Mainstream media is all abuzz about the breaking news late Wednesday that President Trump’s eldest daughter Ivanka Trump is officially joining the White House staff as a “special advisor” to her father.

Not since former President George W. Bush worked closely with his father President George H. W. Bush’s campaign for president in 1988 has a member of a president’s family been so closely involved, but even then the younger Bush did not attend high-level presidential meetings like Ivanka Trump, 35, has been doing.

Soon after President Trump’s win in the November national election, President Trump named his son-in-law Jared Kushner, 36, Ivanka’s husband, as a “chief” advisor to the president. 

During her father’s campaign for president and since the Jan. 20 inauguration, Ivanka Trump has been seen accompanying her father on out of town trips, during presidential cabinet meetings with her husband and during luncheons and dinners sitting with various heads of state visiting President Trump and the White House. Obviously the president’s critics are voicing concerns about nepotism – the hiring of family – and other ethics violations.

According to a statement from Ivanka Trump, she has put her considerable personal business interests under separate management and will concentrate solely on her unprecedented, unspecified and unpaid role in her father’s presidency. Ivanka Trump will receive a classified security clearance, an office in the West Wing of the White House and a government issued telephone device.

“I have heard the concerns some have with my advising the President in my personal capacity while volunteering with all ethics rules, and I will instead serve as an unpaid employee in the White House Office, subject to all of the same rules as other federal employees,” Ivanka stated. “Throughout this process I have been working closely and in good faith with the White House counsel and my personal counsel to address the unprecedented nature of my role.”

Let there be no doubt that this move is extremely controversial to say the very least, but if President Trump wants his daughter by his side during his presidency there is nothing the president’s critics can do to stop her front-line presence in national and international politics and policy creation.

In response to criticism, a U.S. Department of Justice official gave the following justification for Ivanka Trump’s appointment as a “special advisor” to her father.

“In choosing his personal staff, the President enjoys an unusual degree of freedom, which Congress found suitable to the demands of his office,” wrote Daniel Koffsky, deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ Office of Legal Council, which serves as interpreter of federal law for the White House.

According to CNN Politics, last January Koffsky said that anti-nepotism laws cover only appointments in an “executive” agency and that the White House Office is not an executive agency within the law. He cited another law that gives President Trump broad powers to hire whoever he wants on his senior staff.

That law authorizes the President to appoint “employees in the White House Office without regard to any other law regulating the employment or compensation of persons in the government service.”

Only time will tell just how involved Ivanka Trump will be in President Trump’s White House and what her focus will evolve into. It remains unknown if Ivanka Trump will be seen in the National Security Situation Room in the White House while her father — the president — deals with an international or domestic crisis or ongoing military conflict somewhere in the world.

It was also announced this week that none of President Trump’s staff or family will attend the annual White House Correspondents Association Dinner in Washington on April 29 out of “solidarity” with the president, who in February flatly refused to attend the event clearing showing his disdain for his treatment from mainstream media during his campaign in 2016 and since his inauguration. It has been decades since a sitting president did not attend this dinner.

“The WHCA board regrets this decision very much,” said Jeff Mason, president of the WHCA. ”We have worked hard to build a constructive relationship with the Trump White House and believe strongly that this goal is possible even with the natural tension between the press and administrations that is a hallmark of a healthy republic.”

In the past two years since New York billionaire Donald Trump announced his intention to run for the presidency mainstream media has gone beyond “natural tension” in their disrespect for President Trump and the presidency itself. The Democrats and mainstream media have been heavily criticized for forming together an “opposition party” designed to tear down President Trump and his agenda for America.

About the Author

Britt Nelson relocated to Costa Rica in 2011 from Florida, where he served as news editor for the Palatka Daily News, a newspaper owned by the New York Times Regional Newspaper Group (NYT-RNG) for 20 years.

Nelson served the NYT-RNG for 18 years in Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida as a correspondent, reporter, staff writer, senior staff writer training new reporters, copy editor, page designer, editorial writer, editorial page editor and editorial board member.