The following article by Marie Solis of Newsweek was posted on the National Memo website December 12, 2017:
President Donald Trump endorsed Roy Moore partly out of resentment against top advisers who condemned the candidate—including his daughter Ivanka Trump.
According to a Politico report, the president felt “resentful and angry” when Ivanka Trump condemned Moore in November and told the Associated Press there’s “a special place in hell for people who prey on children.”
“I’ve yet to see a valid explanation, and I have no reason to doubt the victims’ accounts,” Ivanka Trump said of the multiple allegations against Moore claiming he pursued inappropriate sexual relationships with teenage girls as an adult.
Her remarks echoed comments White House Director of Legislative Affairs Marc Short made just days before, during an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd. Short said Moore should have a chance to defend himself, but he also told Todd, “There’s no Senate seat more important than the notion of child pedophilia.”
At first, Donald Trump had only hinted at an endorsement for the candidate, writing in a November tweet that Doug Jones, Moore’s Democratic opponent, would be a “disaster” for the GOP’s agenda.
“The last thing we need in Alabama and the U.S. Senate is a Schumer/Pelosi puppet who is WEAK on Crime, WEAK on the Border, Bad for our Military and our great Vets, Bad for our 2nd Amendment, AND WANTS TO RAISES TAXES TO THE SKY,” Donald Trump wrote at the time.
But the president changed his tune just days later, explicitly endorsing Moore in a series of tweets and even calling up Moore personally to offer the candidate his full support. According to the Moore campaign, Donald Trump told him: “Go get ’em, Roy!”
Ivanka Trump is a self-proclaimed feminist who many hoped would push her father to be more moderate on issues affecting women. The first daughter and top adviser to the president, however, has said people have “unrealistic” expectations of her ability to change Donald Trump’s mind and overestimate her influence in the White House.
“Some people have created unrealistic expectations of what they expect from me,” she said in a September interview with the Financial Times. “That my presence in and of itself would carry so much weight with my father that he would abandon his core values and the agenda that the American people voted for when they elected him.”
She continued: “It’s not going to happen.”
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