That’s why some of her friends and associates think she’ll run for president one day. “I’m a hundred percent sure it will happen, though maybe when her kids are older,” an associate said after she moved to Washington. “The attention, she loves it. She’s like, addicted.” Part of it, too, made good business sense. Posing for magazine covers and appearing with her father on The Apprentice was cheap mass exposure. “What other developer could generate that sort of publicity for free?” she asked the New York Times when she first came back to the Trump Organization and posed for the cover of Elle Mexico.
A big chunk of this is the fact that much of Ivanka’s life was not only out of her control, but also documented and determined by the press. She was a preteen when she saw her media-obsessed father leave her, her mother, and her brothers for Marla, and witness how he lit up or blew up depending on how the press depicted him. She carried the burden of wondering if her father would leave again or love her still, and knew full well that one way to endear her to him forever was for him to read about her in the paper, particularly if she could make him money while getting her name in print at the same time.
This idea played out in steroidal proportions during the presidential campaign, which was not Ivanka’s idea for what she wanted at that point in her life. She was an executive in her father’s company, at the helm of her own eponymous fashion line, and had just inked a deal on a book about being a working woman and mother (at the time, her publisher thought of it as a C-list celebrity self-help book that might appeal to a coastal audience). She and Jared had just bought another apartment in the Trump building where they lived in on Park Avenue, and she was about a minute pregnant, if that, with her third child when her father announced his candidacy in June 2015. She had invitations to the annual Met Gala, vacations planned aboard David Geffen’s yacht, small kids who were happily settled in their schools and classes in the city. Their schedules were already so packed that she had to schedule time to play cars with her son Joseph and designate a day to bring her daughter to the office. Her trainer had begun bringing a notebook and pen to sessions so that Ivanka could write down what she had to do after their workout. Otherwise, she would be too overwhelmed to focus.
Ivanka’s life didn’t have room for a presidential campaign, especially one that required her to be both a second-string campaign spouse, since her stepmother largely sat out, and a proof point that her father did respect women, despite the things he’d said about their appearance or the behavior he’d been accused by two dozen women over the years. But there was no question that if her father decided to run, she would do what he needed her to do, even if it wasn’t what she herself wanted, or what would be best for her own life and business and family. That’s how their dynamic worked.
Still, Ivanka found control in a situation that seemed, in every way, beyond her grasp. In all her public statements—the stump speeches, the television interviews, the phone calls to reporters—she stuck to one issue. She used her speech introducing her father at the Republican National Convention to talk about paid family leave; she stumped about affordable childcare; she told interviewers about all the times her father had told her she could be anything she wanted to be if she worked hard enough. She avoided any political discussions that didn’t mesh with her personal brand and the vision she’d already been marketing to customers for years. Her role helped her father’s cause, sure, but even more, it set her up for her life after the campaign.
That level of messaging mastery doesn’t appear out of thin air for adult children of presidential candidates to harness during a campaign. As Chelsea Clinton, an acquaintance Ivanka ran into at dinner parties before the presidential campaign cut off the oxygen between them, once remarked to Vogue, Ivanka was “always aware of everyone around her and insuring that everyone is enjoying the moment. It’s an awareness that in some ways reminds me of my dad.”
This quality would serve as perhaps Donald’s greatest political asset, and, in an unintentional political turn, Ivanka’s too. Without knowing it, she’d been preparing for this moment all of her life—learning to contain the uncontainable, and steer it in her favor. “I’m always known as kind of a control freak,” she admitted on Good Morning America when she was sixteen. “I like to be in control of everything and not be vulnerable.” At twenty-three she told W Magazine, “There are very few things we can control in life, but how we project ourselves is one of them.” And so she used what her father gave her, fueled by the childhood innocence and privacy he’d stripped away, and crafted for herself an image she thought would suit her best: an ambitious heiress, privileged but not spoiled, beautiful but not dim. This Ivanka did not dance on tables, or drink, or smoke, or stay out late. She didn’t want the attention, but if she could use it for the good of the family, then she’d just have to take it on. She worked constantly, and was in on the jokes people made about her being born on third base or a vacuous blonde with a big bank account. For years, those around her watched her put a calculated strategy in place, making certain that this was the image of Ivanka Trump that stuck.
One thing she must have picked up from her father: a half dozen points she wanted to make about herself, which she repeated, and repeated, and repeated again, over the years. They made her sound strained to many people who interviewed her. “Speaking with her was like talking to a very carefully-crafted press release,” a reporter from the National Post noted in 2009. “She allows access into her professional world to further both the family legacy and her independent business ventures and restricts access into personal details to guard her interior life.” Reporters noted that she ate big meals in front of them to ward off the impression that she was hyperconcerned with her figure, and took out her own trash lest she be appear in print as overindulged.
“I had been feeling that I was getting only her work face, a kind of tough, boss-lady character that she plays to overcompensate,” a New York Times reporter wrote two years earlier. “She did not really break character.”
This kind of strategic repetition is a tell. The things people choose to emphasize reveal the things they wish to be, that they believe best serve their ambition. It just so happens to actually work.
