First Daughter Ivanka Trump hit a road bump in her first global appearance an official member of the Trump administration as the audience at a women's empowerment panel in Germany booed and hissed at her for defending her father's record on women.
The event, hosted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, marked Ivanka's first global trip as part of her White House role. "Certainly not the latter", she said, but added that the role of being the president's daughter as well as one of his assistants was "rather unfamiliar", but that she was enjoying the "remarkable, incredible journey".
Her remarks about paid family leave drew noticeable reactions after she said she was proud of her father, President Donald Trump, for being "a tremendous champion of supporting families and enabling them to thrive". Among the panel was International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Legarde, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, Queen Maxima of the Netherlands, tech entrepreneur Juliana Rotich and German Chanellor Angela Merkel.
Ivanka is widely seen as a moderating influence on him, along with her husband Jared Kushner, but their role as advisers without any political or diplomatic experience has sparked plenty of criticism.
She and Ivanka Trump realized they shared interests in women's entrepreneurial issues, her office later said, and extended the younger Trump a personal invitation to participate in the panel. The newspaper Berliner Zeitung, which has described her as "the president's whisperer", said German officials would "certainly be hoping that the president's daughter will convey a positive image of Germany to her father".
Here's video of the incident (you may need to turn your volume all the way up to hear it), in which Ivanka says her father has been a champion of women long before he became president.
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Despite an awkward first encounter in which he referenced phone tapping and didn't shake her hand, Trump claimed the pair had "unbelievable chemistry".
She said she is still finding her feet in her new role.
The panel moderator, a finance journalist, interjected, saying: "Some attitudes toward women your father has publicly displayed. might leave one questioning whether he is such an empowerer for women". It's been hard to tell how much Ivanka planned to blaze her own policy paths, and how much she would be a spokeswoman for her father's policy goals.
"He encouraged me and enabled me to thrive", Ivanka explained. She said that she thought it was important for people to learn to disagree in respectful ways, which is what she thought had happened at the conference.
Ivanka has been accused in the United States of benefiting from nepotism, and was ridiculed on the "Saturday Night Live" comedy show for being "complicit" in promoting Trump's divisive policies.
"I should have pressed 'coffee, '" she apologized.
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