Ivanka Trump gets defensive during Cosmopolitan interview

(Image credit: Mark Makela/Getty Images)

published 15 September 2016

Ivanka Trump's recent interview with Cosmopolitan about her father Donald Trump's new child care and maternity leave plan ended with the 34-year-old businesswoman abruptly announcing she had "to run." The interview, published Wednesday, started with questions about why the Trump campaign waited "so long" to come out with the policy, which Ivanka unveiled alongside her father Tuesday night. The plan includes six weeks of paid maternity leave and a rewrite of the tax code to allow mothers to deduct childcare costs.

The interviewer followed up that question by repeatedly asking whether the policies took gay couples who had adopted into consideration (Ivanka said the plan is just "focusing on mothers"). By the next question, which referenced Donald in 2004 calling pregnancy "an inconvenient thing for a business," Ivanka started to lose her cool. "So I think that you have a lot of negativity in these questions, and I think my father has put forth a very comprehensive and really revolutionary plan to deal with a lot of issues," she said. "So I don't know how useful it is to spend too much time with you on this if you're going to make a comment like that."

After some back-and-forth over that question, the interviewer tried for one more: "How will this plan be paid for?" Ivanka assured the interviewer that was all coming Thursday, when Donald is set to "unveil his total tax-reform plan." And with that, Ivanka decided she'd had enough. "I'm going to jump off, I have to run," she said. "I apologize."