In no particular order, and over the better part of two decades, Ivanka constantly made the point that she was a hermetic, unentitled goodie-goodie who worked her ass off, had no interest in television or modeling as a career, and enjoyed the simpler things in life.
Paris Hilton served as a constant foil. The two both grew up uptown in the same era; both were bleached-blond real estate heiresses born the same year to rich parents who wanted the best for their daughters, even if they may have diverged in their definitions of “best.” Donald had publicly said he found both of them attractive. When Paris’s reality show, The Simple Life, premiered, in 2003, the show was a hit. The era of the celebutante was reborn, and suddenly the real-life Eloises and Little Lord Fauntleroys spilling out of nightclubs routinely made Page Six, and populated the entire home page of TMZ. It is not the image most conventional parents would choose for their children, but Donald was not a conventional parent. Friends of Ivanka at the time remember Donald constantly talking in front of his daughter about how famous and attractive Paris was, and urging her to have her own reality show like The Simple Life.
Instead, Ivanka repeatedly made a point of setting herself apart from her peers who were behaving badly. “It makes me sad,” she said of Paris in 2004. “One of the easiest stereotypes of kids with money is that they’re the same—they were raised with the same values, they behave the same way.” Later that year, on 20/20, she said, “When people say, ‘You know, why aren’t you wild and, you know, out and very ostentatious and partying all the time?’ And I think the difference is, we wouldn’t be allowed to. It’s really as simple as that.” Two years later she made it clear that “Paris and I don’t hang out,” though they know each other. “We both come from wealthy families, but that’s all that links us. I think there’s something more acces
sible about me,” she said, adding that it’s annoying to her when she is lumped into “that heiress category” because she “works her ass off.”
It didn’t take an interviewer asking about Paris for her to bring up how hard she worked and how little she socialized. “I know her wardrobe might tell another story, but she’s really a homebody,” said Alexis Zimbalist, her roommate after she transferred to the University of Pennsylvania for junior and senior years. They shared an apartment at a building called the Left Bank, overlooking the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, which was both far enough away from the fraternity and sorority houses and expensive enough to insulate them from the typical college scene. “She’ll rent whole seasons of shows on DVD. She’s a Law & Order slut.” Ivanka responded to her friend’s comments by joking that that would be the last interview she’d let her give, yet doubled down on it by calling herself “hermetic.” She gave interviews to local papers in Palm Beach and New York gushing about her version of fun—walks on the beach, which serve as both exercise and a chance to catch up with friends; dinners with six to ten friends; golf, tennis, a roller rink in Staten Island, a bar where she could beat her friends at Big Buck Hunter because she stuck to soda while they drank more than enough alcohol to make up for her. Had she ever done anything rebellious? a reporter asked in 1999. “Oh god, no. I’ve never smoked or taken drugs or drunk alcohol.” Well, she admitted to trying it once, but she didn’t like it.
Unlike Paris, a club rat in diamond chokers who built a brand on being unaware of her privilege and lacking the most basic understanding of actual labor, Ivanka branded herself as the heiress who understood the value of a dollar. She flew commercial, for one. She blogged about saving money on lunch, and when she got stuck on an unexpected layover in Salt Lake City on her way to Aspen in 2006, she slept at a Quality Inn and ate dinner at Little Caesars with the $18 voucher the airline handed out—a fact that found its way onto Page Six.
It wasn’t as easy to square her teenage modeling career—the pouty poses, the scantily clad magazine cover photos, the midriff-baring runway walks—with this teetotaling, work-obsessed homebody image. But there was real value in her modeling work. It fed the Trump ego, creating around her the buzz that her father craved, and that would ultimately benefit the family business by making her a household name. “I’ve wanted to be a model since I was ten or eleven or so,” she said just before her fifteenth birthday. “I’d be like, ‘There’s Cindy! There’s Claudia!’ And I guess I always wanted people to say that about me.” Modeling had the added benefit of requiring frequent travel, which provided an escape from some of the doldrums through which normal high school kids just have to suffer.
Ivanka used her natural good PR sense to manipulate what could have been a deviation from her message. That she was nearly six feet tall and had been a front-row regular at fashion shows alongside her mother since before she could read made her modeling an easier mental leap. Repeatedly, she described it as a means to an end, not a destination. “Modeling was never an endgame for me,” she said in her twenties, a sentiment she spun time and time again. “It was never what I wanted to do. I just wanted out of boarding school, where I was bored to death.”
It was also a real paid job, which meant years of being able to talk about just how unspoiled the self-described unspoiled heiress really was, and how much blood and sweat her work cost her, and how many fashion show tears she’d shed. Her parents, she would say, weren’t like all the other rich-kid parents who gave their kids credit cards and couture and wads of cash on demand, no questions asked. One story in her arsenal was that she bristled when she noticed her parents were flying first class on a trip to Europe, but she and her brothers were in coach. Her mother, she said, told her that if she wanted the more expensive ticket, then she could use her modeling money and pay for it herself.
