Ivanka Trump is truly her father's daughter. When Daddy Trump makes anything less than the most horrible possible decision, we hear from anonymous Ivanka-linked sources that it was her steadying influence and aren't we oh-so-glad we have the reasonable, not entirely insane Ivanka at Donald's side to occasionally stamp out stray embers of the raging garbage fire that is the Trump White House.
When Trump truly does make the most horrible possible decision, which has been happening far more often than not as the months go by, Ivanka's allies or Ivanka herself pops up to complain that the same outlets that are forever writing about her reasonableness and influence are being meeeeeeeeean by involving her.
“Some people have created unrealistic expectations of what they expect from me,” she said. “That my presence in and of itself would carry so much weight with my father that he would abandon his core values and the agenda that the American people voted for when they elected him. It’s not going to happen. To those critics, shy of turning my father into a liberal, I’d be a failure to them.”
Now that is spoken like a Trump. Donald has, in the last months, embarked on a series of insanities that no prior president would have considered, from nixing the world's central climate accord to both-sidesing white supremacist marches to would-be budget cuts that even longtime Republican burn-it-downers immediately panned as non-starters to the banning of Muslim immigrants to stepped-up deportations of children to an unending stream of pissy Twitter fights unbecoming of a high school substitute teacher, much less a sitting president. But I can only do so much, moans Official Presidential Adviser Ivanka With An Office In the White House. There's no way to make you people happy!
The first daughter said she only wants to be judged on the policy issues she has decided to tackle herself, like gender equality in the workplace.
It seems to me there were some other policy meetings she sat in on as well. Do those not count? It seems we were forever hearing from Ivanka-friendly sources of all the times she tried to moderate Papa Garbage Fire—I presume we can safely discard all those?
All right, what great strides in gender equality, subsection the workforce, can we expect?
Anything? Or, after this too is met with a new Trump Justice Department directive that enforcement of gender equality laws and policies will be going onto the same scrap heap as the rest of American civil rights protections? What new outcome can we look forward to from this new policy front, other than an executive order stating that presidents are now able to enter any dressing rooms they see fit?
Ivanka Trump had two paths to choose when her father put his hand on the little book on inauguration day: She could be a presidential daughter, or she could be a member of a presidential administration.
She chose. And when the administration has achieved nothing but chaos and intentional malevolence, people are going to question her competence and motives along with those of everyone else. It's not as life-altering an experience as being barred from asylum in this country, being required to leave it, being banned from the military, or wondering if the health insurance that keeps you alive will still be there six or 12 or 18 months from now. But you can see how it would be stressful for those who considered such things unfair.