US president’s daughter hears boos at W20 summit for calling him a ‘champion of supporting families’ as Angela Merkel tries hard to make her guest feel welcome

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

One of the issues at the top of the agenda of the W20 summit in Berlin on Tuesday was how working women can better balance family and work.

So perhaps it was inevitable that the first question for Ivanka Trump – a woman accused of mixing business interests and dynastic ambition in ways the White House has rarely seen – should have focused on alleged conflicts of interest.

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What exactly did being the “first daughter of the United States” entail, asked the panel’s moderator, journalist Miriam Meckel: “Who do you represent, Ivanka? Your father, the American people or your business?”

“Well certainly not the latter,” Trump answered quickly – only to add the qualifier: “Speaking as an entrepreneur …”

She was, she said, “certainly quite unfamiliar” with her new role.

“I am listening and I am learning and I am defining ways in which I think I will be able to have an impact,” Trump said.

Eyebrows were raised when it was first announced that Trump would appear at the event, on a panel alongside Angela Merkel, Christine Lagarde and Queen Máxima of the Netherlands.

The gathering of female business leaders was intended to help set the agenda for July’s G20. As for the political aspect of her visit, Trump said that she would “bring advice and knowledge back to my father”.

That may well have been Merkel’s calculation when she slipped an invitation to Donald Trump’s daughter during her visit to the White House on 17 March this year.

Back then, President Trump was accused of outright nepotism for seating his daughter next to one of the most influential politicians in the world at a panel debate on workforce development.

At the Berlin debate, the organisers made a point of seating the president’s daughter and Merkel a seat apart, with Trump wedged between Lagarde, the IMF director, and the Canadian foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland.

But the German chancellor seemed determined to make the American guest feel welcome, nodding at her encouragingly every time she took the mic.

The audience was in a different mood. When Trump described her father as a “tremendous champion of supporting families”, there were boos and hisses.

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Meckel, the moderator, said some of the attitudes Trump’s father had displayed in the past cast doubt on whether he really empowered women.

“I’ve certainly heard the criticism from the media,” Trump replied. “But I know from personal experience – and the thousands of women who have worked with and for my father are testimony to his enormous belief in women’s potential and the ability to do the job as well as any men. As a daughter I know he encouraged me and enabled me to thrive. I grew up in a house where there were no barriers.”

Finding herself on the back foot, she praised Merkel for passing “unequal pay legislation” – something that “we should all be looking at”.

Under the draft law passed in Germany in January, workers in companies with 200 employees or more will be legally entitled to information on what criteria they are paid under. How exactly Trump squared such a law with her desire to see “regulatory burdens lifted” in the US remained unexplored.

Merkel said the G20 needed to work on opening up access to financial means for female entrepreneurs, for example via micro credits – an issue she had raised repeatedly over the past five years.

Asked whether she considered herself a feminist, the German chancellor offered the most Merkelesque of answers: “The history of feminism is such that there are certain commonalities with me, and other aspects where there aren’t.”

The moderator extended the question to the rest of the panel. Trump, egged on by a cheering audience, put her hand up.

Trump, the second of three children from the US president’s first marriage to Czech-American model Ivana Zelníčková, arrived at Berlin’s retro Tegel airport shortly after 8am.

A limousine took her first to the Adlon hotel in front of the Brandenburg Gate and then on to the US embassy, usually a two-minute walk.

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Later in the day, the White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, said Trump was due to visit Siemens’ Technische Akademie, a vocational training college, and US architect Peter Eisenmann’s Holocaust memorial.

The invitation had met with criticism in Germany, where Social Democrat politician Lars Klingbeil tweeted: “Am I the only one who thinks it is utterly absurd that the chancellor is now doing foreign policy with the daughter of Donald Trump?”

Other German commentators detected certain similarities between the chancellor and the president’s daughter: “The same applies to Ivanka Trump what [CSU leader] Horst Seehofer once said about Angela Merkel: if you underestimate her, you’ve already lost,” said the Washington correspondent of state broadcaster ARD.