Ivanka Trump got a little personal with wealthy Republican donors at a mid-August fundraising retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Or at least she flirted with intimacy. Asked by the moderator, former Entertainment Tonight host Mary Hart, what personality traits she inherited most from her parents, Ivanka Trump quickly said her mother set a strong example of how to be a successful and powerful woman, Politico reports. "And her father? He passed onto her his moral compass, she said, according to two event attendees."
President Trump is not generally known as a paragon of moral rectitude, but if this seems like too-good-to-check political gossip, Ivanka Trump said something similar in public, at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Politico notes. "My father taught my siblings and me the importance of positive values and a strong ethical compass," she said at the time.
The point of Ivanka Trump aligning herself with her father's moral proclivities wasn't to bare her inner ethical sanctum, though, but rather to create an illusion of intimacy with the 120 elite donors shelling out good money to hear her speak at House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's (R-Calif.) mountainside fundraiser, Politico notes. Most political families do similar farming-out of family anecdotes by children and siblings.
"You have to have a draw to convince donors to write a $50,000 check to come to a fundraiser," one close White House adviser told Politico. "The president and vice president are obviously a draw, and Melania Trump would be amazing, if she would do it. The next best things are the kids."
"It's the storytelling that has become the selling point," Tammy Vigil, an associate professor of communication at Boston University, tells Politico. "The stories may not actually be accurate, but it still gives people a sense of connectedness." So it's possible Ivanka Trump was lying about her father setting her moral compass? Don't think about that too hard. Read more at Politico.