On a day when the President of the United States effectively washed his hands of Saudi Arabia’s brutal murder of the journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi , it may seem a bit tendentious to focus on his daughter’s e-mail habits, but bear with me. Although there is no moral comparison between Donald Trump’s disgraceful toadying up to the Saudi royal family and Ivanka Trump’s decision to use a private e-mail address for official government business, they are indicative of a common attribute of the Trump family: overweening entitlement and hubris.

Since the night of the 2016 election, Trump has interpreted his unlikely victory in the Electoral College as a mandate to do pretty much whatever he wants to do, including refusing to sell his business holdings or place them in a blind trust, and appointing his daughter and son-in-law to senior—if vague—positions at the White House. In a country that long exalted austere Presidents who viewed the Presidency as solemn public service, Trump crowed openly when he discovered that many of the federal ethics statutes didn’t apply to him. He and his sons, who still run the Trump business empire, have regularly used the Presidency to promote Trump properties, such as the Trump International Hotel in Washington; the Mar-a-Lago resort, in Palm Beach; and several of Trump’s golf clubs.

Trump behaves as he does because he is a bad man, but also because he has internalized, in the course of his career, an important lesson: the bigger the effrontery, the more likely you are to get away with it. (It’s the conman’s version of Goebbels’ “Big Lie” principle.) Thanks to the New York Times, we now know that the family real-estate fortune that he inherited was enlarged by years of systematic tax evasion. As a developer and self-promoter in his own right, he parlayed a largely disastrous record—bankruptcies, restructurings, bank bailouts—into a lucrative second career as a television celebrity and manager of the Trump brand. When he turned to politics, he bluffed his way to the Oval Office by exploiting mountains of free media, mercilessly attacking his opponents, and pulling an inside straight that ran through Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Neither his blanket refusal to release his tax returns nor the unearthing of the “Access Hollywood” tape halted his progress. So it is little wonder that he doesn’t adhere to norms—whether they apply to his business empire or the conduct of the Presidency. In Trump’s mind, only saps play by the rules.

Unlike her father, Ivanka Trump at least pays lip service to the First Amendment. (“I do not feel that the media is the enemy of the people,” she told Axios’s Mike Allen this summer.) But the First Daughter, as she has become known, appears to have inherited the family’s disregard for other rules and regulations, as well as its cavalier attitude toward the truth.

In October of last year, The New Yorker, ProPublica, and WNYC published a report revealing how, in 2012, Ivanka and her brother Donald Jr. narrowly avoided being indicted by New York prosecutors on charges of misleading the buyers of condos in the Trump SoHo hotel about how well sales were going. In an e-mail obtained by investigators, the “Trumps discussed how to coördinate false information they had given to prospective buyers,” the story said. “In another, according to a person who read the e-mails, they worried that a reporter might be on to them.”

Was that incident a one-off? In 2009, Ivanka said in an interview that a Trump-branded property in Toronto was virtually sold out. In reality, “24.8 percent of units had sold, according to a 2016 bankruptcy filing by the developers,” a second report by ProPublica and WNYC revealed. In Panama, the Trumps lent their name and marketing expertise—for a hefty fee—to a seventy-story waterfront development that opened in 2011. During the financing of the project, the report by ProPublica and WNYC said, “Ivanka told a journalist . . . that ‘over 90 percent’ of the Panama units had sold — and at prices five times as high as comparable buildings. Both statements were untrue.”

If you ignore the political context, one could argue that the Washington Post’s revelation that Ivanka “sent hundreds of emails last year to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules” doesn’t amount to much. But, of course, the context cannot be ignored. For two years, Ivanka’s father traipsed around the country claiming that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server, when she was Secretary of State, was “bigger than Watergate.” Even today, he salutes the crowds at his rallies as they chant, “Lock her up.”

The Post story said that when White House officials asked her about her use of a private account, “She said she was not familiar with some details of the rules.” In a statement, her spokesperson claimed that, unlike Clinton, Ivanka didn’t set up a private e-mail server, or delete any of the messages that she sent from a private account. The statement added that the “emails have been retained in the official account in conformity with records preservation laws and rules.” Speaking with reporters on Tuesday afternoon, Trump himself repeated some of these talking points. “There was no server in the basement like Hillary Clinton had,” he said. “You were talking about a whole different, you’re talking about fake news.”

Actually, it still isn’t entirely clear what e-mail arrangements Ivanka used. The Post story, citing people close to her, said of her and her husband, “The couple’s emails are prescreened by the Trump Organization for security problems such as viruses but are stored by Microsoft.” Presumably, that is one of the details that Representative Elijah Cummings and his Democratic colleagues will be examining when they take control of the House Oversight Committee. “We launched a bipartisan investigation last year into White House officials’ use of private email accounts for official business, but the White House never gave us the information we requested,” Cummings said on Tuesday. “We need those documents to ensure that Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and other officials are complying with federal records laws and there is a complete record of the activities of this Administration.”

You can hardly blame the Democrats for picking up a gift that has been tossed into their laps, but the main point here isn’t about record-keeping. It is about the hypocrisy, arrogance, and hubris of a family that has sought to turn the Presidency into another Trump franchise. “Certainly, I think it’s hypocritical,” Anthony Scaramucci, who served briefly in the Trump White House, said on CNN. “You can’t do that in that position.” Unless, of course, you think that you are bulletproof, and you don’t really give a damn what people think.