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Harriet Marsden
May 08, 2017
Getty Images / Pool
Much has been written about Ivanka Trump's unusual position in the White House.
Donald's second child is also effectively functioning as the First Lady of the United States, while his wife Melania Trump is in New York looking after their son, Barron, and keeping busy by suing the MailOnline.
Ivanka's also been appointed senior advisor to the President despite no government experience, which is definitely not nepotism because she's doing it for free.
She was hailed by some as a potential check on her father's more virulently misogynistic and anti-immigrant policies, but has since found herself criticised for being effortlessly #complicit and failing to challenge her father for her so-called causes.
And let's not forget, Trump famously remarked that it was OK to describe her as 'a piece of ass'.
Here's a list of some of Trump's creepier comments about his daughter Ivanka...
- "Don't you think my daughter's hot? She's hot, right?" (1997)
- "She's got the best body." (2003)
- "[...] voluptuous." (2006)
- "If Ivanka weren't my daughter perhaps I'd be dating her." (2006)
- "If I weren't happily married and, ya know, her father..." (2015)
So it's unsurprising that people view their relationship as unusually close, or even unhealthy.
However, there's a general line that people just don't cross - the 'universal taboo', or the Just Don't Go There remarks.
Host of HBO talk show Real Time and political satirist Bill Maher made the joke that nobody's supposed to make - the incest joke.
He said:
What do you make of Ivanka and her efforts to sort of humanise her father?
We see all this misogyny at Fox News, we see it in Donald Trump himself.
A lot of us thought, Ivanka is gonna be our saving grace.
When he's about to nuke Finland or something, she's gonna walk into the bedroom and - 'Daddy, Daddy...'Don't do it, Daddy.'
Maher then simulated Ivanka performing a sex act on her father.
And not everybody took kindly to it...
Although there were a few dissenting voices.
This is a throwback to a similar joke Maher made in November, when he performed at the Los Angeles Largo comedy club:
Be nice to Ivanka, she's our only hope - because she seems like she actually knows rationality, but she's his kid, and she's the only one who can get to him, and you know he loves her.Â
If he's going to do somethign nutty, we're going to depend on Ivanka going into that bedroom. 'Daddy, Daddy! You have to apologise for that tweet where you called Agngela Merkel a c****.'
In that case, Maher also mimicked the same action.
The jokes (and gesture) were clearly meant as a comical satire of Ivanka's alleged complicit nature and Trump's despicable sexual behaviour, rather than an actual accusation of an incestuous relationship.
That said, we'd like to point out the inherent hypocrisy of a liberal criticising Trump's sexism and misogyny, with a joke as offensively sexist as this.
HT: The Daily Beast
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