Ivanka Trump finally admits she’s a failure
Presidential advisers have one primary role: they offer advice to the president, which amounts to influence over the president. Ivanka Trump, for reasons known only to herself and her father, is officially a White House adviser to Donald Trump. The entire point is for her to influence his Oval Office decision making. Just don’t tell that to Ivanka, who is now flat out admitting that she doesn’t have any influence over him.
Even the most optimistic among the Resistance were merely hoping that Ivanka might be able to steer her father toward a slightly less deranged position on the occasional political issue. Best anyone can tell, however, she hasn’t been able to influence him on anything. Now she’s admitting her own failure in an interview which she oddly gave to the Financial Times (link). The whiny upshot: don’t expect her to be able to get her dad to give so much as an inch.
Ivanka says in the interview that “Some people have created unrealistic expectations of what they expect from me, 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.” Uh, no, Ivanka. Some people were just assuming that because you took the job of White House senior adviser to your father, you might be able to incrementally influence him in the way that all successful senior advisers incrementally influence the president.
The wackiest part may be that Ivanka Trump somehow initially thought she might be good at politics, despite having no experience and no skills and no clue. Financial Times says that “she has become more cynical, admitting in private that she finds DC politics prickly.”
