Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.

Back in 1990, when her parents broke up, a split that spawned hundreds of headlines in the tabloids of New York, Ivanka Trump was eight years old. Her younger brother worried their mother would leave them forever. Her older brother raged against their philandering father. Ivanka? She got teased at school, and she cried at home, and she asked her mother, “Mommy, does it mean I’m not going to be Ivanka Trump anymore?” But she also played “peace maker and keeper,” her mother said earlier this year. She talked to her father often from her private school in New York and later from her boarding school in Connecticut, calling collect, dialing his office, where he would put her on speaker and say to the people in the room she was “the smartest,” the “most beautiful.”

“The only phone call Donald would always take was Ivanka,” a close Trump associate told me this week.


The 34-year-old daughter of the Republican Party’s presidential nominee always occupied a singularly important role in his life—and has grown up to occupy a singularly important role in his unlikely campaign. She has changed the stances and tone of a man notorious for listening to almost nobody but himself, and she’s had steady, growing influence in behind-the-scenes decision-making. And Thursday night in Cleveland, she is going to deliver a speech normally reserved for a spouse. The job was not given to her older brother, Donald Trump Jr.; or her younger brother, Eric Trump; or her youngest sister, Tiffany Trump; or her stepmother, Melania Trump, her father’s third wife. Ivanka Trump got the nod to introduce him before the speech in which her father accepts the nomination—and she got it because she is a combination of things that both flatter Trump and help make up for what he lacks.

She is physically fit and attractive, as her own father has pointed out more than once, raising eyebrows. “She’s got the best body,” he once told radio shock jock Howard Stern. “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her,” he once said on TV. “If I weren’t happily married and, you know, her father …” he said just last fall. More than her two closest brothers, who are also executive vice presidents at the Trump Organization, she has his entrepreneurial savvy—having started her own lines of shoes and sunglasses, bracelets and bags, forging a somewhat independent identity in the shadow of one of the most famous men in modern America.

Last summer, she introduced him, too, before he made the speech announcing he was running. Since then, she has emerged as one of his most trusted advisers and most effective defenders, tamping down conflicts, mopping up after him, trying to keep peace and mend relationships. And now, in the latest, most high-profile moment of a relationship that’s been unusually close, “daddy’s little girl” with a Trumpian twist, the poised, polished Ivy League graduate will take the stage tasked with a mission that could not be performed by anybody else named Trump. The wife and mother of three will attempt to soften his crude, sexist image, repair his rotten reputation with women voters and do more of what she’s done throughout the campaign—say what he should have said in the first place.

“I think she is the campaign’s greatest asset when it comes to women voters,” longtime Trump political consultant Roger Stone told me this week.

“There’s no better reflection of a man than his children,” said Michael Caputo, a former senior adviser for Trump’s campaign. “And I think she’s one heck of a reflection.”

“Mr. Trump,” spokesperson Hope Hicks told me, “trusts her implicitly.”

***

She was always his favorite.

“My father never walked me in the stroller through Central Park,” she once said. “My mother probably didn’t do that, either, quite frankly.” But she took piano. She took ballet. She went to her first fashion show, in Paris, when she was 8.

Her father thought she would be a model. He had married a model, he had started dating a model, and he would marry another model.

His first daughter from his first marriage signed when she was 14 with the agency that represented Elle Macpherson. She was spotted by a reporter from USA Today at a fashion show in New York with her father. “She’ll be up there,” he said.

She posed with him a few months after that in a picture that ran with a story in New York magazine. He was dressed in a white three-piece suit. She was dressed in a mini skirt and a slinky top. He had a hand on her hip. She had a hand on his face.

“Hi, babes,” he said in the Q&A that ran with the picture. “Is my girl growing up?” he asked.

She had some Polaroids from the photo shoot. He called the pictures “adorable.” He asked her if he could have them.

At Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s sprawling manse in Palm Beach, Florida, he often hosted parties and walked through the room, “sometimes with his beautiful teenage daughter, Ivanka, on his arm,” according to author Gwenda Blair in her book about Trump.

She started modeling for Versace and Thierry Mugler. She was in a four-page spread in the April 1996 Elle. She was on the front of the May 1997 Seventeen. A brief in the Style section of the New York Times made a note of “the 15-year-old daughter of Donald J. Trump and Ivana Trump Mazzucchelli” making “her debut as a cover model.”

In her mind, though, that’s not what she wanted to be. Modeling was “an excuse to travel,” she would say to Marie Claire. It was “never an endgame for me,” she would tell New York. She started college at Georgetown, but then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, to the Wharton business school—following in her father’s Philadelphia footsteps.

