Ivanka Trump Reveals Main Reason for Not Returning to Politics

Then-White House senior advisers Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner arrive at Hyderabad House in New Delhi, India, on Feb. 25, 2020. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Ivanka Trump has reaffirmed in a recent interview that she will not be returning to politics as her father, President-elect Donald Trump, is slated to take office early next week.

The president-elect’s eldest daughter, who was one of his top advisers in his first term in office, told a podcast on Tuesday that she will stay away from Washington in his second term.

“I love policy and impact. I hate politics. And unfortunately, the two are not separable,” Ivanka Trump told the “Him & Her Show” podcast, adding that it is a “very dark” and “negative business.”

“Some people love the gladiator aspect of it—the fight. That was never me.”

Also, in the interview, the younger Trump said she wants to make her family a priority.

“The main reason I am not going back to serve now is I know the cost, and it’s a price that I’m not willing to make my kids bear,” she said.

“I did the best I could—and I think I was there for all the really critical moments—but you don’t want to miss the small ones either.”

During her father’s 2024 presidential campaign, neither she nor her husband, former Trump adviser Jared Kushner, participated. Both have previously said they would not join his second administration.

“I love my father very much. [But] this time around, I am choosing to prioritize my young children and the private life we are creating as a family. I do not plan to be involved in politics,” Ivanka Trump said in late 2022.

In early 2024, Kushner publicly ruled out joining the Trump administration if his father-in-law was elected.

“I’ve been very clear that my desire at this phase of my life is to focus on my firm,” Kushner said. “I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity as a family to be out of the spotlight.”

Both Kushner and Ivanka Trump served in the first Trump administration and worked on Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns. Ivanka Trump also served as an executive vice president in the Trump Organization and was a judge in her father’s NBC show, “The Apprentice.”

After Kushner left the White House, he started a private equity firm that allegedly obtained a $2 billion investment from the sovereign wealth fund controlled by Saudi Prince Mohammed, drawing some scrutiny from congressional Democrats in 2023.

Just several days before Trump’s win in November 2024, Kushner told The New York Times that there would be “zero” chance his wife would join a second Trump administration because she “made the decision when she left Washington that she was closing that chapter of her life.”

Since leaving the White House in 2021, both have maintained relatively low profiles and have made few comments on Trump’s campaign or election win. Ivanka Trump offered a statement after the former president was subject to an assassination attempt in mid-July.

She appeared alongside other family members, including Trump’s other children, during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in August 2024.

Meanwhile, Trump’s two eldest sons—Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump—have frequently appeared at campaign events, regularly speaking at rallies and giving media interviews on behalf of their father.