Ivanka Trump, the daughter of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, dismissed the criticism that her father has faced over controversial comments he’s made about women and their looks on Wednesday.
The executive vice president at the Trump Organization said she believes those controversies were driven by “sensationalism” and “orchestrated largely by the media.”
“Look, my father is very blunt. He’s very direct. He is not gender specific in his criticism of people, and people that he doesn’t particularly like or people that he does like but thinks they’re wrong on a particular issue,” she said in an interview with CNN’s Poppy Harlow. “So I don’t think that he’s gender-targeted at all. Like I said, I wouldn’t be the person I am today, I wouldn’t be a high-level executive within his organization if he felt that way.”
The billionaire businessman said Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever” when she posed tough questions during the first GOP debate and criticized GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina’s looks in a Rolling Stone profile.
“Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?” he said.
His daughter added that her dad will be “amazing” and “incredible for women in this country.”
Ivanka Trump sat down with CNN at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, where the businesswoman also spoke about her “Women Who Work” initiative aimed at empowering working women and “celebrating the fact that women are multi-dimensional.”
“I do think there’s this unfortunate and prevailing depiction of the working women as, you know, wearing a black pantsuit and being solely focused on her professional role. And that’s just not true. And hopefully I can be a small part of changing the narrative around what it looks like to be a woman who works today,” she said.
The pressures of the presidential campaign have added a new dimension to Ivanka Trump’s life, though, bringing a new degree of scrutiny and pressure to her family’s life.
But she stressed that her friendship with Chelsea Clinton hasn’t taken a hit as a result of a campaign that has often seen verbal grenades flying between her father and Chelsea’s mother, the Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.
“It has not been an issue for us. I have great respect for her, she’s been a great friend to me. I’ve been a great friend to her. So, you know, the politics of our parents is not relevant to our friendship,” she said.
But what about the Democratic debate that aired the night before Trump sat down with CNN?
“Well, I thought the debate was excellent. I thought the debate was interesting to watch, so I enjoyed watching. Like I said, I’m a businessperson, not a politician, so I’ll leave politics to other members of the family and the many, many people who are involved in the race on both sides. So we’ll see who emerges,” she said.
