Maybe this is just her revenge for that very unfortunate quote about Tom Brady attributed to dad in the Times a few days ago?

Either way, Trump’s first tweet attacking her as a “lady cuck” for her comments this morning will be legendary. Says Drew McCoy, “Congratulations to Tiffany Trump on her promotion to Favorite Daughter.”

One fun thought experiment about the Trump era is which Trump child is most likely to inherit his political support should they choose to enter politics themselves. It’s an either/or question — Ivanka or Don Jr, as Eric and Tiffany don’t seem interested and Barron is many years away from thinking about it. Initially the conventional wisdom pointed to Ivanka. She was easily the best-known Trump child during the campaign and has always possessed her own star power. She’s good in interviews, intelligent and poised. Put all that together with her looks and she seems like a natural.

But all of that was premised on the belief that she’d take a populist turn herself while working in the White House and become a Marion Marechal Le Pen to dad’s Marine (or Jean-Marie, even). That’s where the GOP seems headed, after all. But it hasn’t worked out that way. She and Jared have stayed pretty low-key and Democratic-ish in their policy concerns; instead it’s Don Jr who’s wrapped his arms around populism, doing the Fox News media circuit periodically and buddying up to popular right-wing figures on social media. If you held a gut-check vote between him and Ivanka among the GOP base today, there’s no question he’d come out ahead. So much for Ivanka as the future, right?

Eh, I don’t know. There’s enough room for both of them in the party and Ivanka *might* be playing a long game in building the political identity that she has, as the loyal child who’s sufficiently pro-Trump to serve in the White House but not quite so much her father’s daughter that she’ll back him up on the things he says and does that most offend Democrats. Maybe the clips below are just her being her, but if you’re looking for strategy in it, you might say that she’s positioning herself as a representative of “softer” Trumpism, the sort of nascent politician who understands the policy concerns of dad’s base — note in the second clip when she says the laws must be enforced — but is smart enough to stay away from the rhetorical excesses that alienate much of the country. That’s not what Republicans want right now but is it what they might want in 10 years? I wouldn’t bet against her.

But who knows. Maybe she just misses her friends in NYC and is saying what she can here to try to mend the rift with them before eventually returning home. What would you rather do with your time, run for some grubby political office somewhere or be rich, famous, beautiful, and well-liked in Manhattan?

.@IvankaTrump: "No. I do not feel that the media is the enemy of the people."

Full video here: https://t.co/jDuINeDEQU #Axios360 pic.twitter.com/mH1FdeMe6v

— CSPAN (@cspan) August 2, 2018

.@IvankaTrump: "That was a low point for me as well. I feel very strongly about that. I am very vehemently against family separation and the separation of parents and children…immigration is incredibly complex as a topic." #axios360 pic.twitter.com/shU32wprwu

— CSPAN (@cspan) August 2, 2018