Ivanka Trump’s left-of-center positions are causing trouble for President Trump. Many passionate supporters of Trump didn’t like it one bit when he gave her a prominent advisory role in his government. Both the “alt-right” and actual conservatives feared she would push her farther left on a host of pivotal issues, including on the Planned Parenthood funding battle and the Syrian migrant security issue.
Although Ivanka is losing on the former, she’s still fighting for the latter, which must put her father in a difficult spot:
Ivanka Trump, juggling dual roles of White House adviser and daughter of the president, said in an interview aired on Wednesday that the United States might need to admit more refugees from Syria, a pointed public departure from one of her father’s bedrock populist positions.
Ms. Trump’s comments, which seemed to question the basis for President Trump’s two executive orders that tried to bar migrants from Syria and other predominantly Muslim nations, set off a minor scramble in the West Wing. Advisers grappled with a political problem unique to Mr. Trump’s family-business White House: how to manage an officially empowered daughter who is prone to challenging elements of the president’s conservative agenda.
“I think there is a global humanitarian crisis that’s happening, and we have to come together and we have to solve it,” Ivanka said. When asked whether this meant she supports allowing Syrian refugees to come to the States, she answered:
That has to be part of the discussion. But that’s not going to be enough in and of itself.
Oops.
The result? A massive scramble in the White House:
But two advisers to Mr. Trump, who declined to be identified talking about an internal White House dispute, described the statement as a political misstep. Her comments, they said, revealed a simmering private policy debate in the White House that pits Ms. Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, against hard-core nationalists like the president’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and the policy adviser Stephen Miller, who see the crackdown on immigration from Muslim nations as fulfillment of a core campaign promise to Mr. Trump’s white working-class base.
Breitbart.com, the website Bannon ran before he joined the Trump campaign in 2016, has also covered Ivanka’s statements. Although the reporter refrained from commenting on her remarks, some Breitbart commenters were less diplomatic.
“It’s time for Trump to put a lid on Ivanka,” wrote “elizabethrc.” Presently, that was liked 1224 times.
Commenter VANITAS wrote: “It’s almost as if we voted for a leftist presidency. We already have more than enough welfare leeches in the west. We don’t need more.” That has been liked almost 500 times.
More than 10,000 similar comments are currently below the Breitbart article, most being outspokenly negative about Ivanka.
In short, Trump’s decision to place an ideologically opposed family member front and center in his administration has — predictably — become a problem for him.
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