What Ivanka Trump Learned on About Women’s Empowerment in Africa — and Why She's Being Criticized as an ‘Empty-Calorie’ Phony

There is nothing simple about President Donald Trump's divisive administration — no message without backlash and no decision without controversy 

Ivanka Trump, President Donald Trump‘s eldest daughter and one of his longest-serving and most visible advisers, just wants to talk about her recent work in Africa and her focus on women’s economic empowerment.
“I’ve been deeply, deeply inspired by my trip here,” she told the Associated Press while still in Ivory Coast in April.
But there is nothing simple about the Trump administration — no message without backlash and no decision without controversy.
As her father’s power has expanded, so has hers. But that close association has not spared her from his divisive and historically unpopular image.
Even as Ivanka, 37, published an opinion column for CNN on Tuesday extolling her work and the stories of the women she met while in Ethiopia and Ivory Coast last month, critics returned to a familiar charge: that she is worse than just the pleasing face for an ugly political platform.
“Ivanka’s op-ed omits the fact that the policies that she and her administration enforce are holding back the very women she hopes to empower,” Jezebel’s Prachi Gupta wrote on Wednesday.
The Jezebel piece honed in on the Trump administration’s anti-abortion policies, which includes cutting aid “to any foreign-based organization that performs, promotes or offers information on abortion,” according to the Washington Post.


Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended the move to reporters in March, arguing, “We can achieve … the great work that many of these foreign NGOs do without running the risk that they’ll be used to perform abortions or advocate for abortions.”
Last month, in another critical piece, a columnist for The Guardian wrote: “Ivanka’s superpower, inherited from her father, is that she believes her own spin. She seems genuinely to see herself as a champion of women — despite the fact that she has remained silent as her father has systematically attacked women’s rights.”
The Guardian column also criticized Ivanka’s silence on her father’s anti-immigration and anti-Muslim politics.
She has said that she is privately candid with her father but acknowledges he is her boss. “One of the reasons that I have such a good relationship with him in both a personal and professional capacity is because I’m incredibly candid with him,” she told ABC News last year.
“He knows exactly where I stand on any issue,” she said then. “I’ll always tell you what I’m for, but it is not my place as somebody working within a White House to tell you what I’m against. The only person who knows that is one person, and he knows it.”
A spokeswoman for Ivanka in the White House, where she works as adviser to the president, declined to comment on her critics. But she has supporters.

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