Ivanka Trump says 'I try to stay out of politics' despite assisting at White House

Ivanka Trump, special assistant to the president, told Fox News on Monday: “I try to stay out of politics.”

Trump was speaking to Fox & Friends, the morning show which this weekend broadcast an interview with Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump.

“I try to stay out of politics,” Ivanka Trump said in answer to a question about her father’s use of Twitter to bypass most normal channels of presidential communication. “His political instincts are phenomenal. He did something that no one could have imagined he’d be able to accomplish.

“I feel blessed just being part of the ride from day one and before. But he did something pretty remarkable. But I don’t profess to be a political savant.”

Donald Trump won the 2016 election in the electoral college, after a campaign marked by bitter partisan rancour and interference by Russian actors working, according to a Washington Post report last week, at the direct instruction of Vladimir Putin to help Trump beat Hillary Clinton. Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2.5 million ballots.

Ivanka Trump became a trusted lieutenant to her father, delivering a well-received convention speech in Cleveland in July and moving to Washington in January with her husband, Jared Kushner, who is one of the president’s closest advisers. Her White House position is unpaid.

Though Trump claims to “stay out of politics”, she has been a familiar surrogate for her father in the media and on the world stage. Earlier in June, she told Fox & Friends: “We’re really focused on why the American people elected Donald Trump as their president and implementing that plan.”

Amidst congressional and FBI investigations into links between Trump aides and Russia and the reported investigation of her father for possible obstruction of justice related to those probes, she said then: “It is hard, and there’s a level of viciousness that I was not expecting. I was not expecting the intensity of this experience, but this isn’t supposed to be easy.”

Asked in the interview broadcast on Monday if she ever disagreed with her father – who has, for example, pursued policies on climate change, pulling out of the Paris agreement, that might be thought anathema to a registered New York Democrat, which she until recently was – the first daughter said: “So naturally, there are areas where there is disagreement.”

Climate change, with women’s rights, is part of Ivanka Trump’s White House brief.

“We’re two different human beings,” she continued. “I think it’s normal to not have 100% aligned viewpoints on every issue. I don’t think anyone operates like that with a parent, or within the context of an administration.

“And I think that all different viewpoints being at the table is a positive thing. And I think one of the things that, in this country we don’t have enough of, is dialogue.”

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