Watch Ivanka Trump Desperately Try To Convince Us That She's Actually Good

Ivanka Trump’s interview with Gayle King on CBS This Morning aired Wednesday morning, and it is exactly what you would expect from an interview in which Ivanka is asked to engage, even gently, with the destructive consequences of her father’s presidency.

Here are some highlights from the conversation:

She initially wasn’t going to have a role in her father’s administration, but then she processed and decided she should have a role in her father’s administration. This is good, actually:

I was processing real time the new reality and–and what it would mean … I realized that having one foot in and one foot out wouldn’t work … And the reality is that it–it all happened very organically for me.

She also took an official White House role to satisfy you, her critics. This is also good:

So to me the–this particular title was about giving critics the comfort that I’m holding myself to that highest ethical standard. But I’ll weigh in with my father on the issues I feel strongly about.

And while she still has myriad conflicts of interest—like her stake in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. and fixed income from her family’s luxury real estate brokerage agency—she has at least put her fashion brand-licensing business into a so-called blind trust operated by her in-laws with whom she (obviously) still keeps in close contact. It’s definitely good:

…they’re completely independent. And I’m transparent about that.

In her official capacity in the administration, Ivanka also promised to make her voice heard by never publicly criticizing her father or his policies. It’s good:

I would say not to conflate lack of public denouncement with silence. I think there are multiple ways to have your voice heard. In some cases, it’s through protest and it’s through going on the nightly news and talking about or denouncing every issue on which you disagree with. Other times it is quietly and directly and candidly. So where I disagree with my father, he knows it. And I express myself with total candor. Where I agree, I fully lean in and support the agenda and–and hope–that I can be an asset to him and–and make a positive impact. But I respect the fact that he always listens. It’s how he was in business. It’s how he is as president.

And she is absolutely complicit in this administration’s crackdown on immigrant families, reversal of basic environmental regulations, and rollback of protections for trans students if by “complicit” you mean “actually good”:

If being complicit is wanting to be a force for good and to make a positive impact, then I’m complicit. I don’t know that the critics who may say that of me, if they found themselves in this very unique and unprecedented situation that I am now in, would do any differently than I’m doing. So I hope to make a positive impact. I don’t know what it means to be complicit, but, you know, I hope time will prove that I have done a good job and much more importantly, that my father’s administration is the success that I know it will be.

Get ready for four more years of this.

 
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