Shortly after Donald Trump’s stunning electoral-college victory, the incoming 45th president of the United States convened his family in his gilded triplex for an interview with 60 Minutes. Ivanka Trump sat in the first row, with her father and step-mother to her left, and her three siblings to her back. As expected, the conversation touched on how the family business might view its descent on its newest market: Washington. Eric Trump fielded a question about staying behind in New York to mind the family’s brand while Donald Trump moved to Washington to, well, expand his. Leslie Stahl probed Ivanka about the assumption that she would be part of the Trump administration. “I’m, not,” she demurred. “I’m going to be a daughter. I’ve said throughout the campaign that I am very passionate about certain issues and I want to fight for them. . . . There’s a lot of things I feel deeply, strongly about, but not in a formal, administrative capacity.”
It was not entirely shocking when, the morning after the 60 Minutes interview, for instance, an Ivanka Trump-brand employee sent a “fashion alert” out to journalists promoting a $10,000 bracelet from her own line that Ivanka had worn in the interview. The resultant criticism was swift, but the behavior was hardly new. A few months earlier, Ivanka had been chastised after her brand tweeted a link to purchase the dress she wore on stage at the Republican National Convention, in Cleveland. Both times, spokespeople blamed over-eager employees for the messages. Ivanka, meanwhile, seemed to be accelerating her own ambition—political, financial, or otherwise, despite what she had said in the interview. In private, Ivanka Trump can be direct and less affected. In her public communications, she is often less straightforward. Within a matter of weeks, she and her husband, Jared Kushner, announced that they would, in fact, move to Washington.
From early on, Ivanka Trump seemed to realize that a formal split between herself and her business was essentially only a talking point given the tacit financial connection between the business and its namesake; she was, after all, the business. Like her father at the Trump Organization, she stepped down from her day-to-day responsibilities at her company and put her interests in a trust. Still, the arrangement would allow her to continue to profit off the business while she served as a senior White House staffer. The Trumps are modern-day vaudevillians who appear primed to sell themselves on multiple levels, at all times—whether it’s a shift dress or a reality show; a childcare tax credit or a travel ban; or even the notion that they belonged in the White House at all. For Ivanka, the chance to take her brand from Trump Tower and departments stores to the White House and the world’s stage was too good to turn down.
But unlike her father, who is testing the limits of his notion that he could get away with murder in broad daylight, Ivanka is no Teflon Don. Since the campaign trail, she has been dogged by criticism over the conflicts of interest that her brand posed. She was dinged for wearing pieces from her line. She caught heat over a distribution deal with a Japanese company that had ties to the government. There was the furor when China issued trademarks to her companies in what seemed like a political gesture. When Nordstrom dropped her line, last year, President Trump tweeted that his daughter had been treated “unfairly,” which prompted senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway to infamously tell Fox News viewers in a live TV interview to “go buy Ivanka’s stuff.” (The White House reviewed appropriate codes of conduct with Conway after members of Congress fumed.)
Underneath the political upheaval are some economic considerations. Brand sales, which soared through the election year, had begun to lag. Some retailers, citing soft sales, stepped back. Online sales from Amazon, Bloomingdales, Macy’s, and Zappos fell about 45 percent through June, according to retail-tracker Rakuten Intelligence. The brand was still making money, but perhaps not enough to justify the myriad complexities it posed. A financial-disclosure form that Ivanka filed earlier this summer shows that the company brought in $5 million in income for her in 2017, and its trust was valued at more than $50 million. But the Trump-Kushners could be worth up to $740 million, according to ethics filings. A flagging company worth roughly $50 million and waning likely wasn’t worth the headaches.
On Tuesday, the brand informed its 18 employees that the company would be shutting down for good, according to The Wall Street Journal. Ivanka was set to address the laid-off workers in the afternoon, telling the Journal that she had grown frustrated in recent months by the restrictions placed on the company in order to avoid conflicts of interest. The decision to shut down the line may make business sense, but it also signifies that the First Daughter has undergone somewhat of an evolution, from an aspiring member of New York’s David Patrick Columbia world to a veritable swamp creature, fulling immersing herself in her father’s muck in Washington. Or at least dipping her toe in with the new opportunities she has been handed. “After 17 months in Washington, I do not know when or if I will ever return to the business, but I do know that my focus for the foreseeable future will be the work I am doing here in Washington,” she told the Journal. As one person close to Ivanka and the brand told me after the news broke, “she was never going to go back to this, so what’s the point? This is a signal that she is in D.C. to stay. She’s not going anywhere.”
