It’s a free country, and everyone’s free to make the friends they like. But it’s unusual to have a Republican frontrunner and a Democratic frontrunner whose daughters are friends:
When Chelsea Clinton and Ivanka Trump were introduced by their husbands a few years ago, they clicked immediately — the two famous daughters swanned around Manhattan together for a time, posing on the red carpet at events like the Glamour Women of the Year Awards where they laughed and embraced for the cameras.
They seemed to genuinely delight in each other’s presence and discovered much common ground. Last year, Chelsea even compared Ivanka’s natural charm to her own father’s while praising her in the glossy pages of Vogue…
Associates said the “bipartisan BFF” storyline hyped by the tabloids overstates the relationship between Chelsea and Ivanka — theirs was a budding friendship. They are the kind of friends who see each other for dinner a few times a year, not those who text each other all day. “They genuinely relate to each other and care about each other and ran in the same circles,” said one associate.
If the wedding photo is the most uncomfortable social connection for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and Trump’s donation’s to Hillary are the second, then their daughters’ friendship is the third-clearest suggestion that the pair’s furious denunciations are conditional or at least exaggerated by the needs of the campaign.
Trump called Hillary “evil”, “insane,” and declared she “caused tremendous death with incompetent decisions. Hillary called Trump an “un-American” “demagogue” “trafficking in prejudice and paranoia.”
And yet… not long ago, they ran in the same New York social circles and their daughters hang out intermittently. This is the world we live in, where Ted Cruz, simply by his status as a U.S. senator, is considered part of the establishment or an insider, and the guy who hosts the Manhattan parties with the Democratic lawmakers is the outsider.