Ivanka Trump Resurfaces as Dad’s Re-Election Fortunes Change
Ivanka Trump’s political intermission appears to be over.
The businesswoman and former White House adviser is creeping back into the spotlight after she chose the beach over the ballot box when her father, Donald Trump, made an ugly exit from the White House following his election loss and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
At the time, Ivanka said she wanted to leave politics to focus on her kids and her entrepreneurial pursuits, lamenting that she was proud of what she’d accomplished and had “left it all on the field” in Washington.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump watch a tennis match at the Miami Open in April.
She and husband Jared Kushner decamped to Florida with their three young kids shortly after Trump left the White House, and the former first daughter has spent her time since then vacationing, doing charity work, and rekindling old friendships, People magazine reported last year.
“She basically wants a new life to compensate for what she lost when she spent four years in her father’s Washington,” a source who ran in Ivanka’s social circles told the mag. “She misses her active social life and group of friends.”
But as her father’s path to a second term has been increasingly widening following President Joe Biden’s rocky debate performance last month, Ivanka has slowly been re-entering the political arena. She is slated to attend the Republican National Convention next week in Milwaukee, where she’ll be appearing in a personal capacity to support her father, according to The Daily Mail.
Kushner and Trump and their family attend a baseball game in New York in late 2023.
Her apparent decision to attend as a private citizen instead of as a delegate or fundraiser is in contrast to her role at the convention in 2020, where she acted as a headliner and introduced her father to the stage.
And while she hasn’t yet taken a prominent role in her father’s campaign, she appeared on the right-leaning “Lex Fridman Podcast” last week, her first major interview this election cycle, in which she offered her first comments on her father’s hush-money trial in Manhattan.
The case was very “painful” to see play out, she said, adding that she still fully backs her father.
Ivanka Trump attends an NBA Playoff game in Miami last April.
She also said she had been more willing to take an active role during Trump’s first term because he was a political newbie who needed a circle of trusted advisers by his side.
“My father had never spent the night in Washington, D.C. before staying in the White House,” she said. “There wasn’t a part of me that could imagine a 70 or 80-year-old version of myself that would have been OK with saying no.”
Ivanka, who often treats her 7.5 million Instagram followers to snaps from her various vacations, told Fridman that politics is a “pretty dark world” that’s “at odds” with the life she wants for herself and her family, but only time will tell if she sticks to sunbathing over political strategy.
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