Originally Posted: March 31, 2017
This is an excerpt from a March 30 Christian Science Monitor article “Ivanka in the Trump White House: the rewards, and the risks.” Read the full article here.
Boosting the ‘New York faction’
If Trump is signaling a pivot toward the center, bringing his daughter in as a full-time adviser strengthens the point. Ivanka also adds more heft to the “New York faction” within Trump’s White House staff, which clashes in world view with the populist nationalists on Trump’s team, led by former Breitbart News executive Stephen Bannon.
In fact, both factions suffer from a lack of experience in government, and the arrival of Ms. Trump to the West Wing does nothing to alleviate that deficit.
“The overriding problem with the Trump White House is that it has too few people who know how to work the government,” says Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, in an email. “Bringing Ivanka into the West Wing does nothing to address that problem. Rather, it means that there is yet one more influential voice that may be able to debate goals but has little sense of how they might be achieved in government.”
Still, the arrival of Ivanka Trump as a full-fledged participant in West Wing life can also be seen as a positive, says Troy of McGill University.
“Maybe he’s starting to learn the ropes, maybe he’s understanding that there’s a whole set of rules and protocols in Washington, which you have to follow,” he says. “So you can’t just have your daughter move to Washington, [rent] a fancy house, and pop into the White House when it suits her.”