Ivanka Trump
speaker
1,538 appearances
13 recordings
8 series
first heard Jul 2024
last heard 10 Jun
Ivanka Trump’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 8.
Appearances
so much. She passed away two years ago now. And she was a remarkable, remarkable woman. She was a trailblazer in so many different ways, as an athlete and growing up in communist Czechoslovakia, as a fashion mogul, as a real estate executive and builder. And Just this all-around trailblazing businesswoman. I also learned from her, you know, aside from that element, how to really enjoy life.
You know, I look back and some of my happiest memories of her are in the ocean. You know, just lying on her back, looking up at the sun and just so in the moment. Or dancing. She loved to dance. Yeah. And she really taught me a lot about living life to its fullest. And she had so much courage, so much conviction, so much energy, and a complete comfort with who she was.
I think because she was this unbelievable, formidable athlete and because of the discipline she had as a child, I think it made her value those moments more as an adult. I think she was a great balance of the two that we all hope to find. And she was able to find both incredibly serious and formidable. I remember as a little girl, I used to literally traipse behind her
at the Plaza Hotel, which she oversaw and actually kind of was her old post office. It was this unbelievable historic hotel in New York City. And I'd follow her around at construction meetings and on job sites. And there she is dancing. See? That's funny that that's the picture you pull up.
That's great. She had such a joy to her. And she was so unabashed in her perspective and her opinions. I mean, you know, she made my father look reserved. Whatever she was feeling, she was just very expressive and a lot of fun to be around.
I think fundamentally, as people, we desire freedom. We want agency. And my mom was like a lot of other people who grew up in similar situations where she didn't like to talk about it that often. So one of my real regrets is that I didn't push her harder. But I think back to the conversations we did have, and I try to imagine what it's like. She was at Charles University in Prague, which was...
really like a focal point of the reforms that were ushered in during the Prague Spring and the liberalization agenda that was happening. The dance halls were opening, the student activists, and she was attending university there right at that same time. So the contrast to this feeling of freedom and progress and liberalization in the spring.
And then it's so quickly being crushed in the fall of that same year when the Warsaw Pact countries and the Soviet Union rolled in to put down and ultimately roll back all those reforms. So for her to have lived through that, you know, she didn't come to North America until she was 23 or 24. So that was her life. As a young girl, she was on the junior national ski team for Czechoslovakia.
My grandfather used to train her. They used to put the skis on her back and walk up the mountain in Czechoslovakia because there were no ski lifts. She actually made me do that when I was a child. just to let me know what her experience had been. If I complained that it was cold out, she's like, well, you didn't have to walk up the mountain.
You'd be plenty warm if you had carried the skis up on your back up the last run.
You wonder how much of who they were was a reaction to their experience. You know, would she have naturally had that sort of forward-looking, grateful, optimistic orientation? Or was it a reaction to her childhood? I think about that. You know, I look at this picture of my mom, and she was unabashedly herself. You know, she loved flamboyance and glamour and
And in some ways, I think it probably was a direct reaction to this very austere, controlled childhood. You know, this was one expression of it. I think her, you know, how she dressed and how she presented. I think her entrepreneurial spirit and love of capitalism and all things American was another manifestation of it and one that I grew up with. I remember this story she used to tell me.
about when she was 14 and she was going to neighboring countries. And, you know, as an athlete, you were given additional freedoms that you wouldn't otherwise be afforded in these societies under communist rules. So she was able to travel where most of her friends never would be able to leave Czechoslovakia.
And she would come back from all of these trips, and the first place where she'd do ski races in Austria and elsewhere, and the first thing she had to do was check in at the local police.
And she'd sit down, and she had enough wisdom at 14 to know that she couldn't appear to be lying by not being impressed by what she saw and the fact that you could get an orange in the winter, but she couldn't be too excited by it, that she'd become a flight risk. Right. So give enough details that you're believable, but not so many that you're not trusted.
And imagine that as a 14-year-old, you know, that experience and having to navigate the world that way. Yeah. She told me that eventually all those local police officers, they came to love her because one of the things she'd do is smuggle that stuff back from these countries and give it to them to give their wives perfume and stockings. So she figured out the system pretty quickly. Yeah.
But it's a very different experience from what I was navigating and the pressures and challenges me as a 14-year-old was dealing with. So I have so much respect and admiration for her.
Victor Frankl is somebody, I mean, that book and just his philosophy in general is so inspiring to me. But I think so many people, they say they want happiness, but they want conditional happiness. When this and this, a thing happens or under these circumstances, then I'll be happy.
And I think what he showed is that we can sort of cultivate these virtues within ourselves regardless of the situation we find ourselves in. And in some ways, I think the meaning of life is the search for meaning in life. It's the relationships we have and we form. It's the experience we have. It's how we deal with the suffering that life inevitably presents to us.
And Viktor Frankl does an amazing job highlighting that under the most horrific circumstances. And I think it's just super inspiring to me.
Showing 1201–1220 of 1,538 · page 61 of 77
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