What to Know
Ivanka Trump has been lying low lately — at least if you compare her current behavior to what she was doing during her father’s first term. After President Donald Trump announced that he’d be running for president a third time in 2022, Ivanka made it clear that she was totally done with politics. During a recent podcast experience, she explained why.
She’s choosing to prioritize her kids after realizing how hard it was to balance both politics and parenting. “Now I know how intense it is,” she told podcaster David Senra. “I know that you can’t dabble, and I know that my children really need me there for them.”
Ultimately, being involved in politics would impact her kids, and she doesn’t want that.
“I’m not willing to make them bear the sacrifice of serving again,” she told David, per The Daily Mail. Ivanka is mom to Arabella, 13, Joseph, 10, and Theodore, 8. During her father’s first presidency, she served as a senior advisor. When she announced that she would not return to the political sphere, she mentioned that her children were a factor in that decision.
“I love my father very much,” she wrote on social media in 2022, per CNN. “This time around I am choosing to prioritize my young children and the private life we are creating as a family. I do not plan to be involved in politics. While I will always love and support my father, going forward I will do so outside the political arena. I am grateful to have had the honor of serving the American people and I will always be proud of many of our Administration’s accomplishments.”
A few years later, she described politics as “a very dark, negative business.”
And it doesn’t feel in line with who she is or what she wants for herself, she explained on the Skinny Confidential’s “Him & Her Show” in 2025. “There is a darkness to that world that I don’t really want to welcome into mine,” she said, per The Hill. Of course, it’s hard to totally escape that, given that her dad is the president.
“To some degree, I’m at the center of the storm because my father is about to be president, but it’s a very dark, negative business,” she explained. “And some people love the gladiator aspect of it — the fight. That was never me.”
Leaving politics was not a difficult decision to make.
She made the decision based on her values and priorities. “My highest, most core value is family,” she said, noting that “it’s very easy to make a decision when it aligns around your core values.”
Though she still tried to show up as a parent when she was working in politics, she felt it was difficult to do so. “My primary goals were just to be the best freaking mom I could be,” Ivanka explained. “It’s hard. I mean, I did the best I could — and I think I was there for all the really critical moments — but you don’t want to miss the small ones either.”
In 2023, Ivanka and CEO Melissa Ackerman co-founded Planet Harvest, a “profit-for-purpose” company that seeks to “reimagine the food supply chain through private-sector innovation.”
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