Ivanka Trump told a Fox News morning show that she has been surprised by the “viciousness” and “ferocity” of life in the national political spotlight as her father’s administration has been rocked by a rolling series of scandals.
“It is hard and there’s a level of viciousness that I was not expecting. I was not expecting the intensity of this experience,” she told Fox and Friends, a show friendly often praised by the president.
“I wasn’t expecting it to be easy, but I think some of the distractions and some of the ferocity – I was a little blindsided by on a personal level,” she said.
Ms Trump, considered one of the more moderate and unifying figures of the Trump administration, sought to portray her family as focused on helping America despite a media storm over her father’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey.
“We moved down to Washington, we want to be helpful, we want to do big things, important things,” she said.
But despite seeking to focus her interview on the administration’s efforts to fix infrastructure and bolster blue collar jobs in regional locations, it was her apparent surprise at the ferociousness of politics which has made headlines.
During the 2015-16 primaries and presidential election, her father’s campaign was defined by direct, cutting personal attacks on political opponents, branding rivals as “lying” and “corrupt” after announcing his campaign by saying many Mexican immigrants were drug dealers and rapists.
The businesswoman and her businessman husband, Jared Kushner, have been appointed to senior roles in the West Wing, though neither had previous political or government experience.
Despite mounting pressure on the White House, with the administration’s travel ban blocked by courts and healthcare legislation stalled in Congress, Ms Trump insisted that the administration remained focused.
“With all the noise, with all the intensity of the media coverage and obviously what makes headlines, ultimately we’re really focused on why the am people elected Donald Trump and implementing that plan,” she said.
“At the end of the day, if you want to think about difficult it’s the factory worker who’s been laid off, it’s the mother who’s lost a child to opioid abuse.”
