2015-12-04

The Quiet Power Behind the Trump Throne

Vatic Note:   Well, as the saying goes, "Behind every great man, there is a woman".  I won't tell you who she is, but you can read the article and find out.  Frankly, I was surprised.  Its also good to know that Donald raised his kids to be who they really are and did not ostracize them for not being like him.

That is excellent parenting, helping your children find out and discover who they really are.  It seems from the article below that the grandchild mentioned is doing the same thing.... she dresses up and then spends the day messing with building blocks.  Read this and see who and what she is that is behind Donald Trump.   A world of difference in personality and style.  I like them both.  Donald for his blunt honesty and The Quiet Power behind him, for her self assured, classy and understated style. 

The Quiet Power Behind the Trump Throne
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/ivanka-trump-donald-trump-2016-213248


                                                         


You will not find a wall adorned with framed magazine covers in Ivanka Trump’s office. For that sort of thing you’ll have to visit her father, who can look up from his desk and see himself beaming down from Time and Playboy. In fact, on the day we met for a conversation about my biography of Donald Trump, Ivanka, 33, had placed a framed article about herself on the floor. That’s not to say that the former model, and current fashion and real estate exec doesn’t revel in her fair share of the spotlight.



Ivanka’s face has adorned magazine covers for years, from Seventeen to Shape to Harper’s Bazaar. But, unlike the father, the daughter seems so secure about herself and her prominence that she doesn’t need to brag. As the second-most famous member of a family that all but fetishizes good breeding—brother Donald Jr. calls it the “racehorse theory” of talent—Ivanka seems to be missing the desperation gene that drives her father’s constant pursuit of clicks and clippings.
 
On the campaign, Ivanka Trump, who grew up playing in her father’s office, is his most influential adviser, his de facto first lady in waiting and his character foil: the cautious, measured power behind the striving, showy candidate. She was the first person Trump mentioned by name when Sean Hannity asked in August, “Is there anyone close to you that you count on most?” and the member of his inner circle whom he consulted during the Megyn Kelly imbroglio.

And when Trump announced his candidacy in June, it was Ivanka who introduced her father, while his wife, the former Melania Knauss—a less public person save for her sometimes racy work as a fashion model—stood in the background. As the crowd cheered, the candidate’s daughter flashed a telegenic style that is more polished than her father’s blend of Archie Bunker and Jay Gatsby and far more self-assured. She is the softer, more refined side of the Trump brand and an antidote to the candidate’s abrasiveness.
 
Father and daughter meet the world with vastly different styles. Where Donald speaks in a stream-of-consciousness manner that sometimes lurches into the absurd and often gets him in trouble, Ivanka is extremely careful in her public statements. She consistently strikes the proper notes when asked about her father, praising his record and avoiding controversy.

She acknowledges that her father turns to her for advice and insists that she wouldn’t be where she is in life if her father didn’t “deeply believe in opportunities for women.” Yesterday, she told a forum in Washington that the Kelly-Trump dustup had been “sensationalized” and that “it didn’t interest me that much.” “Look, my father is very blunt,” she said last night during an interview with CNN. “He is not gender specific in his criticism of people.”
 
Ivanka Trump never dwells on scandal and leaves the details of policy to her father. As she said last night, “I’m a businessperson, not a politician, so I’ll leave politics to other members of the family and the many, many people who are involved in the race on both sides.” At campaign events she speaks almost exclusively about her father’s “brilliance, his passion, his work ethic, and his refusal to take ‘no’ for answer.”
 
On the rare occasions when Ivanka has plunged deeper into policy, she’s been both pro-women and pro-business. In 2010, she took to Fox News to calmly criticize President Barack Obama and his “anti-business rhetoric,” saying she’s “not overly supportive” of the president. But, like her father, Ivanka is fully capable of veering away from Republican gospel to say, for example—much as her close friend Chelsea Clinton might—that gender-based wage inequality is a serious problem.

In 2013, in her most overtly political act prior to her father’s White House bid, she hosted a fundraiser for liberal Democrat Cory Booker’s successful U.S. Senate campaign. Even so, with her father now in the political spotlight, she has dutifully stood by him in even his most out-there moments: When her father was heaped with scorn for his birtherism—even now he won’t admit that Obama is truly an American—she refuted reports that she and her brothers told him to cool it.
 
In a family that values loyalty, led by a patriarch who sees a world full of enemies, Ivanka is consistently on-message about her larger-than-life father. During our interview, when she spoke of him, Ivanka glanced upward, as if to heaven. (In fact, he works a floor above, and the gesture is also practiced by her two brothers,

Eric and Donald Jr., who occupy space just down a well-lit hallway.) The Donald, as their mother and Trump’s ex-wife called him, hovers over the Trump Organization like the Goodyear blimp that was once tied to the mast of the Empire State Building. Inflated as he may be, Trump père will cast a huge shadow for as long as he lives.

In the meantime, his adult offspring by his first wife, Ivana, each of whom holds the rank of executive vice president in the family business, are slowly taking command of different corners of the empire, which, depending on who does the counting, is worth from $5 billion to $10 billion. Ivanka’s areas of focus have been the Trump hotels and fashion-oriented businesses.


As her father does, she suggests that real estate may be a bit of an inherited taste. “It was always very clear,” she said. “I wanted to be a businesswoman from as early as I can remember, and specifically my real passion was real estate.” An old family story revolves around Donald playing with blocks. Of her own daughter, Ivanka told me, “She wants to put on a Snow White dress every single morning. That’s the first thing she says when she gets up, and then she spends her day building blocks. She spends her day building blocks. It’s sort of interesting.” 
 
Of the three children from Trump’s first marriage, Ivanka has always been the most visible. She appeared as a model in Seventeen in 1997 when she was just 16 years old and she subsequently showed up in advertisements for Tommy Hilfiger and performed in fashion shows for Versace, Marc Bouwer and Thierry Mugler. Ivanka’s style has always stressed a kind of polished femininity that communicated an urbane self-assurance that her father never mastered.

He would forever be the kid from the outer borough of Queens, educated at a now-defunct military school, who resented the true Manhattan elite. She is the product of the impossibly exclusive Chapin School in Manhattan (alumnae include icon Jackie Kennedy) then Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut (John F. Kennedy), where the Icahn Center for Science and Paul Mellon Arts Center were both designed by I.M. Pei.
 
Polished by her exclusive secondary school experience and then informed by an undergrad education at Georgetown and Penn, Ivanka went on to work as a real estate executive in the family firm and start shoe, clothing and accessories lines, which all fall into the affordable luxury category and are popular with working women. (You can buy Ivanka stilettos on Zappos.com for $99.)

Although Ivanka is as much a cheerleader as her father (she is the author of a 2010 book, The Trump Card: Playing to Win in Work and Life), her version of the Trump style is cool where her father is hot and at ease where her mother, Ivana, who struggled in media appearances, was often uncomfortable. On the reality TV show The Apprentice, which was also a promotional vehicle for her fashion ventures, she served as a voice of moderation.
 
Ivanka uses words like “conservative” and “gatekeeper” to describe her approach to business and explained that her generation will not continue the spectacle that has been her father’s life in business and now politics. “For us it’s about preserving and growing it, but in a risk-averse way,” she noted. “We don’t have to take binary, all chips on black, type of bets.” Her brothers tend to agree with her that once they take over, the company and the family name will be managed more conservatively.

In an interview, Donald Jr. described his father’s showman’s style as “so out there,” and Eric allowed that he and his siblings are more reserved than their father. Having been tabloid prey as youngsters and the subject of paparazzi as adults, they are not inclined to sling insults at celebrities or start Twitter wars with journalists.



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