Ivanka Trump: belief

Transcript context

…I took a long road trip around the United States in my 20s, and I’m thinking of doing it again just for a couple of months for that exact purpose. And you can get these stories when you go to a bar in the middle of nowhere and just sit and talk to people and they start sharing. And it reminds you of how beautiful the country is. It reminds you of several things. One, that people, well, it shows you that there’s a lot of different accents, that’s for one. But aside from that, that people are struggling with all the same stuff. And at least at that time, I wonder what it is now, but at that time, I don’t remember. On the surface, there’s political divisions, there’s Republicans and Democrats, and so on, but underneath it people were all the same. The concerns were all the same, there was not that much of a division. Right now, the surface division has been amplified even more maybe because of social media, I don’t know why. So, I would love to see what the country’s like now. But I suspect probably it’s still not as divided as it appears to be on the surface, what the media shows, what the social media shows. But what did you experience in terms of the division? I think a couple reactions to what you just said. I think the first is when you connect with people like that, you are so inspired by their courage in the face of adversity and their resilience. And it’s a truly remarkable experience for me. The campaign lifted me out of a bubble I didn’t even know I was in. I grew up on the Upper East Side of New York and I felt like I was well traveled, and I believed at the time that I’d been exposed to divergent viewpoints. And I realized during the campaign how limited my exposure had been relative to what it was becoming, so there was a lot of growth in that as well. But I do think you think about the vitriol and politics and whether it’s worse than it’s been in the past or not, I think that’s up for debate. I think there have been duels, there’s been screaming, and politics has always been a blood sport, and it’s always been incredibly vicious. I think in the toxic swirl of social media it’s more amplified, and there’s more democratization around participating in it perhaps, and it seems like the voices are louder, but it feels like it’s always been that. But I don’t believe most people are like that. And you meet people along the way and they’re not leading with what their politics are. They’re telling you about their hopes for themselves and their communities. And it makes you feel that we are a whole lot less divided than the media and others would have us believe. Although, I have to say, having duals sounds pretty cool. Maybe I just romanticize westerns, but anyway. All right, I miss Clint Eastwood movies. Okay. But it’s true. You read some of this stuff in terms of what politics used to be in the history of the United States. Those folks went pretty rough, way rougher, actually. But they didn’t have social media, so they had to go real hard. And the media was rough too. So all the fake news, all of that, that’s not recent. It’s been nonstop. I look at the surface division, the surface bickering, and that might be just a feature of democracy. It’s not a bug of democracy, it’s a feature. We’re in a constant conflict, and it’s the way we resolve, we try to figure out the right way forward. So in the moment, it feels like people are just tearing each other apart, but really we’re trying to find a way, where in the long arc of history it will look like progress. But in the short term, it just sounds like people making stories up about other and calling each other names, and all this kind of stuff, but there’s a purpose to it. I mean, that’s what freedom looks like, I guess is what I’m trying to say, and it’s better than the alternative.…

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