So, last night I tried to read through the 231 pages of testimony that Ivanka Trump gave to the January 6th Select Committee on April 5, but I gave up somewhere around the 100th page because how many times can you read that someone says “I don’t recall” when asked a question about an event in which that individual was involved?
I’m referring here to two meetings in the Oval Office on January 6th, the first meeting prior to Trump making his speech at the Ellipse, the second meeting after the riot started and Trump was drafting the remarks which told the rioters to ‘go home,’ a statement which ended with these words: “So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel but go home and go home in peace.”
Try as she might, Ivanka Trump just couldn’t recall much of what happened that day, in particular how she felt about whether her father was upset about what was going on.
Ivanka’s memory lapses weren’t, of course, intentional. They were due to the role she played at the White House, which was “to run the Office of Economic Initiatives, focused on working-family policies, expanding access to paid leave and affordable childcare, workforce development initiatives and job training programs, initiatives relating to combating human trafficking and child exploitation. [p. 14]
Ivanka never was involved in political issues during her White House tenure, because as she told the Committee, she was “incredibly passionate about the work [she] was doing.” [p. 21] To be more specific, she also told the Committee that “my focus was on the work I was doing in the White House. That was always where my focus was – and celebrating all the great things that this Presidency had accomplished for the American people. [p. 25]
Exactly what these ‘great things’ consisted of was never made clear in her testimony, with the exception of one program, something called the Farmers to Family Food Box Program which was run by the USDA and was supposed to get food directly from farms to families who couldn’t go food shopping during the Pandemic.
This program was so successful that the USDA shut it down several months after Trump left office with a terse announcement that there were “distribution problems.” But Ivanka thought this program was a great success and, by the way, her work on it had no political implications whatsoever. She only focused on ‘policy’ which is how she defines ‘celebrating’ her father’s achievements as President.
I have to admit that the Committee members who questioned Ivanka went out of their way to be polite. At no time did any member of the Committee – Cheney, Raskin, Schiff – react to her stupid, and self-serving testimony with the contempt which her comments deserved. For that matter, Bennie Thompson’s description of her remarks as being ‘not forthcoming’ was the understatement of the year.
Had I been allowed to question Ivanka about January 6th, my first question would have been aimed at getting her to explain how and why she was so enamored of policy issues, particularly government policies designed to help ‘working Americans’ make ends meet. Not only didn’t Ivanka evince even the slightest shred of interest in such issues before her father started producing a reality TV show called ‘Forty-five,’ but her previous career had been devoted to making a buck by selling some crummy and overpriced jewelry under the family name.
Ivanka did manage to glam herself onto one policy initiative, a project run by the World Bank which gives start-up capital to female entrepreneurs in all those ‘shithole countries’ who keep sending their good-for-nothings to rape and pillage in the United States. The picture above is from a big meeting the group held in Dubai in 2018, where Ivanka sat on a panel and said the usual bromides about women, economic development and world peace.
When I was eleven or twelve years old, my mother and I were walking around the National Zoo (I was born and raised in D.C.) and my mother pointed to a woman her age walking alongside the bird cage with two young girls.
"There’s the Vice President’s wife and the two daughters,” Mom said to me, pointing at Pat Nixon with the kids. If there was a security guy anywhere near them, he sure was staying out of the way.
That was then, this is now. And now the children of Presidents don’t visit the National Zoo except to hold a press conference about animal ‘rights’ or some other stupid sh*t. Today, members of the Presidential family go to public events in Dubai and work for important issues like peace, gender equality, and economic growth.
Did the members of the January 6th Select Committee actually believe that Ivanka Trump would tell them anything about her father’s behavior during the Capitol riot that they already didn’t know?
Dollars to doughnuts, if Ivanka had been asked whether her father was drinking a Diet Coke while he watched the riot on TV, she probably would have said, “I don’t recall.”
