Silently vocal
Princess Ivanka gets another fawning interview with people who should know better:
[T]hings got worse at the end of the interview when Brennan went to extreme lengths to portray her as a moderating force in her father’s White House.
On the topic of immigration, Brennan described Ivanka as “vocal in your opposition” to the inhumane family separation policy her father implemented in April 2018, noting that she described the policy as a “low point.” But Ivanka was not in fact “vocal” in opposition to the policy — in fact, the opposite is the case.
As my colleague Emily Stewart chronicled at the time, Ivanka — supposedly an advocate for women and families in the administration — only spoke out in opposition to the family separation policy after her father signed an executive order in June 2018 ending it. She was conspicuously silent in the days leading up to that point, as heart-rending stories and images of children being separated from their families along the southern border were in the news.
Because guess what, Ivanka isn’t some stealth-decent person working undercover in her daddy’s corrupt regime. She’s what she looks like: a pampered rich offspring who has no intention of cutting off the cash supply by offending her rich daddy.
Brennan’s misleading characterization of Ivanka’s position on the family separation policy was later echoed in a tweet from the Face the Nation account that included video of the exchange and has a ratio of more than 3,100 (largely critical) replies to 151 retweets as this is published — one that indicates CBS’s framing is going over [badly].
Ok, but you have to admit, her hair is very smooth.
Executive order ending family separation in June 2018?
If we’re being generous, we might consider it plausible that she applied pressure behind the scenes while remaining silent in public. But I have seen no reason to grant her this generousity.
Reminds me of Thabo Mbeki’s “quiet diplomacy” – which looked suspiciously like supporting a dictator who was trampling the rights of Zimbabwe’s citizens, because that is exactly what it was.