Ivanka Trump takes heat for tweeting photo of Confederate Flag
Donald Trump’s entire foray into politics has been based on racism. He’s consistently promoted racist policies. He’s defended white supremacists. He regularly starts feuds with black athletes. So it would not be at all shocking if, let’s say, he tweeted a photo that had a Confederate Flag in it. Instead, people are trying to figure out why his daughter did precisely that on her Twitter account.
Ivanka used her official verified Twitter account to post four vacation photos on December 26th. They each depicted her husband Jared Kushner and her young son fishing on a boat. The second of the four photos has an unmistakable Confederate Flag in the background, attached to someone else’s boat:
Let’s be clear here: based on the distance between them, there is no reason to believe that the other boat was part of the Ivanka-Kushner fishing trip. In other words, it’s not their flag, and it probably belongs to someone they don’t even know. So it’s not as if this flag was in her photo because it was on her own boat. But it’s difficult to imagine that Ivanka Trump, the only member of the Trump family who tries to choose her words and actions carefully, somehow didn’t know she was tweeting a photo of a Confederate Flag. So what’s really going on here?
There are only two possible explanations, of course. One would be that Ivanka Trump carelessly tweeted a photo with a white supremacist flag in it because she didn’t notice it. The other would be that she did it on purpose, either to create a distraction, or because she thought it was funny, or because she was trying to help fire up her father’s racist base. Notably, a day and a half after she posted the photo, and long after she’s surely been made aware of it, she still hasn’t deleted the photo in question. That may tell us everything we need to know.
