October 19, 2016, 02:41 pm
Ivanka Trump: I expect my father to concede if he loses
By Ben Kamisar
Ivanka Trump said her father would accept the outcome of the 2016 presidential election even if he loses as the GOP nominee continues to warn that the election might be "rigged" against him.
"My father is in this to win it, and I'm not interested in talking about alternative outcomes. Of course, my father will always do the right thing, that’s the kind of person he is," Ivanka Trump said during an interview with Time magazine's Nancy Gibbs during Wednesday's Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit.
"He’ll either win or he won’t win, and I believe he’ll accept the outcome either way."
Donald Trump's near constant warnings about voter fraud have prompted concerns as to whether he'd stand down if he loses in November. He said he would during the first presidential debate but told The New York Times when asked again just days later, "We're going to have to see."
Ivanka Trump didn't directly answer a question about whether she agreed with her father that the election is rigged against him, but she pointed to a "vicious" media that she claims has distorted stories about her father and the Trump brand.
She specifically pointed to a Times story from this week that used data from an online travel company that showed a 58 percent decrease in Trump bookings.
Ivanka Trump described how her organization had argued with the paper that the data only relied on a booking website that accounted for just 18 nights in the previous year, so the analysis failed to capture the vast majority of the Trump hotel bookings. But she said the Times didn't include that context.
"It's demoralizing when you are working very hard and you have teams working very hard," she said.
"The bias is very, very real, and I don't think I would have said this to you even a year ago."
Earlier, she pushed back on the characterization of her as a campaign "surrogate," pointing to her decision to stay out of policy outside of her work on child care policies.
"I'm not dogmatically aligned with any party and I share my thoughts with my father very candidly," she said.
"I made a very purposeful determination at the beginning of this campaign not to talk about policy because I am not the candidate, I am not an adviser. I am the daughter."
As the GOP nominee's daughter, she's hit the stump with her father and come to his defense in a handful of interviews. And reports pegged her in playing a key role in the ouster of her father's first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/301825-ivanka-trump-i-expect-my-father-to-concede-if-he-loses
