Ivanka Sat In Putin’s Chair. Here Are 4 Other Places She Shouldn’t Have Put Her Tuchus.
Ivanka at the G20 Summit.
During a 2006 visit to Russia, Ivanka Trump sat at Vladimir Putin’s desk and spun in his chair.
Felix Sater, a real estate developer, recalls in Buzzfeed the time when President Trump “asked him to chaperone” Donald Jr. and Ivanka in Russia. At the time, Sater was with a development company called Bayrock Group, which helped scout locations and secure financing for the Trump Organization’s licensing deals across the globe.
For Ivanka and Donald Jr., Sater arranged a tour of the Kremlin. Sater reached out to an old friend, a Russian billionaire, who he knew through his Bayrock connections. The billionaire sent a fleet of cars and guards to escort them through the Kremlin, and when a tour guide pointed out Putin’s office, Ivanka asked if she could sit in his chair at an antique desk.
One of the guards said, “Are you crazy?”
“I said, ‘What is she going to do, steal a pen?’” Sater recalled. “He let us in. She sat behind the desk, spun in the chair twice, and that was that.”
This seems to be a trend for the First Daughter. Ivanka drew criticism last July when she briefly sat in her father’s chair at a Group of 20 summit meeting in Hamburg, Germany, during a closed-door session on African development as the World Bank president spoke.
Here are four other moments Ivanka received international side-eye for her seating choices.
Ivanka Trump and Angela Merkel at the White House.
- She scored a spot directly next to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on her visit to the White House in March 2017.
W20 Summit
- In April 2017, Ivanka joined an elected head of state, a head of the International Monetary Fund, a foreign minister and a queen on stage at the W20 summit in Berlin. Even the panel’s moderator didn’t know why she was there, asking her to clarify whether she was representing the interests of the U.S., her father or her business.
Ivanka and Justin Trudeau
- Last year, she snagged a seat next to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the Roosevelt Room at the White House earlier this year in a meeting about entrepreneurship, also in 2017. Weeks later, she took another seat next to him, but at a Broadway show in New York, at which Ivanka was his guest.
Ivanka in the Oval Office.
- Ivanka has sat in the Oval Office on multiple occasions, including during a phone call with the astronaut who broke the record for the longest stay aboard the International Space Station.
Contact Alyssa Fisher at fisher@forward.com or on Twitter, @alyssalfisher
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