President Trump Holds CEO Town Hall On US Business Climate At White House

Ivanka Trump delivers remarks during an April 4 event at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building April 4, 2017 in Washington, DC. U.S. President Donald Trump also delivered remarks and answered questions from the audience during a town hall event with CEO's on the American business climate. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

(Win McNamee)

Merriam-Webster defines the word "complicit" as "helping to commit a crime or do wrong in some way," a fact the dictionary company provided to Ivanka Trump on Twitter after CBS News began promoting a Wednesday morning interview with the first daughter.

"I don't know what it means to be complicit," Ivanka Trump says in the excerpts released Tuesday, "but you know, I hope time will prove that I have done a good job and much more importantly that my father's administration is the success that I know it will be."

Shortly after CBS began publicizing the full interview, Merriam-Webster noted that searches for the word "complicit" began to spike.

📈'Complicit' is trending after Ivanka Trump told CBS "I don’t know what it means to be complicit." https://t.co/qE6UcB8pUz — Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) April 4, 2017

The first daughter has been under fire since before the inauguration for her silence in the wake of much of President Donald Trump's controversial policy proposals and executive orders.

Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca, whose sparring with Fox News personality Tucker Carlson went viral in late December, has written at length on what she calls Ivanka Trump's complicity with her father's prescriptions.

The term had been attached to Ivanka Trump so much that "Saturday Night Live" in early March aired a gag commercial starring Scarlett Johansson as Trump hawking a fragrance called "Complicit."

When the sketch initially aired, Merriam-Webster claims searches for the word were also quite popular.

📈'Complicit' also trended in March. We wrote about it then. https://t.co/HEqWBltPUc — Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) April 4, 2017

Ivanka Trump defends herself throughout the rest of the CBS interview, claiming several ways she says it's possible to make a stand in a testy political climate.

"I would say not to conflate lack of public denouncement with silence," she said.

--Eder Campuzano | 503.221.4344

@edercampuzano

ecampuzano@oregonian.com