Ivanka Trump says her father will accept the results of the election, despite the fact that the Republican presidential nominee has spent more than a week on the campaign trail assailing the electoral process as “rigged.”
“I believe he’ll accept the outcome either way,” Trump told TIME Editor Nancy Gibbs at Coins2Day’s Most Powerful Women Summit on Wednesday.
Donald Trump’s eldest daughter and a senior figure in his business empire, Ivanka has proved a key advocate for the Republican nominee. But she declined to back up the candidate’s recent claims—made with no evidence—that a conspiracy is afoot to use widespread voter fraud to deliver Hillary Clinton the presidency. Instead, Ivanka Trump pointed to media bias that she said has made it impossible for her father to receive a fair hearing.
“The media has been vicious,” she said, adding she’s given up trying to correct the record in the face of what she described as a ceaseless barrage of negative coverage.
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Trump said she found her father’s remarks about using his celebrity to kiss and grope women without their consent “offensive,” and said he apologized to her personally. The 2005 recording, made during the taping of an Access Hollywood segment, ignited a firestorm when it leaked earlier this month.
“He recognizes it was crude language,” Trump said. “That’s not language consistent with any conversation I’ve ever had with him certainly or any conversation I’ve overheard, so it was a bit jarring for me to hear, and he was very sincere in his apology.”
The tape’s revelation came after the candidate made derisive comments about a former Miss Universe pageant winner’s weight gain—and has been followed by a series of women coming forward to allege he kissed or groped them without consent. Ivanka Trump, founder of a multimillion-dollar retail clothing line that celebrates working women, said she has worked hard to “maintain complete separation” between her brand and the campaign. “I have to just shrug things off,” she said. “It’s a very difficult environment in which to operate because critics have loud voices and make them heard.”
She indicated that the historically wide gender gap that polls show separating her father from Clinton—the latest NBC/ Wall Street Journal survey showed the Democratic nominee leading by 20 points among women—may narrow when voters actually cast their ballots. “We’ll have to see,” she said, noting she’s heard from female Trump supporters in Democratic communities who say they’re too anxious to declare their preference publicly. “I do think there will be a lot of support that isn’t currently being recorded in the polls that are being conducted.”
