The annual G20 summit is a dry, diplomatic affair that rarely offers viral moments. This year’s gathering in Japan was an exception, thanks to Ivanka Trump. The French government posted a clip last weekend that shows British Prime Minister Theresa May and French President Emmanuel Macron deep in discussion as the president’s eldest daughter awkwardly interjects. Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, appears visibly irked. The moment drew widespread scorn on social media and spawned the hashtag #UnwantedIvanka, where she was photoshopped into various historic scenes.

Ivanka, accompanied by her husband Jared Kushner, played a strange starring role in President Donald Trump’s East Asian trip. At times she appeared to act as a ceremonial stand-in for First Lady Melania Trump, who stayed in Washington. But she also took on roles usually reserved for senior diplomats and national-security personnel: Hobnobbing with foreign heads of government, accompanying her father to an impromptu meeting with Kim Jong Un at the Korean Demilitarized Zone, and delivering filmed readouts of Trump’s meetings with the Indian and Japanese prime ministers.

It’s hard to not feel a deep sense of national embarrassment from the spectacle. The G20 has its share of corrupt authoritarian figures, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El Sisi. Each of those dictators still had the self-respect to not bring their unqualified adult children to international summits. Nepotism at the White House is hardly the most urgent or dangerous scandal in the administration, but it’s a scandal nonetheless. What’s more, it offers some useful insight into the president’s approach to governance, power, and democracy.

The problem starts at the beginning. For decades before his 2016 bid, Trump floated himself as a presidential candidate with varying degrees of seriousness. In 2000, he joined the Reform Party, announced a presidential exploratory committee on Larry King Live, and said he would choose Oprah Winfrey as his running mate. He toyed with the idea of running in 2012 but decided to keep his lucrative TV contracts instead. Each prospective bid came about not because he had a coherent vision of the nation’s ills and how to remedy them, but because it was a great way to garner free publicity from an amused news media.

By the time Trump actually ran in 2016, he had assembled an inchoate set of ideas for voters: the nation’s elite have failed us, foreign countries are taking advantage of us, trade deals are hurting us, immigrants are attacking us, and so on. But the fundamental dynamic—using his political career to further his personal and business interests—never really went away. Trump’s campaign spent roughly $12 million in 2016 to reimburse his companies for using Trump properties for events and his private aircraft to travel there. His inaugural committee also spent millions of dollars at his Washington, D.C. hotel in 2017, reportedly paying above market value in some instances.