Ivanka Trump tells Gayle King: I am more effective off social media

Ivanka Trump, who vowed to be just "a daughter" to President Trump in the White House, says she's taken on a more formal (and powerful) role because she wants to "be a force for good" and prove her father's administration will be a success. That means staying off social media to be more effective, she says.

In her first TV sit-down interview since her father took office, Ivanka Trump talked to Gayle King of CBS This Morning on Tuesday. The full interview aired Wednesday on the morning show but a clip aired Tuesday on CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley.

Originally, Trump said she did not want to work in the White House; now she has taken an unpaid job with the title of assistant to the president. What changed her mind, King asked.

"I was processing real time the new reality and what it would mean," she said. "I realized that having one foot in and one foot out wouldn’t work. And the reality is that it, it all happened very organically for me."

Trump addressed critics who have said she and her husband, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, are “complicit” with President Trump. She said she doesn't understand what that means.

“If being complicit is wanting to... be a force for good and to make a positive impact then I’m complicit," she said. "I don’t know that the critics who may say that of me, if they found themselves in this very unique and unprecedented situation that I am now in, would do any differently than I am doing.

“I don’t know what it means to be complicit, but you know, I hope time will prove that I have done a good job, and much more importantly, that my father’s administration is the success that I know it will be.”

She also explained why she doesn’t publicly speak out on issues. “I would say not to conflate lack of public denouncement with silence,” Trump said. She said there are multiple ways to make her voice heard, and sometimes it's quietly.

“So where I disagree with my father, he knows it, and I express myself with total candor," she said. "Where I agree, I fully lean in and support the agenda and hope that I can be an asset to him and make a positive impact. But I respect the fact that he always listens. It’s how he was in business. It’s how he is as president.”

But do not expect her to criticize him publicly. "I’m still my father’s daughter," she said. Besides, she can be more effective in telling him what King called "hard truths" behind the scenes.

"We’re in a very unique time where noise equals, in a lot of people’s perception, advocacy.," she said. "I do think there’s a time for public denouncement … I also think there’s a time for discussion. And so you asked me about people who criticize me for not taking to social media on every single issue, and I would ask them if that would render me more effective or less effective with the people ultimately making decisions?"

The interview took place Tuesday afternoon at Ivanka Trump's rented home in Washington, while her husband was visiting Iraq. King said Trump wanted to do the interview to clear up "misconceptions" about her and open up a little more about her new life in Washington. She wore wore a green and black sleeveless shift dress, having changed from a sleeveless cream shift dress she wore earlier at a White House appearance.

Ivanka Trump, 35, the elder of Trump's two daughters, is now her father's closest and most trusted adviser in the White House (next to Kushner), with her own title (assistant to the president), West Wing office, chief of staff and security clearance.

That makes her unprecedented, as the first modern presidential first daughter to work for her father in the White House. Already fascinated by Ivanka, official Washington is wondering: What does she plan to do with her enhanced power?

She says she plans to continue "advocating for the economic empowerment of women. I’m very focused on the role of education," she said. "So to me this particular title was about giving critics the comfort that I’m holding myself to that highest ethical standard. But I’ll weigh in with my father on the issues I feel strongly about."

She just doesn't think she can be effective sounding off on social media on issues or every time she disagrees with dad.

"And that’s okay. That means that I’ll take hits from some critics who say that I should take to the street," she said. "And then other people will in the long-term respect where I get to. But I think most of the impact I have, over time most people will not actually know about."

She has tried to push her issues — such as equal pay and empowering women in the workplace, in business and in science and technology — to the top of the White House agenda, at least in optics. On Tuesday, she joined Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross at a town hall meeting for CEOs to discuss the state of American business and workforce development.

Kushner, 36, himself has a heavy load of responsibilities, having been tasked by POTUS with transforming government to be more like a business, with brokering Israeli-Palestinian peace, and with managing the Trump administration's relations with foreign countries such as Mexico, Canada and now Iraq, among other duties.

"Jared is incredibly smart, very talented, has enormous capacity," she told King. "He is humble in the recognition of what he doesn’t know, and is tremendously secure in his ability to seek informed viewpoints... So, you know, the myth that he’s operating in a silo is just that. "

Since January, Ivanka Trump has been front and center at the White House far more than her stepmother, first lady Melania Trump, who remains in Trump Tower in New York at least until June.

As documented by the media and her Instagram page, Ivanka Trump has been in the front row at press conferences with foreign leaders, at the table next to her father in meetings or at his desk in the Oval Office, attending luncheons and conferences, or walking to Marine One with her husband and one or more of their three children.

By taking on a more formal, if unpaid, role as her father's assistant, she and Kushner have had to deal with far more critical scrutiny of their financial worth — as much as $740 million according to newly released ethics records on the holdings of White House staffers — and from ethics-in-government pundits skeptical about whether either of them can fully step away from their respective real estate, investment and fashion empires to avoid complicated conflicts of interest.

Ivanka said she has "no involvement" with her fashion brand anymore and signed legal documents to that effect. "I take a legal document very seriously and I wouldn’t go through the pains of setting this up if I intended to violate it," she said.

Ivanka Trump is also under more scrutiny than her four siblings, who remain in New York, because she and Kushner and their children are nearby: She and Kushner have moved into a rented six-bedroom house in the posh Kalorama neighborhood near Barack and Michelle Obama's rented mansion. It has a backyard swing set — rare for a New York home.

"Never in my life would I have thought that I would have actually moved out of New York," she said. "My business was there. My life was there, so this is actually an amazing moment in time where I came to Washington and I told Jared with my kids, I wanna treat it almost like I’m a visitor. Every week, I take my children to a different museum or cultural institution. We went to the Supreme Court. We’ve been to five or six museums. We went to the monster truck show."

Her middle child, 2-year-old Joseph, loved that, she said. "He hasn't stopped talking about it since."

So, King asked, should voters get their Ivanka 2024 campaign signs out? The speculation has already started. " No way, Trump said.

"Politics is a tough business. Politics is a tough business."