This Description of Ivanka Trump's Face After Talking With Dad Donald Trump on Jan. 6 Will Stay With You

September 23, 2021



While much has been written about Jan. 6 and Donald Trump’s reaction while it was going down, Bob Woodward’s new book, Peril, is giving readers more insight into what happened behind closed doors. The day was fraught with a lot of drama, and as we know, much of the burden of getting through to the president rested on Ivanka Trump’s shoulders.

When the insurrection took a dangerous turn on Capitol Hill, Executive Secretary and Chief of Staff of the United States National Security Council Keith Kellogg reached out to Ivanka to speak to her father to get the rioters to calm down. “She could reach her father in ways others could not,” reads the excerpt obtained by SheKnows. “She could talk to him as a daughter.” But that conversation didn’t go as planned because when she walked out of the Oval Office, “Kellogg immediately recognized the look on her face.” The “tough conversation” Ivanka had with her father didn’t go anywhere — Donald was stubbornly sticking to his plan of inciting the crowds with his tweets.

The entire administration had been handling the outgoing president with kid gloves in his final days in office. According to Woodward, everyone was using “a light touch” with Donald, even though he “indulged in the legal theories and congressional plots offered by his allies.” Ivanka and husband Jared Kushner believed that “he alone should be the one to decide how to finish” out his presidency, but Jan. 6 did require some intervention on her part.

She had to visit the Oval Office two more times to tell her dad, “Let this thing go. Let it go,” per the excerpt. It’s as if she were reprimanding a child, but Donald didn’t want to listen. He wanted to make his own decisions about the chaos that was happening in Washington, D.C. — and if Ivanka couldn’t get through to him — no one was going to get through to him that day.