Even Donald Trump Admits His Daughter Doesn’t Work

Membership Ticker

You come to Mother Jones for unique journalism, and we love doing it for you—especially at a moment like this. That's really it. That's the upshot of our fall fundraising drive, and we're hoping to raise $250,000 in a much shorter than normal three-week window, by November 5, so we can keep right on doing it. Please pitch in early to help us get there.

$250,000

You come to Mother Jones for unique journalism, and we love doing it for you. That's it. That's the upshot of our fall fundraising drive, and we're hoping to raise $250,000 in a shorter than normal three-week window so we can keep right on doing it.

Al Drago/ZUMA

Fight disinformation. Get a daily recap of the facts that matter. Sign up for the free Mother Jones newsletter.

More than a year after Ivanka Trump officially joined her father in the White House, it remains unclear what the senior adviser and daughter to the president does all day.

While critics have long derided the first daughter for her apparent lack of purpose within the Trump administration, one would be surprised to find President Donald Trump becoming one of Ivanka’s inadvertent detractors. But during a roundtable discussion on workplace development in Iowa Thursday, Trump appeared to admit that he too has questioned how his daughter has managed to do so well for herself by doing so little:

TRUMP on IVANKA: “She went to Wharton & was always a great student. I said ‘Ivanka, are you going to do your homework?’ ‘I already did it, dad.’ Then she got As, I said, ‘she doesn’t work!’… Her friends said, ‘we had to work harder than she did’…everybody likes Ivanka.” pic.twitter.com/74UPXx8zPf

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 26, 2018

With exquisite irony, Trump appeared to ignore the fact that these same observations have been made about his improbable path to the Oval Office. Who needs reading anyway?