Americans have already noticed Ivanka Trump, but they ain't seen nothing yet: She could be America's first surrogate first lady in 150 years.
With incoming first lady Melania Trump planning to stay in New York for at least six months, Donald Trump's elder daughter is likely to be tapped as a stand-in for any hostess duties at the White House. Already, Ivanka is more in the spotlight than Melania, who's been seen in public only a handful of times since the election while Ivanka has been prominent on the Trump transition team and at her father's press conference last week.
"She earns being the favorite because she’s very, very present," says Carl Sferrazza Anthony, an historian of first ladies and first families at the National First Ladies Library in Canton, Ohio.
Americans can expect to see a lot more of Ivanka as she takes her place at her father's side as his most trusted family confidante and the most influential first daughter in decades.
"She's going to be standing in for her stepmother," predicts David Patrick Columbia, editor and co-founder of NewYorkSocialDiary.com, who says Melania is "lovely" but soft-spoken and not as confident in public as Ivanka.
Ivanka's fans say Americans will like what they see: A young (35), charming and beautiful woman, well-educated (Choate, Georgetown, University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business); a mother of three; a smart and successful businesswoman; an author (her second, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success, has been pushed back from March to May thanks to dad's win); a reality star (on her father's The Apprentice); and a deft user of social media to burnish her perfect-family image.
Those who know her say Americans will appreciate Ivanka's serene and graceful presence in public, so different from her father's hurly-burly style — and so helpful in blunting his sharp edges.
"We're fascinated because she's beautiful, well-spoken, calm, almost steely, so collected and so opposite to her father. She’s the most prominent woman in this (incoming) administration next to Kellyanne Conway, one of the few women in the Trump orbit," says Kate Andersen Brower, author of First Women: The Grace and Power of America’s Modern First Ladies.
"Hers is the one phone call her father always takes. She's his top adviser, he respects her judgment and...she softens him a little bit."
During the campaign, when women accused Trump of sexual impropriety, Ivanka, and later her younger half-sister, Tiffany, 23, were Trump's Exhibit A and B attesting to his lack of misogyny. Ivanka may not approve of everything her father says and does but she is above all loyal.
Columbia, who has met Ivanka at social functions, predicts she will be as popular with the rest of America as she is on the social and charity circuit in New York.
"She is a very intelligent, contemporary American woman, very self-possessed, very sophisticated; she has her father's self-confidence without his bombastic quality," Columbia says. "She always looks good wherever she goes. She can make very intelligent small talk, which is not unimportant. She's very lady-like, well-mannered and you feel comfortable around her, there's a warmth to her."
Ivanka and her four siblings are reflections of good parenting by Trump and their mothers (Trump's first wife, Ivanna, is mother to Ivanka and her brothers Don Jr. and Eric), Columbia says, with acute business instincts inherited from their father.
"I can't imagine anyone really has true influence on him, but she knows when to try and what works and doesn’t work," Columbia says. "If I had to predict the future, even without Donald Trump, (Ivanka) is a woman who is going places."
Now she is going to the White House. Historians and journalists who study presidential families are already wondering what kind of first daughter Ivanka will be. Anthony says she might be another Julie Nixon Eisenhower, fiercely defending her father from the slings and arrows of modern politics.
"During Watergate, Julie had a way of balancing being impassioned with being rational. She never lost her cool, and to me that’s a valid comparison with Ivanka," says Anthony.
At the moment, the speculation and curiosity in Washington is focused more on Ivanka than on her ex-fashion model stepmother Melania, 46, who initially plans to stay in Trump Tower to take care of the youngest Trump child, 10-year-old Barron. Even after that, Melania may often be gone from Washington.
Anita McBride, a former chief of staff to first lady Laura Bush and now at American University's school of public affairs, says people are fascinated with first families in general. "They are the closest people to the president of the United States and we all know what our family lives are like, good or bad or difficult, so we're fascinated with what it is like for a first family in the public eye trying to lead a private life," McBride says.
If Ivanka steps in to play the hostess role at the White House, it would not be the first time in American history. "While we've had daughters fill in for the first lady before — or President Cleveland's sister or President Buchanan's niece — that was in the 19th century," says Brower.
In 1802, when the widowed President Jefferson was in the White House, his daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, known as Patsy, served as his hostess for two winters. The wife of President Andrew Johnson (who succeeded the assassinated President Lincoln in 1865) was in mourning and often too sick to play hostess and was focused mostly on raising her youngest child, 13-year-old Andrew Jr.
"Their eldest daughter, Martha Patterson, oversaw the decorating and entertaining, and was the president's consort at public events," Anthony says. "She also was his great defender during his impeachment trial."
Ivanka has no plans to take an official White House job, with a salary and office.Her husband, Jared Kushner, a member of another billionaire New York real estate family, who played a crucial role during the campaign, is taking a job as a senior adviser to his father-in-law.
But even if she doesn't, she's preparing as if she is. She and Kushner and their three young children have already found a houseto move into in Washington's elite Kalorama neighborhood close enough for them to walk to a synagogue.
She announced last week on Facebook that she will take a formal leave of absence from her high-level role in The Trump Organization and from her eponymous apparel and accessories brand. She also plans to sell her interest in the newly-built Trump International Hotel in Washington.
(The Ivanka Trump fashion brand, which totaled $100 million in revenues in 2015 and posted a $29 million increase in sales in its 2016 annual report according to Forbes, has been subjected to a #GrabYourWallet boycott with mixed results: Macy's dropped her brand, Nordstrom hasn't. She wears her brand regularly but she got into trouble after her jewelry line sent a "style alert" to the media about a $10,800 bangle bracelet she wore during a family interview on 60 Minutes. After, she banned her company from promoting products if she's wearing them while appearing as first daughter.)
Her initial moves suggest she will be consequential on the issues she has said she cares about, such as equal pay and paid family leave. According to CNN, Ivanka gets the credit for Trump hiring Dina Powell, a respected former Bush administration official and Ivanka ally, to help Trump bolster his positions on women's issues.
Before the campaign, Ivanka, a skilled networker, had established warm ties with liberal Democrats such as Chelsea Clinton, entertainment mogul-turned-philanthropist David Geffen ("She's a lovely, intelligent woman," he told Vanity Fair.) and New Jersey U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, for whom she and her husband hosted a fundraiser at their Park Avenue apartment in 2013.
During the transition, Ivanka helped the Trump team keep some lines of communications with Democrats open, meeting with the liberal likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and former Vice President Al Gore to discuss climate change and environmental concerns.
"Gore went in thinking he was meeting with Ivanka, not, as it turned out, Trump, too," says Brower. "But he would have been satisfied with meeting with just the daughter."
Could any other recent first daughter say the same?
