Ivanka Trump could be the most powerful first lady ever
But unlike her predecessors who weren’t the wife of the president, Ivanka appears poised to be an adviser, advocate and hostess all at once. Which could revolutionize the role — and make her the most powerful first lady ever.
.. “Ivanka and Jared and Don Jr. are more influential than any Cabinet member,” a friend of the Trumps told me recently
.. When I interviewed Rosalynn Carter earlier this year, she clearly remembered the uproar over her decision to sit in on her husband’s Cabinet meetings, even though she did so without saying a word. Then, first ladies were expected to hide their influence. Ivanka, on the other hand, was at the table Wednesday (along with Don Jr. and brother Eric) when the president-elect met with tech CEOs. And she hasn’t done much to dispel the notion that she and her husband will be top advisers
.. I do think she is intrigued by the potential to serve as an envoy from President Trump to skeptical blue America.
.. One way to view Ivanka’s unapologetic assertion of herself as a policy adviser is that she’s already cleared the bar that Lady Bird warned her daughters about: “Don’t do anything you wouldn’t mind seeing on the front page of the newspaper.” Ivanka has lived her whole life understanding this maxim and is prepared for the White House in a way that presidential daughters who came before her, including Luci and Lynda Bird Johnson, Tricia and Julie Nixon, and Jenna and Barbara Bush, weren’t.
.. During the campaign she unwisely cut short an interview with Cosmopolitan’s Prachi Gupta because she said the reporter’s questions about conflicts between her statements on child care and her father’s statements years before had “a lot of negativity.” That’s an answer the media probably won’t accept from someone with West Wing influence.
.. in April, then-candidate Donald Trump described Melania’s reluctance: “We have such a great life. Why do you want to do this?” he said she asked him. He replied with his usual modesty: “I sort of have to do it, I think. I really have to do it.” Ivanka doesn’t share her stepmother’s reticence. She fits the mold of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, President Theodore Roosevelt’s first daughter, who described herself as “ecstatic” when her father became the 26th president