By Jesse McKinley, The New York Times MIAMI — Ivanka Trump has been surfing. She’s posed in front of the Eiffel Tower, and attended a Formula One party in Miami in a race-car red dress. She’s hung out with her children in a hot tub, with Kim Kardashian in Malibu, and with her husband, Jared Kushner, at the Acropolis.
The one place Trump hasn’t been, however, is the campaign trail. And though she has been upfront about her absence, politically speaking, it remains somewhat mysterious. During former President Donald Trump’s last two bids for office, Ivanka Trump appeared at rallies, in television ads and on national convention stages, often with the implicit role of appealing to female voters.
But nearly two years ago, as her father started a third run for the White House, Trump announced that she and Kushner would be stepping back from politics to prioritize their children and family life. “While I will always love and support my father, going forward I will do so outside the political arena,” she said. So it is in her father’s fiercest and potentially final campaign that Trump — his oldest daughter, one of his former top aides and perhaps his closest family member — has become a nearly silent observer, with seemingly no intention of boosting his candidacy in any public way.
That decision to separate herself from her father’s politics comes as Donald Trump has faced the prospect of four separate criminal trials, including one in her — and his — former.
