About six months ago, in the long-ago springtime of the Trump presidency, Ivanka Trump made an offer to Cecile Richards, the head of Planned Parenthood. The first daughter had pressed her father to say positive things about Planned Parenthood during the 2016 campaign, and now she had a proposal for the organization’s leader: What if Planned Parenthood split up, creating a small operation that ran abortion clinics and a larger one whose health clinics didn’t perform abortions? Then her father would call for increasing funding to the larger operation, instead of joining with congressional Republicans in their efforts to defund Planned Parenthood entirely.

This anecdote has surfaced repeatedly in stories about Ivanka’s role in the Trump White House, and it’s been typically used to highlight her naïveté, her inexperience with politics and the superficiality of her attempts to smooth her father’s edges. In this month’s extended Vanity Fair takedown of the first daughter and her husband Jared Kushner, the Planned Parenthood episode is cited as one of their many “dismal” forays into “the work of Washington society.”

As someone distinctly underwhelmed by the usual “work of Washington,” I have a somewhat different thought. It was indeed implausible to imagine that Richards would seriously consider Ivanka’s proposal. But as a political idea, a way of rethinking the whole Planned Parenthood debate, it reminded me of Ivanka’s father’s 2016 approach to many questions — the Trumpian habit of ignoring the ideological assumptions around an issue, and groping toward views that more Americans might be likely to support.

In a sense, Ivanka’s proposal was calling multiple bluffs. The most common defense of public funding for Planned Parenthood from uneasy-about-abortion Democrats is that disposing of tiny human lives is a vanishingly small portion of its work. But this is highly misleading: It implies that Richards’ organization performs, say, a few thousand abortions for high-risk pregnancies and rape victims annually, instead of the real number, which last year was 328,348 — dwarfing the number of prenatal care visits by a factor of more than 30.