When President Trump set in motion the United States withdrawal from the expansive Paris climate agreement, he was tearing down a central element of Barack Obama’s legacy — and the perception that his daughter would shape and moderate his administration’s policies.
This is a loss for Ivanka Trump in a family that keeps score. And it suggests the limits of her influence on the highest-stakes policy questions in a new nationalist administration. In the zero sum debate over carbon emissions, and in the broad outlines of health care, Ivanka’s role appears so far to have been softening the margins while figures like Trump advisor Steve Bannon set the course.
“The president’s survival and potential for success is tied to fulfillment of the agenda that got him elected,” Roger Stone, a fierce internal critic of the younger Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner, told BuzzFeed News. “To the extent that Kushner and Ivanka are repelled in trying to get him to violate what he promised, [that] is a good thing for the president. What they don’t understand is that when they urge him to do things that are antithetical to what he ran on they are doing him a disservice.”
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