Ms Trump went to Moscow in 2006 with Russian-born Felix Sater, who was acting as her part-time on-the-job tutor. According to the 2019 book ‘Kushner Inc’, the pair were visiting the capital on a scouting trip and while they were there took a private tour of the Kremlin. Author Vicky Ward wrote: “[Mr Sater] pleaded with a member of Vladimir Putin’s security detail to allow her to sit, briefly, in the Russian President’s chair.”
Mr Sater was a scam artist turned FBI informant who met Donald Trump in 2000.
By the time he met Mr Trump, he had joined a development firm, Bayrock Group, and apparently the real estate mogul “wanted him close”.
Mr Sater and his colleagues worked in Trump Tower just two floors down from the future President.
Mr Trump would repeatedly ask him which of his children should take over his company, to which he would say Ivanka because she “had the biggest set of balls in the room”.
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Recalling working with the future First Daughter, he said: “There was a lot of yelling back and forth.
“She was a born promoter. Her appearance and her tenacity made Donald look and her and say ‘Wow. She knows how to get shit for free and get her name on stuff.’”
In 2007, Mr Sater’s past was exposed in the New York Times and he retreated to London where he would attract less scrutiny.
However, he returned to the US in 2010 and Mr Trump made him a senior adviser, which he felt Ms Trump was not happy about.
Ms Ward wrote: “Trump reluctantly did what his daughter wanted, and Sater left the company.
“It was a seminal moment that demonstrated Ivanka had real influence over her father, the limit of which had not yet been found.”
While this incident shows that the US President’s daughter has significant influence over him, there is also evidence that she is always just trying to please him.
This tendency to try to please her father may date back to when she was young.
Mr Trump was absent a lot when Ivanka was growing up, especially after he divorced her mother Ivana and married the woman he had had an affair with – Marla Maples.
He divorced Ivanka’s mother in 1992 when she would have been 10 or 11 years old, and she reportedly asked her mother: “Does it mean I’m not going to be Ivanka Trump anymore?””
It was then that she decided she was going to go out of her way to spend time with her father.
Ms Ward wrote: “Whether our of insecurity or love – or a combination of both – Ivanka never stopped trying to please him.”
Family friend Nikki Haskell commented that she as “always Daddy’s little girl”.