Ivanka Trump dismisses critics who say she’s ‘complicit’
Ivanka Trump says she doesn’t understand people who say she is “complicit” in some of her father’s highly controversial policies because she has not publicly denounced them.
“I don’t know what it means to be complicit,” the first daughter told CBS News’ Gayle King in an interview that aired Wednesday morning. “If being complicit is wanting to be a force for good and to make a positive impact, then I’m complicit.”
The interview was Ivanka Trump’s first since accepting an official unpaid role in the Trump administration. She has largely kept her head low as her father’s critics mock her role in supposedly moderating his more hard-line policies. On “Saturday Night Live” last month, Scarlett Johansson portrayed Ivanka hawking a perfume called “Complicit.”
Related: ‘She’s complicit’: Ivanka Trump torched by ScarJo on ‘SNL’
Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, are among Trump’s closest political advisers. She suggested to CBS that she was doing her best from within her father’s inner circle.
“I don’t know that the critics who may say that of me, if they found themselves in this very unique and unprecedented situation that I am now in, would do any differently than I’m doing,” she said. “I hope to make a positive impact.”
The 35-year-old mother of three said those critics should not “conflate lack of public denouncement with silence.”
“I think there are multiple ways to have your voice heard,” she said. “In some cases, it’s through protest and it’s through going on the nightly news and talking about or denouncing every issue on which you disagree with. Other times it is quietly and directly and candidly. So where I disagree with my father, he knows it. And I express myself with total candor.”
“We’re in a very unique time where noise equals, in a lot of people’s perception, advocacy,” she continued. “And I fundamentally disagree with that. I do think there’s a time for public denouncement. I also think there’s a time for discussion.”
And to those who criticize her for “not taking to social media on every single issue,” like, say, her father, Ivanka Trump said she “would ask them if that would render me more effective or less effective with the people ultimately making decisions.”
But she did take to Twitter on Wednesday morning to express outrage over the deadly chemical attack in Syria the day before.
“Heartbroken and outraged by the images coming out of Syria following the atrocious chemical attack yesterday,” Ivanka Trump tweeted.
Heartbroken and outraged by the images coming out of Syria following the atrocious chemical attack yesterday.
— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) April 5, 2017
President Trump condemned the attack in a statement that blamed it in part on former President Barack Obama’s “weakness and irresolution.” But he has yet to tweet about it.
Ivanka Trump said that her father “agrees with me on so many issues — and where he doesn’t, he knows where I stand.”
But she refused to offer an example of something they disagree on.
“It’s not my administration,” she said. “I think that for me this isn’t about promoting my viewpoints. I wasn’t elected by the American people to be president.”
“I don’t think that it will make me a more effective advocate to constantly articulate every issue publicly where I disagree,” Ivanka Trump added. “And that’s OK. That means that I’ll take hits from some critics who say that I should take to the street. And then other people will in the long-term respect where I get to. But I think most of the impact I have, over time most people will not actually know about.”
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