President said in an interview with the Atlantic the first daughter ‘would’ve been great’ because ‘she’s very good with numbers’

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Donald Trump has confirmed that he considered naming his daughter Ivanka Trump to head the World Bank, and also thinks she would have been a great UN ambassador.

In an interview with the Atlantic published on Friday, Trump was apparently quite eager to sing his daughter’s praises: the author writes that she requested an interview with Ivanka herself and was turned down, but instead got a call that the president wanted to talk to her.

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“I even thought of Ivanka for the World Bank … She would’ve been great at that because she’s very good with numbers,” Trump said.

“She’s a natural diplomat,” Trump said. “She would’ve been great at the United Nations, as an example.”

Asked why he didn’t nominate her, he said: “If I did, they’d say nepotism, when it would’ve had nothing to do with nepotism. But she would’ve been incredible.”

Trump sometimes calls Ivanka “baby” during official meetings, the magazine reports.

“If she ever wanted to run for president,” he said, “I think she’d be very, very hard to beat.”

In March last year, Ivanka Trump effectively acted, if briefly, as de facto interim secretary of state, after Rex Tillerson was fired. She also sat in for her father at a G20 summit in Hamburg in July 2017, to widespread consternation.

In his bombshell White House-insider bestseller Fire and Fury, the author Michael Wolff wrote that Ivanka Trump aspires to a higher achievement than an appointment from her father: to be the first female US president.

The US president does not have the final say on the World Bank appointment, which must be voted on by the bank’s board of directors. But presidential nominations have traditionally led to appointments.

The bank has historically been led by figures with multiple decades of governmental, macroeconomic or academic experience. All 12 presidents to date have been men.