Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, recently explained just how much she’s fallen in love with Jiu-Jitsu. As far as celebrity BJJ enthusiasts in the USA go, it doesn’t get much bigger than the President and his immediate family. This isn’t the first time that Ivanka Trump has mentioned how much she’s been enjoying the sport either, as she initially revealed that she started training at The Valente Brothers academy with the rest of her family in an interview with Lex Fridman. Although it started with her children, she experienced the same pull that many parents have and has started training alongside them.
She started out by explaining that it started with her daughter specifically:
“She came to me and said: ‘You know, as a woman, I feel like I need to know how to defend myself, and I don’t have a confidence level yet that I can do that.’ My jaw just hit the ground because at 11, I don’t know what I was doing. I was thinking about boys or something, but I was not thinking about being able to physically defend myself.”
Her daughter isn’t the only one of Donald Trump’s grandchildren who has started training Jiu-Jitsu either, as the other side of their family recently received their grey belts. As Ivanka Trump went on to reveal, it wasn’t long before the rest of her family discovered an interest in Jiu-Jitsu:
“I started driving her to these classes. She started asking me to join, so I joined. Then my two sons wanted to do what their older sister was doing. Then my husband joined. It’s supposed to be really good for kids, right? It is good for everyone, and it’s like multiple things I like, so it meshes. Physical movement… it’s almost like a moving meditation because the movements are so micro, it’s like three-dimensional chess.”
As with many people who first discover the sport, she has clearly become enamoured with some of the things that make Jiu-Jitsu special. She went on to talk about exactly why she was so attracted to it in the first place:
“There’s a real spiritualism to it, like the grounding in Samurai tradition, culture, and wisdom. As someone who’s always been drawn to philosophy, I love how it meshes movement with deeper principles.”
The full interview with Ivanka Trump where she discusses her love for Jiu-Jitsu was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of the Him & Her Show:
