Watch: Ivanka Trump booed at women’s summit for praising her ‘champion’ father
She called Donald Trump a great supporter of families. Imagine the reaction.
US President Donald Trump’s well-documented sexist conduct landed his daughter Ivanka Trump in a difficult situation at an international summit on women’s entrepreneurship in Germany.
“I’m very proud of my father’s advocacy,” she said, trying to sound terribly earnest, as IMF managing director Christine Lagarde and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, seated next to her, looked on doubtfully. Ivanka went on to state that her father has been “a tremendous champion of supporting families and enabling them to thrive.”
This was, possibly, too much of an overstatement, if not downright untrue, for the women in the audience to bear, who summarily dismissed these remarks with some loud booing and hissing. This was Ivanka Trump’s first solo overseas trip as an official representative of the United States, where she participated in the W-20 Summit panel in Berlin as the “first daughter”.
“The German audience is not that familiar with the concept of a first daughter,” said the panel’s moderator, Miriam Meckel, editor in chief of the financial weekly WirtschaftsWoche. “I’d like to ask you, what is your role, and who are you representing, your father as president of the United States, the American people, or your business?”
“Certainly not the latter,” said Ivanka Trump, who owns a fashion line.
She then tried to salvage the moment by playing the personal card: “I grew up in a house where there was no barrier to what I could accomplish beyond my own perseverance and tenacity. That’s not an easy thing to do; he provided that for us,” she said, adding that her father treated her exactly the same way he did her two brothers, who now run the family business.