“I love policy and impact. I hate politics. And unfortunately, the two are not separable,” Ivanka Trump said on Skinny Confidential’s “Him & Her Show” podcast this week. Trump's eldest daughter served during his first administration, originally as an unofficial advisor. Ivanka soon took an official — but unpaid — position as an assistant to the president, working to help pass the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and representing the country (and her father) at international events like the World Economic Forum in Davos.
But no more.
“To some degree, I’m at the center of the storm because my father is about to be president," she told Skinny Confidential on Tuesday, "but it’s a very dark, negative business. And some people love the gladiator aspect of it — the fight. That was never me.”
Thank goodness her dad does, right?
"I think I’m most looking forward to just being able to show up for him as a daughter and be there for him to take his mind off things, to watch a movie with him, or watch a sports game," but she won't be talking shop or pushing Trump 47 legislation on Capitol Hill.
Let's put policy aside for a moment because Ivanka is not exactly a conservative, but I wish we had more people like her. This nation's institutions and civic health would be in much better shape if we only had two things:
- More public figures who hate politics and don't want to serve.
- The power to draft them into public service.
I'm not even half kidding.
Robert Heinlein wrote about this problem in his 1959 novel "Starship Troopers." Only those who had served in the military or performed some other kind of dangerous public works service were eligible for full citizenship, the franchise, or public office. For that, Heinlein was called a fascist. Because of course, he was.
But the idea that public service ought to be limited to those who have first given something to the public is an intriguing one — even if only because it would have disqualified a power-hungry draft dodger like Bill Clinton before he even got started.
Our finest politicians have been those, like Ronald Reagan, who never dreamed of pursuing politics until it was almost forced upon them. Reagan started as an FDR Democrat and a union leader. But as head of the Screen Actor's Guild, his speaking tours of the country put him face-to-face with Communist plants. He slowly evolved into a conservative — his published diaries are a fascinating read — who saw better than most the dangerous path his country had taken.
The worst are those like Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, just to pick three recent examples at random. They dreamed of wielding the levers of power their entire lives and grew rich without ever having provided a useful product or service in the private sector. Worse, they enriched themselves while impoverishing our liberties.
The Founding Fathers provided very few qualifications for office and almost no disqualifiers. If it were possible to write the human heart into law, I'd add to the Constitution that the desire to hold power — rather than defend liberty — would be an automatic disqualifier from seeking public office at any level. But that isn't possible.
So it's up to us.
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