Ivanka Trump: belief

Transcript context

…I feel like they made people tougher back then, like my grandma. And you mentioned, it’s funny, they go through some of the darkest things that a human being can go through and they don’t talk about it, and they have a general positive outlook on life that’s deeply rooted in the knowledge of what life could be. How bad it could get. My grandma survived Holodomor in Ukraine, which was a mass starvation brought on by the collectivist policies of the Stalin regime, and then she survived the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. Never talked about it. Probably went through extremely dark, extremely difficult times, and then just always had a positive outlook on life. And also made me do very difficult physical activity, as you mentioned, just to humble you. Kids these days are soft kind of energy, which I’m deeply, deeply grateful for on all fronts, including just having hardship and including just physical hardship flung at me. I think that’s really important. You wonder how much of who they were was a reaction to their experience. Would she have naturally had that forward-looking, grateful, optimistic orientation or was it a reaction to her childhood? I think about that. I look at this picture of my mom and she was unabashedly herself. She loved flamboyance and glamour, and in some ways I think it probably was a direct reaction to this very austere, controlled childhood. This was one expression of it. I think how she dressed and how she presented, I think her entrepreneurial spirit and love of capitalism and all things American was another manifestation of it and one that I grew up with. I remember the story she used to tell me about when she was 14 and she was going to neighboring countries, and as an athlete, you were given additional freedoms that you wouldn’t otherwise be afforded in these societies under communist rule. So she was able to travel, where most of her friends never would be able to leave Czechoslovakia, and she would come back from all of these trips where she’d do ski races in Austria and elsewhere, and the first thing she had to do was check in at the local police. And she’d sit down, and she had enough wisdom at 14 to know that she couldn’t appear to be lying by not being impressed by what she saw and the fact that you could get an orange in the winter, but she couldn’t be too excited by it that she’d become a flight risk. Oh, boy.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.