Ivanka Trump praises her 'great dad,' avoids assault claims, tape controversy

MALVERN, Pa. — Donald Trump’s daughter on Thursday called him “a great dad” and “a leader who helps people grow into their full potential.”

Opening a daylong campaign swing across the Philadelphia region with a stop at a Chester County hotel, Ivanka Trump praised her father and said she was confident he would win the presidency — but effectively avoided addressing what has become the most intense controversy to flare in his campaign.

She did not speak about last week’s public release of a 2005 videotape in which her father admitted forcibly kissing or groping women or about new claims from three women that he assaulted them. And though she took questions from largely friendly and supportive audience members at the Desmond Hotel ballroom in Malvern, none touched on the issue.

Trump then left through a back door, unavailable to reporters.

The event was the first of four campaign stops for the 34-year-old mother. She hosted a similar “coffee stop” in Drexel Hill, Delaware County, and was expected to do the same in Ivyland, Bucks County. On Thursday night, Trump is the featured speaker at a private GOP fundraising dinner at a King of Prussia hotel.

Whether she would address Trump’s 2005 comments, or the ensuing claims, was a question for some who flocked to see her. “It kind of has to put the children in a spot,” said Lauren Martin, a 30-year-old Trump supporter from Lancaster who came to the Malvern event with her mother. Still, Martin said she found the attention given to Trump’s comments in the 2005 videotape to be a distraction from more important issues in the campaign.

“I wouldn’t apologize if I were her,” Martin said, before Ivanka Trump arrived. “It was locker-room talk.”

The banquet room at the Desmond Hotel offered a contrast to large venues where Donald Trump typically holds rallies for thousands of supporters. It also highlighted the campaign’s outreach to the vote-rich Philadelphia suburbs, where a Bloomberg Politics poll released this week found 70 percent of voters have a negative view of Donald Trump.

Ivanka Trump told the crowd her parents didn’t tolerate rudeness, had “expectation of what was appropriate, and I think they taught us to be sensitive to that.”

She spoke for less than 20 minutes, and fielded four questions. The first, asked by the Chester County Sheriff Carolyn Welsh: What is your vision for your children?

Trump said she thinks of her own parents, who told her to pursue her passion.

Her message — as well as the makeup of the crowd and its response to it — were essentially the same at Drexelbook, a banquet hall in Drexel Hill.

“I was a little surprised” that she didn’t talk about the allegations against her father, said Nicholena Iacuzio-Rushton of Havertown, after hearing her talk. “In a way I was hoping to hear a little more … but I still was impressed with her.”

Myron Goldman, 74, of Cheltenham said after the Drexel Hill event that he would have liked to ask Ivanka Trump about her father’s taped conversation because he knows “that’s not who he is,” and he believed Trump’s daughter could have conveyed that.

Goldman said the tape was “horrible,” but he wishes less attention were given to it in the media and more attention were given to allegations against Bill Clinton that Trump has highlighted.

At the earlier Malvern coffee klatch, Melissa Braithwaite, 46, of West Chester, said she likes everything about Donald Trump because he has “blown the lid off of all the political correctness.” She said she does not want to hear about Trump’s comments on women.

“The comments that he made on that tape, that was a personal conversation,” she said. “I was not offended by that at all.”

Braithwaite, a stay-at-home mother, said she wanted to hear Ivanka Trump speak about how she became “the woman that she is today because of her father.”

As she waited with friends to hear Ivanka Trump speak, Braithwaite said had doubts about new allegations from women — published in The New York Times, People magazine and other outlets — who claim Trump accosted them.

“The problem I’m finding now with our media is they’re completely biased, and I don’t know if these women are being paid,” she said.

Trump trails in the latest polls of Pennsylvania voters. An NBC News/Marist poll released Sunday found Clinton leading Trump in Pennsylvania by 12 percentage points.

Diane Collier, 55, of West Chester, said she does not believe the polls.

“The only polls that matter,” she said, “are the ones on Election Day.”