Op-Ed

Ivanka Trump and the Art of Cashing In Quietly

She says she's done with politics — but the brand she built on proximity to power keeps paying out.

By NationalMedia Staff Writer

Published

Ivanka Trump would like you to believe she has left politics behind. In interviews she describes a private life of family and entrepreneurship, distanced from her father's second term, uninterested in a White House post. It is a tidy narrative. It is also, on the evidence, a marketing strategy — because the one asset Ivanka Trump has never stopped monetizing is proximity to power.

Recall what the first term actually produced. A Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington report found that Ivanka and Jared Kushner reported between $172 million and $640 million in outside income while serving as senior White House advisers — a range so vast it is its own indictment of the disclosure system. Among the details: at least 28 foreign trademarks approved for Ivanka's businesses while she held a government office, including a batch of 16 Chinese trademarks granted in October 2018, some covering categories as unlikely as voting machines. Her stake in the Trump hotel in Washington delivered more than $13 million even as foreign delegations booked its ballrooms.

That is the template, and it did not retire when she did. The value of the Ivanka Trump brand was never the clothing line, which she shuttered, or the vague women's-empowerment initiatives. The value was always access — the ability to convert a surname into contracts, trademarks and introductions that ordinary entrepreneurs could never obtain. Estimates of her net worth now run from roughly $700 million to $1 billion. Very little of that was built the hard way.

Which brings us back to the beach. When the Sazan Island resort surfaced in Albania, it was Ivanka — not just Jared — who visited the Vlora coast with architects and investors, met the prime minister, and spoke of a "1,400-hectare private island." She reportedly discovered the site while swimming from a friend's boat. The framing is pure Ivanka: a lifestyle story, a personal discovery, a glossy render — wrapped around a transaction in which a foreign government altered its own laws to accommodate the president's family. The soft-focus branding is not incidental to the deal. It is the packaging that makes the deal palatable.

Here is why the "I'm out of politics" pose matters. Formal distance from the White House is precisely what makes the money-making defensible in polite company. If she holds no title, the reasoning goes, there is no conflict. But conflict of interest was never really about org charts. During the first term, CREW noted, Ivanka worked on Opportunity Zones while Kushner held a large stake in a company selling Opportunity Zone investments. Titles or not, the family operates as a single enterprise, and its most valuable product is the perception that a door to the Oval Office is always slightly ajar.

The genius — and the danger — of Ivanka Trump's second act is its quietness. No cabinet post to confirm, no policy portfolio to scrutinize, just a well-lit Instagram life and business ventures that happen to keep landing where American power is strongest. A daughter of the president is entitled to earn a living. She is not entitled to sell the aura of the office while insisting she has nothing to do with it. The withdrawal from politics is real in exactly one sense: it is the best possible cover for staying in business.

More from the newsroom

← New London Media newsroom