Johansson ‘baffled’ by Ivanka Trump’s advocacy comments
Channel: Crazy America 1996
Date: 2017-04-08

Ivanka Trump explained this week that there are many ways to have your voice heard — but Scarlett Johansson clearly doesn't think all of those ways are created equal.

Rather, she called Trump "cowardly" and "old-fashioned" for saying she would influence her father, the president, via direct discussions rather than public protests and interviews. 

Johansson was, in a word, "disappointed."

"It's such an old-fashioned concept that to be this powerful woman you can't appear to be concerned with — you're going to feel that somebody's going to think that you're 'bitchy,'" the "Ghost in the Shell" actress said at the Women in the World Summit on Thursday.

"It's so uninspired, and actually I think really cowardly, and I was so disappointed by that interview she gave yesterday."

That interview was a sit-down the younger Trump had with CBS News' Gayle King, where. among other things, the first daughter explained what she'd be doing as an assistant to the president and how she intended to do it. 

"I think most of the impact I have, over time, most people will not actually know about," Trump said. 

Johansson — who proclaimed her own views loud and proud at the Women's March on Washington in January — was not OK with that approach. "It baffles me. The whole situation baffles me," she said. 

The 32-year-old granted that things must be complicated for the first daughter, whom she'd met in the past growing up in New York, though in explaining herself she made one presumption not necessarily backed up by facts.

"I can't imagine how complicated it must be to see your parent ... in the position that he's in and know, deep down, and not so deep down, that it's a position he never actually really wanted," Johansson said. "And now he's in this position, finds himself there, and I think as a daughter and as somebody that looks up to a parental figure like that, it must be pretty -- it's a unique and strange thing."

Trump told King that her critics shouldn't think that because she's keeping her mouth shut publicly on various issues, she's doing the same in private.

"We're in a very unique time where noise equals, in a lot of people's perception, advocacy, and I fundamentally disagree with that," said the businesswoman, 35.

When it comes to being heard, Trump said, "In some case, it's through protest and it's through going on the nightly news and talking about or denouncing every issue in which you disagree with. Other times it is quietly, and directly, and candidly."

She wasn't the one who'd been elected president, Trump explained, but wanted to help her father do a "tremendous" job. It wouldn't make her a more effective advocate for her positions, she said, to go public whenever she disagreed with her dad. 

Johansson would do it differently, it appears, were she an assistant to the president. "How old-fashioned, this idea that behind a great man is a great woman," the actress said. "What about being in front of that person or next to them or standing on your own?"