“I hate the word ‘surrogate.’ What does that mean?” Ivanka Trump said on a stage on Wednesday morning at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Laguna Niguel, California. “At one point, major newspapers were writing that I was running to be a Vice-Presidential candidate. I’m, like, ‘No, I’m a daughter. I don’t express my views on policy, with one exception.’ “ That exception, she said, was affordable child care, and she proudly took responsibility for employing her daughterly influence to convince her father, Donald Trump, to incorporate a child-care tax deduction and dependent-care saving accounts into his policy platform, because matters affecting working women were “very core to her professional mission.” Still, she insisted, “I’m not a surrogate. I’m a daughter.”
Ivanka was appearing at the Fortune Most Powerful Women conference, an annual gathering of some of the most accomplished women in corporate America. She had spoken at the conference before, but this year the stop took on an obviously larger significance. Rather than simply reaffirming her celebrity presence among the female entrepreneurs and C.E.O.s of Fortune 500 companies in attendance, Ivanka was trying to salvage her brand, which is built around young professional women and working mothers, two groups who appear to be recoiling from her father’s Presidential candidacy in large numbers.