Ivanka Trump has some advice for her father: You have to be yourself.
"The Donald Trump I know is both incredibly capable, driven and strong, but also tremendously warm and caring and loyal and empathetic," Trump's eldest daughter and trusted adviser told Fox News' Ainsley Earhardt Thursday morning on the
"Fox & Friends" program.
"It's really both sides of his personality that I think have made him such a great parent and effective businessman. And ultimately, it will make him a great president."
Trump, 34, is a senior executive in her father's real estate empire and has also founded her own fashion line. Her interview early Thursday morning came hours before her highly anticipated closing-night speech at the Republican National Convention, when she will introduce the GOP nominee before his prime-time address.
According to
The Wall Street Journal, she'll also be working to show her father as a family man and as a person who believes in the power of women.
At this point, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is ahead of Trump among women in most polls, including a WSJ/NBC News poll that put her 15 points ahead of him.
Trump told Earhardt that she believes her convention speech will be an "unbelievable opportunity" to show her father as she knows him, "both in the capacity as a great personal mentor to me and an amazing father."
But, she said, there are still times she and her siblings disagree with their famous father, and they're not afraid to tell him.
"We're very candid as well," Trump said. "That's one of the great innings about having such a close relationship. We speak candidly to one another. We offer our opinions to each other, solicited or otherwise. We do so privately. So we share our thoughts and feelings with him.
"He's incredibly respectful. So more often than not we agree. When we disagree, he hears us out and ultimately draws some conclusions."
Growing up as a Trump child, there were a lot of rules for Ivanka and her siblings.
"No tattoos, no piercings outside of the ears," she told Earhardt. "There were a lot of rules. But he was, I think more than anything, he really tried to lead us by example. He was a disciplinarian, but I could get around it most often."
And most of all, Trump said that her father was always accessible to her and her siblings.
"I think for me, when I think back, it was really about his acceptability," said Trump. "He was working incredibly hard building a multibillion dollar global business, yet he was always available to me and my siblings when we needed him."
For example, she said that she would call him collect from a pay phone in a janitor's closet every day at school during recess, and he'd always stop and listen to her.
"In retrospect, it's funny I was calling collect as opposed to putting a quarter in the pay phone," she said. "But I was a little kid, probably 10, 11, 12. I would call every single day from that closet and he would pick up the phone and put me on speaker phone. It didn't matter what meeting he was in.
"He'd have heads of state in his office, titans of industry and he'd ask me about a test I had taken or a class that really excited and inspired me. And he'd make everyone else wait."
Trump said she knows that the calls would not always come at the most opportune times, but "I really appreciated the fact that he was always there."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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