Every generation of Trump, or any dynastic family, builds and expands upon itself. Fred Trump built a respectable real-estate empire in Queens. Donald Trump took that empire and fortune and set his sights across the river to Manhattan, where he envisioned his name splashed across the city and his presence accepted in its insular circles, and lusted after fame. Ivanka had Manhattan and acceptance and fame; what she and her generation of Trumps want is power, and they want it on a global stage.
Ivanka’s decision to ditch her company reflects the way in which a year and a half in Washington had changed the First Daughter, and how much it has has amplified her distinctly Trumpian ambition. In summers’ past, Ivanka would have been vacationing aboard David Geffen’s $200 million yacht in the Mediterranean, as she did during her father’s presidential campaign. (Her brother-in-law, Josh Kushner, has spent this week aboard the same boat, along with some of Ivanka’s former friends, including Geffen, who has distanced himself from Jared and Ivanka, according to two people.) Last summer, the couple attended the invitation-only, C.E.O.-heavy Allen & Co. summit in Sun Valley and were invited to Google’s “Camp” around the same time. (This year, they did not receive invitations to either, according to several people familiar with the situation.) But continued proximity to the president has reshaped the heiress’s social calendar. In recent weeks, she has spent her time participating in workforce-development events in the White House or in sessions on Capitol Hill, posting photos from a trip to an asphalt-company site and STEM summer camps. In a sign of these dystopian times, when Ivanka traveled to Los Angeles for fund-raisers earlier this summer, she had dinner at Kim Kardashian West’s_ house, after the Trump-Kushners had hosted the high priestess of realty television at the White House and in their Washington home in the spring. (Kardashian-West was asking President Trump to grant a pardon for a woman serving a life sentence in prison for a first-time drug offense. The president ultimately agreed.)
In some some ways, this latest move reflects some level of self-preservation. Back in New York, her friend group is smaller, the invitations fewer and farther between, and the city’s denizens are still seething over her father’s election. Sure, she slinks in for meetings or hair appointments or small dinners with confidants every now and then, but former friends note there is not exactly a welcoming committee waiting upon her arrival. Washington, though not without its own perils and criticisms, seems like the safest place for her right now, allowing her to chip away at a host of bipartisan, uncontroversial issues. She can do so while accepting invitations from world leaders, as she has from Angela Merkel, Shinzo Abe, and Narendra Modi, to speak on issues related to female entrepreneurs and workforce development. As one former friend put it to me Tuesday, “There are worse places she could be, because she can profit off the status and plot what comes next.” The person stalled. “Well, unless Mueller comes and strips it all down. And at that point, none of this will matter.”
They say “ooooooooooooo” together!
Showing their true colors at the Republican National Convention in 2016.
By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
They match!
Here are the twins are in 2012, opening a hotel in Istanbul, Turkey, matching in clothes and power stance.
By Emrah Gurel/AP/REX/Shutterstock.
They watch the U.S. Open together!
Overseeing the U.S. Open in New York in 1997.
By Ron Frehm/AP/REX/Shutterstock.
They clap on beat!
Talking child-care policy in Pennsylvania as a presidential nominee and presidential adviser/kid nominee in 2016.
By Evan Vucci/AP/REX/Shutterstock.
They walk left, right, left together!
The pair fall in step while walking to the Marine One helicopter base in 2017.
From AP/REX/Shutterstock.
They clap, clap, what’s that now? together!
The two are in step while watching the Military Appreciation Ceremony prior to the start of the first round of the World Golf Championships-Cadillac Championship in Doral, Florida, in 2015.
By Stan Badz/PGA TOUR/Getty Images.
They do manual labor together!
The 2014 groundbreaking ceremony at Trump Hotel D.C.
By Evan Vucci/AP/REX/Shutterstock.
They anoint cement together!
In 2008, the father and daughter coordinated their cement dance at at the opening of Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago.
By Charles Rex Arbogast/AP/REX/Shutterstock.
