Noted women’s advocate and expert on family and maternity policy, Ivanka™, returned from a couple of weeks relaxing on the slopes of Aspen to discover her father’s Health Care plan had collapsed in a shambles after the Freedom Caucus found the bill protected women and children a bit too much for their medieval tastes.

Waiting for Ivanka™ in the West Wing of the White House when she returned was a brand-new office and a brand-new kind-of actual job-type hobby-thingy after her daddy’s administration caved to public pressure and confirmed that she will become an official government employee.

The original plan of course was for Ivanka™ to become a shadowdy unpaid non-employee (“unprecedented” was the preferred term) Trump-whisperer completely unconstrained by the federal ethics regulations applicable to actual official government employees.

Although Ivanka™ and administration spokespeople insisted that she would voluntarily conform to the ethics guidelines, ethicists and people who understand how things actually work pointed out this was a ridiculous plan that basically was set up to allow her to skirt financial disclosure rules. Norman Eisen, former White House ethics lawyer for President Obama, and Richard Painter, former White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush of the ethics-watchdog group Democracy 21 wrote in a letter to the White House:

Under the proposed arrangement for Ms. Trump, she will not be a White House employee and will continue to own businesses that emphasis her brand name. As such, she will not make the commitment set forth in the oath of office that White House employees take and will remain unbound by government ethics and conflicts of interest rules, except to the extent that Ms. Trump voluntarily chooses to comply with them. This arrangement does not work and needs to be revised.”

So the White House decided that the better strategy was to make Ivanka™ an “official” although unpaid government employee and subject her to the same ethics and conflict of interest rules as other government employees.

Ok. So far, so good.

But after appointing Ivanka’s™ husband, Jared – less-douchey-than-my-own-sons – Kerchner to the position of Special Advisor to the President on Everything and Anything the so-called President seems determined to simply ignore anti-nepotism statutes. Because appointing ones own daughter to a government position is nepotism. And nepotism is illegal.

Maybe her new job title will be Special Advisor to the President on Nepotism.

Norm Eisen again:

My view… is that the nepotism statute does apply to the White House, for decades the Justice Department held ‘yes’ the nepotism statute applies to the White House.”

Critics of the White House might point out that appointing patently unqualified, inexperienced wealthy cronies to important positions of huge influence over a vast array of state and policy functions is exactly what Donald Trump promised to eliminate by “draining the swamp”.

However closer attention to Trump’s personal beliefs on genetics and nepotism shows that he is not intent on draining the swamp so much as repopulating it with a better breed of human – his family. After all they will protect the interests that really matter: Trump’s own.

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