It is true that Ivanka was the original template for today’s version of the young top model with a famous last name. Sure, the Kendall Jenners and Kaia Gerbers of the second decade of the twenty-first century are far more successful—critically and financially—as models than Ivanka ever was. But Ivanka pioneered the idea of parlaying a family brand into a career on magazine covers and runways across the world. The notion she tested was whether designers and brands would put fashion-with-a-capital-F second to the publicity a celebrity offspring could bring. It was worth more to Thierry Mugler to have Donald and Ivana at his show in the 1990s—at the height of their notoriety—than to stick with a more typical model (as critics noted at the time, one without hips who actually knew how to walk in heels). Soon after, Ivanka posed in Versace for a spread in Elle, got tapped by Tommy Hilfiger to promote a line of jeans, and appeared on the covers of Seventeen and British GQ. The latter was racier than the rest, describing her as a “nymphet” with “a passion for big erections, architecturally speaking.” Her father said these photos, in which she wore a see-through top and bikini bottoms, weren’t his “favorite pictures in the world,” but he defended them as “a job for a highly reputable magazine.”
She mostly quit modeling once she got to Wharton. The real estate world was closer on the horizon, and she’d soon start posing for photo shoots about the Trump Organization and, later, The Apprentice. “I’ve known, basically since I was cognizant, that I would go into real estate. There’s never been any ambiguity about that.”
She says she hardly even flinched when Anna Wintour called her early one morning in the midst of finals during her senior year at Penn. As she tells it, she had stayed up late studying the night before, only to be woken up by the phone at eight o’clock the following day. Ivanka had met the Vogue editor years earlier through her parents, and they’d run across one another during her modeling years. Wintour, she says, was calling to offer her a job at the magazine after she graduated. She declined the offer on the spot; she had already given her word that she would work for Forest City Realty Trust, another family-owned real estate company in New York. The idea was to spend a few years in the business with a boss who was not her father in order to do some grunt work and get in the swing of things before she inevitably left to join the Trump Organization at an executive level—all before she hit her mid-to-late twenties. She told Wintour how grateful she was for the opportunity, but as much as she liked fashion, there was never another option for her than real estate.
She called her father as soon as she hung up to tell him about the offer she had just turned down. “I think you should consider it,” he told her. “Working at Vogue sounds very exciting.” Her father’s word was gospel to her. She spiraled: Did he not think she was good enough to join the Trump Organization? Was she not smart enough or tough enough or in some way not cut out for the business? In the moralistic way she tells it, she realized that it was all a clever trick set up by her father. He wanted her to go into real estate because that was what she wanted to do, not because she thought he wanted it for her. “He wanted to make sure it was my passion—that I didn’t have blinders on to other incredible opportunities for personal and professional growth,” she wrote in her most recent self-help book, with characteristic starch.
The reality show was another opportunity for Ivanka to deny wanting publicity, and paint herself instead as a team player, lending a hand to the family. “I was asked to be on the show and for a while I chose not to,” she said. “But when I joined my father in the company, I realized the power of television as a medium.” It was an hour, in prime time, highlighting their projects around the world, she’d say; if it weren’t essential to the business, she wouldn’t be involved. She was interested in buildings, for goodness’ sake! She liked to go to roller rinks and walk on the beach with six to ten weeks for fun! None of that involved prime-time national television! But it was too good a vehicle for their brand to turn it down.
She was natural at it, though. She and Jared made a cameo appearance on the hit show Gossip Girl in 2010, hosting an Observer party. “They did it for the money,” the show’s creator recently said of their
appearance, though he regrets not giving Jared more of a speaking role, since his voice is usually so seldom heard.
Ivanka would often go on various business shows to talk real estate. She met with executives at CNBC to ask how she could appear more frequently as an expert on real estate markets. She spent a fair amount of time on other networks, too. The audience ate her up as a guest on Fox Business Network’s Happy Hour. “We get a tremendous response whenever she’s on,” Roger Ailes said of her. “For someone so young, she has quite a following. She’s going to have [the opportunity to turn from real estate to news or entertainment] there.”
Ivanka did dabble on the film side early on. In 2003 she starred in Born Rich, a documentary by her friend Jamie Johnson, heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, alongside a cavalcade of überbrats like Georgina Bloomberg, Si Newhouse IV, Stephanie Ercklentz, and Luke Weil. Many of them appeared unencumbered and unaware of their privilege. And even more of their circle had known that’s the way they’d come off on film should they open up to Johnson, which is why about fifty or so of the young heirs he asked to participate turned him down. Those who said yes were the ones who saw the film as an opportunity, or were confident that they could control the situation.
Ivanka’s interview is partly filmed in her sixty-eighth-floor Trump Tower bedroom, where the whole of Central Park stretches north from the wall of windows at the foot of her lavender canopy bed. Twenty-one at the time, she wears a silver cross around her neck. She gives Johnson a tour of the room—the Madonna clock, the Motley Crew and Bon Jovi and 90210 posters on her wall—and tells him that she is “absolutely proud to be a Trump” because of how hard her parents have worked for all they have. She tells a story she’s repeated in the press since she was a kid, and still uses today, about how she preferred Legos and blocks to Barbies and always wanted to be a builder. “I love looking at the New York skyline and being able to figure out what I’m going to add to that and what patch of the sky one of my buildings will be in.”
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