In general the families of political candidates and officeholders should be treated gently because it's not their fault their ma or pa decided to become a famous professional blowhard, but Ivanka Trump is, like Trump's less intelligible offspring Uday and Qusay, an integral part of her father's campaign, and transition, and apparently is going to get a new White House role as Substitute First Lady because, as far as we can parse out, the new commander in chief gets sweaty and irritable when she's not there to explain his own job to him.
If this is really the Trump plan, then that means Ivanka is going to be expected to divest from her own businesses just like her father is ethically required to divest himself from his own. Her business is her clothing line, and like nearly all clothing these days, the vast majority of it is made overseas in places like Indonesia and Vietnam. If she doesn’t divest completely or if she doesn’t make that administration leap after all, she might at least want to put her money where her very loud father's mouth is, and employ American workers instead of workers in not-America?
Since then, Ms. Trump, 35, has pondered making some items in-house. Investors were consulted, and a business plan was drawn up — but the project was scrapped, said one person briefed on the discussions. It was costly and impractical, so suppliers continued to make her clothes overseas.
“When I started my business, I recognized where my strengths were and knew that I didn’t have any experience in production and manufacturing,” Ms. Trump said in a rare interview. “I am not a designer. I am an entrepreneur.”
We also seem to have redefined the word entrepreneur a bit somewhere along the line, but that's a different subject. Fine, then. Ivanka Trump has excused herself from the difficult task of bringing clothing manufacturing jobs back to America because she is just an entrepreneur and that's not what entrepreneurs do. Entrepreneurs give speeches about what you should do, not what they should do.
So let's move on to the other question. If Ivanka is going to continue to meet with foreign heads of state and engage in other administration duties for her forever angry blowhard of a father, will she still be running her clothing business on the side, sending out press releases about the products she wore during her latest 60 Minutes interview or meeting with important diplomats of nations in which she's looking to expand her brand. The answer is ... maybe?
“I would completely separate myself from my businesses,” said Ms. Trump, who is also considering a leave of absence from the Trump Organization, where she serves as an executive vice president for development and acquisitions. Representatives for Mr. Trump declined to comment.
So the Ivanka Trump clothing line will still exist, but she'll be "separating" herself from it; since this is exactly what Donald himself has said at various points, between the other parts where he's said the opposite, it's unclear what that means. And if she's only "considering" a leave of absence from the Trump Organization even if she gets a job in the Trump Administration, that doesn't bode well for either her ethics or her father’s.
So we'll see. It's painfully apparent that nobody in Trump's family, from Melania to Ivanka to Uday to Qusay to the Great Pumpkin himself, had even the slightest idea what they were signing up for when pa decided to shift careers from professional rich person to, God help us all, the presidency of the United States. And they've only got about three weeks left to figure it all out.