How does real estate and retail executive Ivanka Trump feel about her father’s presidential bid? “That’s a complicated question,” she said, in conversation with Fortune‘s assistant managing editor Pattie Sellers at the Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington D.C.
“I’m proud of him, but it’s a very difficult thing to do,” Trump explained. “My father has achieved tremendous success and he’s not a politician but he’s changing the dialogue and disrupting the process in a very meaningful way.”
Real estate mogul Donald Trump is currently the frontrunner to be the Republican nominee for the 2016 presidential election.
But as a daughter, Trump says her father’s ambitions of becoming President of the U.S. are more complicated for her: “The level of interest and scrutiny is beyond anything you have experienced.”
One moment in particular that created media buzz was Donald Trump’s recent scuffle with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly. At the first Republican presidential debate in August, Kelly quoted some of the GOP frontrunner’s most disparaging comments about women and asked if those remarks would cripple him in the general election. After the debate, Trump launched a series of personal attacks against Kelly. Kelly, who spoke about the incident at the Most Powerful Women Summit on Tuesday, said she overestimated his anger management skills at the time.
His daughter said that the feud with Kelly was sensationalized for TV and it didn’t really “interest” her that much.
She defended her father’s view of women, saying that he has women in leadership positions at his real estate company (she’s one of them) and that he’s inspired tens of thousands of people to achieve great things. “He’s a great leader, business man and negotiator,” she explained. “And he’s been an unbelievable parent.”
As for the broad ongoing media attention around Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign, Ivanka Trump isn’t surprised by the circus that has been created, or that Trump is doing well in the polls. “Politicians have been talking but have not taken a lot of action. My dad is known for action and he’s actually addressing the real issues ahead,” she said. “He’s unguarded with his opinion.”
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