Times Donald Trump Acted Totally Inappropriate Toward Ivanka

There are a lot of aspects of Donald Trump's personal life that have made headlines during the course of his administration, but his ways of displaying affinity for eldest daughter Ivanka Trump may be the most unusual. Unlike his other children, Donald Trump has given Ivanka Trump (and her husband, Jared Kushner) official positions in the West Wing, which means the scrutiny surrounding their personal history is even more heightened, and while there's plenty to talk about when it comes to his relationship with his other children, Donald Trump's public treatment of his eldest daughter has been anything but ordinary.

Not only are there several photos of them together in positions that are not often expected for those of a father and a daughter, but Donald Trump has also publicly spoken of her in terms that many find to be totally inappropriate on many, many occasions. Here are just some of the times Donald Trump upped the ick factor when it came to how he treated Ivanka.

In July 2016, Ivanka Trump introduced her father at the Republican National Convention, following his nomination as the party's presidential candidate, in a speech that focused mostly on his (and by extension, her) plan to increase labor fairness for women and child care affordability once in the Oval Office. But what a lot of people seemed to take away from her appearance at the RNC was not the content of her words, but the reaction they earned from her father.

After she finished speaking and welcomed him to the mic, he joined her on the stage and thanked her with a loose hug and double cheek smooch. That gesture may have been harmless enough, but then he reached down and patted her right hip and/or behind as a sort of awkward send-off, which instantly set the social media world ablaze with criticism. The move was called "creepy" and left some people wondering "what is wrong with this man?" Of course, given his pictorial history with Ivanka, some simply weren't surprised at all that he might feel so free to reach for that particular area of his daughter's body.

There have been a lot of women whose prior personal dealings with Donald Trump have spelled out scandal since he took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but none has received quite as much media attention as the story of Stephanie Clifford, aka "Stormy Daniels." Although Clifford's explosive interview with 60 Minutes grabbed a lot of attention for her revelations about her own contacts with Trump, perhaps the most surprising takeaway was the part where she mentioned Ivanka. According to her, during their one intimate encounter with one another, Trump verbally compared her to his daughter, saying, "'Wow, you are special. You remind me of my daughter. You're smart and beautiful, and a woman to be reckoned with, and I like you. I like you.'"

Soon after, Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Bunny, told CNN she had a similar experience, claiming, "He said I was beautiful like her and, you know, 'You're a smart girl.' There wasn't a lot of comparing, but there was some. I heard a lot about her." The fact that both women came forward stories of being compared to his daughter left a lot of people grossed out by his "bizarre" bedroom behavior.

Before Donald Trump's political ambitions truly came to a head, he and Ivanka appeared on The Wendy Williams Show to talk about then-First Lady Michelle Obama's new hairstyle, among other things, in 2013. One otherwise innocuous question became an excruciating case study in awkwardness, however, when Trump weighed in on what his daughter may have inherited from him, personality-wise.

When asked what favorite thing she has in common with her father, Ivanka said that their shared passion was "either real estate or golf." When the matter was then turned to him, Donald Trump added, "Well, I was going to say sex, but I can't relate that to her." Ivanka seemed to share the audience's bemused sense of surprise at the comment, but the discomfiting exchange would later resurface in the days leading up to his election, assuring no one could forget that his mind went there. Although the words have been panned as the kind you "can't un-hear" and "sick," perhaps the world shouldn't have been so surprised by the response, considering their history of cringe-worthy interviews together...

In 2006, Donald Trump appeared on The View alongside Ivanka. At the time, the two were sharing the small screen thanks to her joining The Apprentice as a guest judge, so audiences might have expected the conversation to remain centered on the subject of their reality work.

However, co-host Star Jones instead opened their segment by asking the very leading question, "What would you do if Playboy put Ivanka on the cover of a magazine?" Ivanka rightly predicted, "This is gonna be an interesting answer," and indeed it was. Trump's response was, "It would be really disappointing, not really, but it would depend on what was inside the magazine [...] I don't think Ivanka would do inside the magazine, although she does have a very nice figure. I've said that if Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her." Perhaps this is the moment Joy Behar's notoriously strained relationship with POTUS began because she retorted, "Stop it! [...] Who are you, Woody Allen?" Some audiences viewed the remarks as harassment, and others view it as part of a much bigger pattern of odd behavior.

One of Donald Trump's most frequent interview haunts throughout the years has been on The Howard Stern Show, which has an endless reel of highlights that have gotten him into trouble, like bragging about sneaking into the female dressing rooms at beauty pageants and admitting to being less than delighted about the news of the impending arrival of his fourth child, Tiffany. Perhaps no subject has been quite as disconcerting, however, as when he talked to the shock jock about his daughter Ivanka. In one early 2000s appearance, he showered some praise on the then-23-year-old, as proud parents are known to do. Rather than cheering her professional or personal achievements, though, he expressed joy over how good-looking she was, saying, "You know who's one of the great beauties of the world, according to everybody? And I helped create her? Ivanka. My daughter, Ivanka. She's six feet tall. She's got the best body." He went on to later agree with Stern when he coined her "a piece of a–."

It wasn't the last time the subject of his kid's body proportions would come up on the show; Trump returned in 2006, and Stern showed no hesitation about discussing Ivanka's figure with her father, saying, "She looks more voluptuous than ever." To that, Donald Trump agreed and said, "She's actually always been very voluptuous." Stern himself would later express unease over Trump's willingness to participate in such conversations.

Although one might be willing to chalk up Donald Trump's off-kilter comments to The View — that is, that he often said he might date Ivanka Trump if she weren't his daughter — as some kind of misguided joke, that wasn't the last time he would say such a thing on record.  

In 2015, as he was gearing up to run for the Republican nomination, he was interviewed by a Rolling Stone writer who claimed he met with Trump's eldest daughter and offered praise about her to him, at which point Trump responded suggestively, "Yeah, she's really something, and what a beauty that one. If I weren't happily married and, ya know, her father..." This has been long interpreted as him showing "sexual interest in his daughter." It probably didn't help matters much that The Dr. Oz Show reportedly had to edit out a comment by Trump that he likes to kiss his daughter "as often as [he] can," despite the fact that audiences present at the taping were more than willing to share the "awkward comment" with their social media followers.

Amidst the reactionary hubbub during his controversial chat with the ladies of The View, Donald Trump could be overheard saying (after his statement that he'd date Ivanka if she wasn't his daughter), "Isn't it terrible? Is that terrible?" It reportedly was not the last time he would openly wonder about the morality of his controversial relationship with Ivanka Trump, either.

According to BuzzFeed, a draft article for The Washington Post in 2016 featured a quote from Trump about his then-13-year-old daughter in which he asked an unnamed associated, "Is it wrong to be more sexually attracted to your own daughter than your wife?" The quote was part of a copy which was circulated to other journalists, although the paper ultimately omitted it from publication. However, WaPo has not discredited the accuracy of the quote, and it does seem to resemble something quoted to The New York Times. In that piece, at least one former beauty contestant was asked by Trump about Ivanka, who was still a teenager at the time and hosted the Miss Teen USA pageant, "Don't you think my daughter's hot? She's hot right?" Naturally, the reactions to these quotes have been colorful, including dubbing Trump "a really sick and twisted individual" and "sad."