"We will follow two simple rules: buy American and hire American," Donald Trump pledged during his January 20 inaugural address. "Except if you're in the family," he added.
Okay, that last part wasn't actually spoken, it was just universally understood by anyone with a brain. Anyway, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, writes NBC News:
Despite President Donald Trump's calls for American companies to manufacture their products in the U.S., shipments of his daughter's branded, Chinese-made dresses have continued to land on U.S. shores since he took office, documents reviewed by NBC News show. [...]
Since Election Day, the apparel brand run by Trump's daughter has imported 56 shipments of Ivanka Trump products from China and Singapore, part of a total of 215 shipments from Asia since Jan. 1, 2016. [...] NBC News traced 53 of the 56 shipments to Chinese ports and three to Singapore.
And thanks to Kellyanne Conway's "buy Ivanka" pitch from the White House in early February, sales of the line surged 207 percent that month over those in January, when sales where slumping.
Remember the campaign trail? “Day one,” Trump was going to declare China a "currency manipulator." Now Trump's Commerce Department is quietly considering changing China's trade status away from it being a "Non-Market Economy."
Escaping from this label is something China has sought for more than a decade and that Chinese leaders consider a matter of great national pride.
For its part, just after the election, China approved a Trump trademark he'd been seeking for about a decade, with a couple dozen to follow in the intervening months.
"It looks pretty suspicious," said Richard Painter, a law professor and former chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush Administration. "It looks like the Chinese government is trying to ingratiate itself with President Trump after President Trump has used some very harsh rhetoric toward China."
Even as her father has taken a tough line on China's trade policies, though, Ivanka Trump has been "on a charm offensive with China, using her children to help woo the Chinese public," according to the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong-based newspaper owned by Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba.
Last week, the paper noted that Trump's daughter recently made a "surprise visit" to the Chinese embassy in Washington with her 5-year-old daughter, Arabella Kushner.
Huh. Maybe Ivanka took "Buy American" as a campaign to get Chinese folks to buy American labels made in their very own country.