Eric Trump ‘Sure’ Sister Ivanka Pushed For Syria Strike
Image by Getty Images
Ivanka Trump might have made the difference when it came to President Trump’s decision last week to attack a Syrian airbase following dictator Bashar al-Assad use of chemical weapons on thousands of civilians.
“Ivanka is a mother of three kids and she has influence. I’m sure she said: ‘Listen, this is horrible stuff,’” first son Eric told Britain’s Daily Telegraph.
He added, “She is not involved in everything. I think she comes and goes with issues she deeply cares about but when you get to a certain level of power a lot of times, and you see this in business too, a lot of times people will say yes just because you happen to be the boss.”
Ivanka is now a special assistant in her father’s West Wing, while Eric and brother Don Jr. are busy running the family’s real estate, golf resort and hotel business. She applauded the president’s strike on Syria in a tweet that cited the Assad regime’s human rights abuses.
She and husband Jared Kushner are seen as key players within the administration, and possible sources of moderation for a White House that has seemed erratic to many outside followers. But their influence has worried some on the far-right, some of whom have denounced the couple in anti-Semitic terms as puppet-masters.
Ivanka has been coy about her influence within the government, telling CBS News in an interview recently that “I’ll weigh in with my father on issues that I care about,” advising critics not to “conflate the lack of public denouncement with silence.”
She added cryptically: “Most of the impact I have over time, most people will not know about it.”
Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
