The House Jan. 6 Committee hearings are finally underway, and amid a deluge of new revelations about the role of former President Trump and his allies in unleashing hordes of armed rioters on the U.S. Capitol, some insights notably came from the former president’s own daughter, Ivanka Trump.
You remember Ivanka—the purse-shilling former First Daughter, who was not only Donald’s favorite and perhaps the only one of his children he could stomach, but also, disturbingly enough, the object of his lust. On Thursday evening, Ivanka testified that at the time of the insurrection, she accepted then-Attorney General Bill Barr’s statement that the Justice Department had found no fraud sufficient to overturn the election. Barr has more recently recounted telling former President Trump that claims of a stolen election, which galvanized the insurrection that killed at least seven, were “bullshit.”
In response to Ivanka’s testimony, proving he’ll eventually come for anyone, Donald Trump has finally thrown his own daughter under the bus. In a Friday morning post on his ridiculous social media platform Truth Social, Donald claims Ivanka’s words aren’t to be taken at face-value, because she “had long since checked out” by the day of Jan. 6
“Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!),” Donald wrote.
Now, 45 has never exactly been “father of the year.” It’s no secret that he regards his eldest sons Don Jr. and Eric as a pair of bumbling buffoons; Tiffany is a woman he doesn’t find hot and is therefore useless to him; and you can’t convince me he spends more than five minutes a week with youngest son Barron. But I never expected him to come for Ivanka, whose conventional good looks and insidious white feminism helped him get elected in the first place.
I can’t speak to how mentally present Ivanka was toward the end of her father’s presidency—to his point, senioritis is very much a real thing. But she still served in his administration as a senior advisor, accompanied her father to the Jan. 6 rally that would escalate into the insurrection, and for weeks prior had joined her father in publicly pushing the Big Lie. She’s hardly a victim here, comically sad as it may be that her daddy has finally turned on the only person he ever seemed to marginally care about.
Ahead of Thursday’s hearing, Ivanka reportedly met with the Jan. 6 Committee for about eight hours in April. In one of the clips shown on Thursday, which her father seems specifically irked by, Ivanka says Barr’s conclusions about the outcome of the 2020 election “affected my perspective.” She added, “I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was saying.”
Other pieces of her testimony reportedly corroborate other witnesses’ claims that the former president was reluctant to try to deescalate the situation, or call off the rioters despite being advised to do so. So, really, I guess they mutually threw each other under the bus. I’m just over here making popcorn.