Ivanka Trump: ‘Judge his values by the ideals he’s instilled in his children’
From the moment she walked to the podium to the song “Here Comes the Sun,” the daughter of the Republican nominee for president did the job set out for her on the final night of the party’s convention — providing a confident, reassuring portrait of Donald Trump as a man, a father and a leader.
Ivanka Trump has been a constant presence on the campaign trail this past year, beginning when she introduced him at Trump Tower the day he entered the race last year, and including the weeks when she was heavily pregnant before giving birth to her third child in March.
She has been called his “secret weapon,” seen by many as a counterpoint to her often brash, combative father, with her quieter, more reflective demeanor. She holds particular appeal for working millennial women like herself, whom she has courted long before her father entered the political arena, with her own clothing line and a forthcoming book about women and work.
Her speech tonight was not big on personal anecdote — the few that she did offer included stories of sitting on the floor building towers with Legos while her father sat at a desk designing ones from concrete, or of having her dad exhort to her “think big” — but it was filled with personal reassurance, one mother to millions of others, that her father would represent women in particular.
Less than an hour after Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign manager, told an interviewer that the Republican nominee would appeal to married women because “their husbands can’t afford” to cover “the family bills,” Ivanka had a somewhat more modern take. At the Trump Organization, she said, to the loudest applause in her speech, “women are paid equally for the work that they do, and when a woman becomes a mother, she is supported, not shut out.”
“As a mother myself, of three young children, I know how hard it is to work while raising a family,” she said. Noting that “gender is no longer the factor creating the greatest wage discrepancy in this country, motherhood is,” she said that her father would “fight for equal pay for equal work and I will fight for this too, right along side of him,” a theme that the candidate himself has not spoken of during the campaign thus far.
All the adult Trump children spoke in prime time during the convention, and they served as popular, humanizing, telegenic ambassadors for their father. “You can’t fake good kids,” Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, said during his acceptance speech last night, and the Trump children have impressed over the past week.
But it was Ivanka who was chosen to introduce the candidate, seemingly confirming her role as his most important adviser, a surrogate for his third wife, Melania, who does not like the campaign trail, and even his heir apparent to the luster of the Trump name.
With her words, and with her polished and controlled manner, she attempted to reassure those who might be nervous about her father that they could trust him because, after all, he’d raised her well.
Judge him by two things, she said: his buildings — not mentioning that it has been years since Trump has actually built anything — and his three sons and two daughters. “He loves his family and he loves his country with his heart and his soul,” she said. “I ask you to judge him by his results. Judge his values by the ideals he’s instilled in his children.”
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