost,” she added.
Ivanka Trump joined her father at the 2025 Super Bowl with son Theodore. While they have a good relationship and Donald sees his grandchildren a lot, they have widely different opinions on certain things. Even though they got along at the White House, mixing business with pleasure isn’t always good.
Now, with the new book All or Nothing by renowned author Michael Wolff, who has written four books on Donald Trump, we get some more insight into Donald Trump and Ivanka’s relationship. It turns out she isn’t prepared to stand by her father in every situation.
Ivanka Trump refused to sign memo stating Trump was not antisemitic, book claims
In the wake of October 7, referring to the deadly 2023 attack by Hamas, Wolff explained that Donald Trump seemingly was “incapable of offering absolute support for Israel. Therefore, the now-president “not for the first time” turned to Jared Kushner, Ivanka’s husband, for help. Ivanka and Jared are Jewish, and Donald asked for a public endorsement. However, according to the author, the couple refused to sign.
“As Trump had continued to waffle, the Washington Post, the campaign understood, was working on a piece that would recycle all the language Trump had variously used over the years, which, on its face, might certainly sound antisemitic. Kushner kept dodging on the formal endorsement of his father-in-law. The campaign then tried to settle for merely a statement from him that his father-in-law was not antisemitic,” Wolff wrote in All or Nothing, as per The Guardian.
Wolff wrote that Kushner said, “No, Ivanka and I aren’t going to do that. We’re not going to go and put our names on something and get in the middle of things. That’s just not what we’re going to do this time.”
According to The Guardian, the All or Nothing published Crown said, “Wolff’s thesis in his 18 months of covering the campaign was that the establishment would destroy Trump, or Trump would destroy the establishment. All or Nothing is Wolff’s panoramic and intimate picture of that battle … from indictments, to trials, to assassination attempts, to the humiliation and defenestration of a sitting president, to Trump’s staggering victory.”
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