Ivanka Trump’s quest to float along, empowered but unsullied, beside her father throughout his increasingly ugly campaign has been getting harder and harder. PHOTOGRAPH BY DREW ANGERER / GETTY

On Wednesday night, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump’s preternaturally poised elder daughter, sat in the audience listening to her father as he overthrew the pledge she’d made on his behalf earlier that day. “He’ll either win or he won’t win, and I believe he’ll accept the outcome either way,” she’d said at a women’s summit in Southern California. But Trump would not promise to respect the outcome of the democratic process: “What I’m saying now is, I will tell you at the time. I will keep you in suspense, O.K.?”

Afterward, Ivanka, who wore a black satin top that left one pale shoulder bare, joined her father onstage, smiling brightly. Since Trump first announced his Presidential candidacy, people have been saying that Ivanka had the power to soften his image and broaden his appeal, perhaps even among the women voters who’ve increasingly turned against him. (According to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, Trump trails Hillary Clinton among women voters by twenty points.) Ivanka is modern and accomplished: a thirty-four-year-old mother of three, who co-runs the Trump Organization while heading her own fashion line, plus a sleek Web site that “celebrates women who work” with brand-building enthusiasm. Among Trump’s other campaign surrogates, his wife, Melania, seems to muddle things (in an interview with Anderson Cooper this week, she compared her husband to a little boy—not what most of us have in mind for a President), while Rudy Giuliani inflames them (his odd defense of Trump and himself was to the effect that “everybody” commits adultery). But elegant, beautiful Ivanka, possessed of the self-discipline and social graces that permanently elude her father, has been like the white-noise machine of the campaign, muting and sometimes neutralizing his outbursts.

Her quest to float along, empowered but unsullied, beside her father throughout his increasingly ugly campaign has been getting harder and harder. It was always a stretch when she tried to portray Trump as a feminist—and that was before we heard the “Access Hollywood” tape in which he bragged about his penchant for grabbing women “by the pussy,” and before multiple women came forward with accusations that he had groped or kissed them unbidden. (Trump denies these claims.) This week, addressing the “Access Hollywood” videotape for the first time, Ivanka told Fast Company magazine, “My father’s comments were clearly inappropriate and offensive, and I’m glad that he acknowledged this fact with an immediate apology to my family and the American people.” (He would go on to undercut this apology by saying, at the second Presidential debate, that his boasts were just “locker-room talk.”)

What was there, ever, to say in his favor as a champion of women? He had employed women in his company, some in positions of authority, as most employers who run large operations get around to doing eventually. He has certainly been a booster of Ivanka herself (“My father is a feminist,” she told the Sunday Times of London, in July. “It’s a big reason I am the woman I am today”), though the terms in which he has publicly complimented her can tend toward the unsavory or benighted. He has repeated that line about how he would have dated her if she wasn’t his daughter; he once endorsed Howard Stern’s request to refer to her as an attractive “piece of ass.” And yet, as Lizzie Widdicombe noted in her magazine Profile of Ivanka, “when pressed to name a woman he might appoint to his Cabinet,” Trump “could think of only one: his daughter.”

The clincher in Ivanka’s case for Donald Trump, friend to womankind, was supposed to be the child-care policy his campaign had put forward, at her behest. (“Daddy, Daddy, we have to do this,” as Trump summed up her argument at a rally in Iowa. “She is the one that has been pushing so hard for it.” He did not mention it in Wednesday’s debate.) In the week after the first Presidential debate, the Trump campaign unveiled a new ad that features Ivanka talking soothingly about her father’s commitment to mothers. The ad, touting Trump’s child-care policy, would look right at home on Ivanka’s Web site: it shows attractive young families frolicking in sun-dappled settings, Trump shaking hands with women and appearing to listen to them, and Ivanka unrolling blueprints in one shot and playing with her three little children in another. “My father will change outdated labor laws, so that they support women and American families,” she says. “He will provide tax credits for child care, paid maternity leave, and dependent-care savings accounts.” According to the Washington Post, the campaign spot, titled “Motherhood,” will run on cable networks with big female audiences, like Bravo, TLC, and Lifetime, as well as on network prime-time shows such as “Dancing with the Stars” and “Madam Secretary.”

The ad’s opening line—“The most important job any woman can have is being a mother”—is, as many people have pointed out, pretty retro. (The most important? Any woman?) But then, so is Trump’s policy, which explicitly excludes new fathers—as Ivanka told Cosmopolitan magazine, “The original intention of the plan is to help mothers in recovery in the immediate aftermath of childbirth.” This makes sense, coming from a man who has made many statements over the years about his own utter lack of interest in child care: “I mean, I won’t do anything to take care of them,” he said in a 2005 interview with Howard Stern. “I’ll supply funds, and she’ll take care of the kids. It’s not like I’m gonna be walking the kids down Central Park.”

Yes, calling for any paid leave is unprecedented for a Republican Presidential nominee, and, yes, it would be much better than what we have now—which is no legally guaranteed paid leave at all, a state of affairs that sets the United States apart from every other industrialized country in the world. And it’s good that Ivanka has been talking about the high costs of child care for families. But Trump’s proposed six weeks of paid leave for new mothers is half of the twelve weeks that Clinton’s plan calls for. Moreover, his plan for paying for it seems shaky—he says he could provide the funds by eliminating fraud in unemployment-insurance claims, though it’s not clear how much that would generate. (Clinton’s plan stipulates raising taxes on the wealthy.) Both proposals would likely run into strong resistance in Congress.

Meanwhile, the disconnect between Ivanka Trump, the carefully modulated advocate for working women, and Donald Trump, the sexist, bullying demagogue, gets ever stranger. Ivanka, Jessica Yellin writes in the Daily Beast, is “a polished, polite enabler.” But her adherence to message is almost too perfect.

Ivanka continues to talk about her father as if this were a normal campaign, and he were a candidate who was maybe a bit of a brash outsider, but not somebody who has been vowing, like a tin-pot dictator, to jail his opponent, “such a nasty woman,” as he called her at Wednesday’s debate. The portrait Ivanka paints of him would seem to be of another man entirely. “They didn’t tolerate rudeness,” she said, of her parents, at a campaign appearance in Pennsylvania last week. “There was sort of an expectation of what was appropriate . . . and I think they raised us to be sensitive to that.” What happened to that expectation?

More on the third Presidential debate: John Cassidy on Trump’s “rigged” comments, and Amy Davidson on Hillary Clinton, “nasty woman.”