She appeared in 2003 in a documentary titled Born Rich, appearing alongside family-money peers like publishing heir S.I. Newhouse IV, Vanderbilt and Whitney heir Josiah Hornblower, and media heiress Georgina Bloomberg. To the producer, two things stuck out about Ivanka Trump: how level-headed she was relative to her fellow well-off offspring featured in the film, and how devoted she was to her father. “Where most of the kids in that movie made fun of their parents, she did not,” Dirk Wittenborn told me this week, looking back at getting to know her over the eight-month project. “She obviously loved her father. That was very clear.”

She graduated from Penn the following year and worked for a short while for another real estate company in New York before going to work for the Trump Organization. She seemed to understand more quickly and more ably than her brothers the core component of the family business. “I love the name my father has given me,” she told Marie Claire, launching her lines of branded merchandise. She appeared at her father’s side on his reality televisions shows, The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice, believing—as he always has—in the raw power of publicity.

Even if that publicity comes at the expense of conventional decorum, like when Donald Trump appeared on ABC on The View in 2006. “She does have a very nice figure,” he told the hosts, seated there alongside his daughter. “I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter …”

The female hosts sounded like they didn’t know whether to laugh or gasp. They kind of did both. They told him to “stop it.” They called it “weird” and “sick.” One of them hit him on the knee with her notes.

“Is that terrible?” Trump said.

His daughter chuckled and clapped.

The next year, in Harper’s Bazaar, she was asked about her father’s penchant for outrageous comments—including what he had said on The View about her.

“There’s no doubting my father values beauty,” she said, “but in my formative years, I never thought he valued it to the point that it should make me uncomfortable.”

In a photo that ran with the story, she wore a shiny black swimsuit and held a jackhammer next to her crotch. She had a new line of jewelry to sell.

***

Over the last decade, as Ivanka Trump has grown more fully into the family business, she has exhibited a particular combination of characteristics that have led her to tonight’s spot-lit role—a genuine interest and ability in business, but also an undeniable leavening effect relative to her contentious, antagonistic father. What Ivanka Trump has become—first in the corporate world, now in the political arena—is a more palatable version of her father. If he’s glitz, she’s glamor. “Where he trusts his gut, she trusts a thoughtful, deliberate process,” a business associate of theirs told me this week. It’s one reason, a Trump insider said to POLITICO in Cleveland, he “wants her to be the face of his brand into the next generation.” The heir apparent of the Trump Organization.

“She’s one of them,” George Ross, a longtime family friend and former Trump legal consultant, told me, adding that her brothers would take over, too. But still, Ross said: “Do I think she’s the best of them? Yes. Absolutely.”

She helped coordinate Trump’s purchase of the Doral golf course in Miami in 2011, and she’s taken a lead in the project to turn Washington’s Old Post Office Pavilion into a hotel—all while building her own brand within the brand. “I look at someone who can first buy my shoes and my jewelry, then hopefully buy our condominiums,” she told Women’s Wear Daily in 2010. “You know, I like that. I like trying to create that loyalty to our brand.”

“She’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever dealt with,” said Michael L. Ashner, the CEO of Winthrop Realty Trust, the other side of the Doral deal. “She was a thorough, diligent, excellent negotiator.”

“She’s sensational,” Ross said. “She has all the abilities of a good negotiator. She knows how to talk with a smile in her voice. People love to deal with her. And she does things a man can’t do. She’s willing to use her femininity …” She also knows, Ross said, how to get things done “without being bombastic and without tearing people down.”

“There’s no bravado,” Ashner said.

And so throughout this campaign, as she urged him to be more “presidential,” as she got him to ease comments about defunding Planned Parenthood, as she convinced him to stop attacking the American-born judge on the Trump University lawsuit due to his Mexican heritage, as she contributed to the ouster of the more bellicose former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in an effort to professionalize the overall effort, as her influence only has increased, she also has become her father’s most ardent defender—perhaps his best hope of convincing skeptical women, or men, for that matter, of voting for him come November 8.

“I don’t think that he’s gender-targeted at all,” Ivanka Trump said on CNN last year. “I wouldn’t be a high-level executive within his organization if he felt that way.”

“I’ve witnessed these incredible female role models that he’s employed in the highest executive positions at the Trump Organization my entire life,” she said on CNN earlier this year.”

Does her father respect women?

“Well, clearly,” she told Town & Country this spring. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be where I am.”

In other words: Don’t like my father? Look at me.