Today, Politico reported that daddy’s dearest daughter had a bunch of secret meetings with the leaders of women’s groups soon after her father’s inauguration, including the heads of Planned Parenthood, the National Women’s Law Center, and the National Partnership for Women and Family. These meetings were described by the organizations as explainers for Ivanka so she could learn about what they did.
The timing of these secret meetings being leaked is, uh, very fortuitous for Ivanka, who recently came under fire for her silence on these issues, despite her apparent love of Female Empowerment™. In an interview with CBS earlier this week, Ivanka insisted that just because she was silent didn’t mean she was silent. “Where I disagree with my father, he knows it. And I express myself with total candor,” she told CBS.
The implication here is that Ivanka talked to a bunch of progressive women’s groups and has been whispering tiny denouncements into her father’s ear about the way the White House is handling women’s issues. But that is giving Ivanka way too much credit. There is no proof that she is secretly pushing against the GOP’s drive to destroy Planned Parenthood. (Just last month, her own father was using the defunding of Planned Parenthood as a stick to beat the House Freedom Caucus.) In fact, there is no proof that she cares about progressive issues at all. All we know is that Ivanka wants to have her cake and eat it too.