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Just this June, in honor of Pride Month, the presidential daughter and special assistant to the president pledged to be an ally for the LGBTQ community, tweeting, “I am proud to support my LGBTQ friends and the LGBTQ Americans who have made immense contributions to our society and economy.” That support evidently doesn’t extend to the likely thousands of trans servicepeople (that's the “T,” in LGBTQIA, Ms. Trump), who signed up to risk their lives on behalf of all Americans and whose careers now hang in the balance. (True to form, President Trump was quick to tweet, but by press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s own admission, seems to have no plan for those current trans military members, and according to some theories, he dashed off the ban in an effort to appease his blood-red base. Today, the Department of Justice dealt the LGBTQ community another blow, filing a brief that argues against workplace protections for LGBTQ employees.)
By now, though, empty words from Ivanka Trump are no longer noteworthy; they are the norm—as routine as the president’s cyberbullying (any day now with your First Lady initiative, Melania) and schmoozing from Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci. While Ivanka is repeatedly credited as “having her father’s ear,” the trans ban is just the latest in a string of defeats on what are believed to be Ivanka’s stated causes. On climate change: It was she who met with Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio during the transition, only to see her father make the U.S. one of the only developed nations on the planet to pull out of the Paris climate accord. While she fancies herself an “advocate for the education and empowerment of women and girls,” she’s been conspicuously (dead) silent as her father rolled back workplace protections that apply to the gender pay gap and continues to urge (to the point of public shaming) GOP congressmen to defund Planned Parenthood and pass health care bills that would strip coverage from millions of women—not quite a boon to women’s empowerment.
So far, as noted by former senior adviser to President Obama Dan Pfeiffer, “Ivanka might be the least influential Presidential advisor in history.” So much so that a hilarious satirical New Yorker piece that imagines that her advocacy for a “signature issue” like climate change amounts to merely considering to purchase a Klean Kanteen water bottle has started to feel disturbingly true. God bless nepotism, because an adviser this ineffectual might normally resign or be ousted. But Ivanka gets a few slow claps of credit just for being one of the lone supposed social liberals bold (alternately: shameless) enough to put on her sheath dress and show up to a White House this hostile to women and the underrepresented. In the case of the trans military ban, The Daily Beast reported that Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, oppose “all the anti-LGBT initiatives” but “they quickly determined” that their “political capital be spent elsewhere.”
Which begs the question: what political capital? Ivanka Trump has displayed none in her father’s White House—and it’s time to accept that there’s a good chance she never will. To invoke the old cliché, if insanity is repeating the same actions over and over and expecting a different result, it’s time to stop expecting Ivanka will do anything meaningful with her proximity to power. It would be pointless to continue to note her silent opposition to her father’s agenda or paint her as a bastion of virtue amid Steve Bannon’s alt-right swamp. She is not going to save us, or anyone else. And she is not going to stand in Trump’s way as he scandalizes Boy Scouts, or sanctions potentially unconstitutional discrimination from the Oval Office.
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http://www.vogue.com/article/ivanka-trump-ineffective-adviser-give-up-hope
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