Getty President Donald Trump and his daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump arrive at the "White House Summit on Human Trafficking: The 20th Anniversary of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000" in January 2020.
The crowd started chanting the name of Ivanka Trump when President Donald Trump talked about who could become America’s first female president during his rally speech in Lansing, Michigan, on October 27.
Ivanka Trump, 38, who’s served as her father’s senior adviser since he first took office, is just one of the president’s many adult children who’ve taken top positions in his White House administration. Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband, also serves as a senior adviser to the president.
On Tuesday, Ivanka Trump appeared to be the crowd’s favorite choice to break the glass ceiling as the first female commander in chief. Before the “Ivanka” chants broke out, Trump was speaking about Joe Biden‘s vice presidential candidate, Senator Kamala Harris. He called her “the most liberal person in the Senate” and said “she makes Bernie Sanders look like a serious conservative.”
“We can’t let it happen. This will not be the first woman president,” Trump said of Harris. “You’re going to have a woman president. This will not be the first woman president.”
After the “Ivanka” chants caught on, a huge smile appeared on the president’s face. “That’s a lot of cameras back there!” Trump said. “Yeah, that’s right. They’re all screaming, ‘Ivanka.’”
During Donald Trump’s Michigan Rally, Ivanka Trump Was Hosting Her Own Campaign Event in Florida
GettyPresident Donald Trump hugs his daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump after speaking in the East Room of the White House one day after the U.S. Senate acquitted him on two articles of impeachment on February 6, 2020.
While Trump’s rally crowd shouted their love for the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump was in Sarasota, Florida, hosting an event for her father’s 2020 campaign. Much like the president, Ivanka Trump tweeted out a video to show off the large crowds lining up for her “Make America Great Again” rally on Tuesday.
The event was set to take place at Nathan Benderson Park near the Manatee-Sarasota county line, which marked her second visit to Southwest Florida in the past week to stump for her father’s campaign. Six days prior, she gave a speech at Top Rocker Field in Fort Myers.
On my way! Love you Sarasota! ❤️
“It’s going to be amazing, a great event,” said Joe Gruters, Republican Party of Florida chair, of Ivanka Trump’s rally on Tuesday.
Ivanka Trump Has Described Her Natural-Born Inclination to Follow in Her Father’s Footsteps
While appearing on Late Night with Conan O’Brien in March 2007, Ivanka described how she was a master Lego builder at age six. In the video above, the story begins around the 1:15 mark. She said, “I remember one of my earlier Christmas gifts was a Barbie and I was devastated because my brothers had gotten Legos and Erector Sets, so to me this was traumatic.”
“So I ended up taking my younger brother’s Legos, bringing them into his room, to add insult to injury, locking him out, taking my mother’s super-glue from the 1980s — there was plenty for her nails — and gluing the Legos together in a model of Trump Tower,” Ivanka continued. “So you know my little brother is crying — (my father is) saying, ‘Ivanka, that’s terrible,’ but at the time he looked very proud.”
Ivanka Trump told a similar Lego story when describing her son Joseph during her keynote speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention on August 27. “When Jared and I moved with our three children to Washington, we didn’t exactly know what we were in for. But our kids loved it from the start,” she said. “My son Joseph promptly built grandpa a Lego replica of the White House. The president still displays it on the mantel in the Oval Office and shows it to world leaders, just so they know he has the greatest grandchildren on earth.”
Andrea Bernstein, author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps and the Marriage of Money and Power questioned the validity of Ivanka Trump’s story on Twitter.
Bernstein tweeted, “OMG, Ivanka is telling a story about her son Joseph building a lego model of the White House. She told the same story about herself once, building a lego Trump Tower. The story was made up.”
The Mercury News reported in January 2020 that “Ivanka Trump admitted as much” in The Trump Card, her book published in 2009.
Bernstein, a reporter for WNYC, tweeted that Ivanka’s story was actually stolen from her father’s book, The Art of the Deal, which was published in 1987:
My brother Robert likes to tell the story of the time when it became clear to him where I was headed. I wanted to build a very tall building, but it turned out that I didn’t have enough blocks. I asked Robert if I could borrow some of his, and he said, ‘OK, but you have to give them back when you’re done.’ I ended up using all of my blocks, and then all of his, and when I was done, I’d created a beautiful building. I liked it so much that I glued the whole thing together. And that was the end of Robert’s blocks.
Bernstein writes in her book that Trump’s Lego story is also likely fiction. The Art of the Deal, co-author Tony Schwartz told Bernstein in an e-mail that “there is less than a 50 percent chance that anything like that ever happened,” according to The Mercury News.
Following Ivanka Trump’s speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention, Bloomberg News White House Editor Alex Wayne tweeted, “Our reporters are in the Oval Office nearly every day. None of them have ever seen the Lego White House.”
READ NEXT: PHOTOS: Mitch McConnell’s ‘Gnarly’ Bruised Hands Spark Concern for His Health