Donald Trump once made a pact with his daughter Ivanka never to date anyone younger than her.
In a recently unearthed interview on The Howard Stern Show in 1999, Trump joked about how he was attending fashion events to meet a model to be his next wife.
When he was asked how that affects his daughter, Trump responded: ‘I have a deal with her. She’s just 17 and she’s doing great, Ivanka, and she made me promise her – to swear to her – that I would never date a girl younger than her.’
He continued: ‘So as she grows older, the field is getting very limited.’
Stern responded: ‘Yeah, I mean the nerve of her, now you can’t go out with 16 year olds.’
At the time of the interview, Trump had already started dating his future wife number three, Melania, who is actually closer in age to Ivanka. Trump is 70 years old while his wife and eldest daughter are 46 and 34 respectively.
The interview was unearthed by a Democratic strategist who shared it with the New York Daily News.
The interview just adds to plethora of uncomfortable comments the Republican nominee has made about his eldest daughter.
In another Howard Stern interview from 2003, Trump bragged about his daughter’s figure, saying: ‘You know who’s one of the great beauties of the world, according to everybody? And I helped create her. Ivanka.
My daughter, Ivanka. She’s 6 feet tall, she’s got the best body. She made a lot money as a model—a tremendous amount.’
He’s also suggested that he might be dating his daughter, if they weren’t related.
‘I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her,’ Trump said in an appearance on The View.
Since Trump first announced his Presidential candidacy, people have been saying that Ivanka had the power to soften his image and broaden his appeal, perhaps even among the women voters who’ve increasingly turned against him. (According to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, Trump trails Hillary Clinton among women voters by twenty points.)
Ivanka is modern and accomplished: a thirty-four-year-old mother of three, who co-runs the Trump Organization while heading her own fashion line, plus a sleek Web site that “celebrates women who work” with brand-building enthusiasm.
Among Trump’s other campaign surrogates, his wife, Melania, seems to muddle things (in an interview with Anderson Cooper this week, she compared her husband to a little boy—not what most of us have in mind for a President), while Rudy Giuliani inflames them (his odd defense of Trump and himself was to the effect that “everybody” commits adultery).
But elegant, beautiful Ivanka, possessed of the self-discipline and social graces that permanently elude her father, has been like the white-noise machine of the campaign, muting and sometimes neutralizing his outbursts.
