After enraging the so-called alt-right, white supremacists trolls who make up a significant portion of his fan base earlier this week, President Donald Trump is now facing another angry sect of supporters — right-wing commentators who insist his daughter and top White House aide Ivanka is actually "a lot like Hillary Clinton."
Ivanka Trump is "becoming like Hillary Clinton in the worst ways," former Ted Cruz aide and conservative commentator Amanda Carpenter said on CNN Tuesday. Speaking of the audibles boos the first daughter elicited when speaking to a women's summit in Germany, Carpenter said: "she's sort of becoming increasingly unlikeable."
Carpenter clearly had her ear to the growing drumbeat against Ivanka emitted from some of the most influential players in conservative media in recent days. Interestingly enough, however, none of Ivanka's detractors in conservative media have complained about her ethically questionable role in the White House or her proposed foundation — just her ideological influence on her father.
"Ivanka Trump’s policies are sounding a lot like Hillary Clinton, and we didn’t want Clinton in the White House," Alex Jones wrote on his Infowars site this week. "We didn't elect her. And she's over in Germany with Merkel, that opened the borders up for all the Islamisists ... and she says for women we should let refugees in and that her dad's wrong and she wants him to change his mind," Jones said in a video posted online Thursday.
Speaking on Wednesday on NBC's "Today" show, Ivanka said that she thought that opening America's borders to Syrian refugees "has to be part of the discussion," adding that such a step is "not going to be enough in and of itself."
Of course, Trump twice attempted to ban Syrian refugees and compared people fleeing the war-torn region as a "Trojan horse." Ivanka's mildly humanitarian suggestion has, in turn, caused some conservative commentators to cast her aside as an apostate of the Trump administration.
"Ivanka's left-of-center positions are causing trouble for President Trump," a writer at the right-wing PJ Media argued in a column titled, "Left-leaning Ivanka becoming Donald Trump's problem child."
Another columnist at the conservative Washington Times wrote, "Raise the red flag and sound the alarm."
"Conservatives and border control advocates are quite right to be concerned," Cheryl K. Chumley wrote, asking, "Who’s he going to listen to — Ivanka or us?"
Even Breitbart, the right-wing website ran by top White House advisor Steve Bannon before he joined the Trump campaign in 2016, has covered Ivanka's statements. AOL also reported that in comments on two pro-Trump Facebook groups "users were shocked and disappointed" by Ivanka's comments. At least some in the White House might agree, as The New York Times reported:
two advisers to Mr. Trump, who declined to be identified talking about an internal White House dispute, described the statement as a political misstep. Her comments, they said, revealed a simmering private policy debate in the White House that pits Ms. Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, against hard-core nationalists like the president’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and the policy adviser Stephen Miller, who see the crackdown on immigration from Muslim nations as fulfillment of a core campaign promise to Mr. Trump’s white working-class base.
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