This is a sideshow story to the real story of Donald Trump pulling America out of the Paris Climate Accord. But we still have to talk about it, because there are still some people out there who want to believe in Precious Ivanka Trump. They want to believe that she’s a good – or at least moderating – influence on her father. They want to believe that she’s more than just his enabler, more than just a complicit, baby-whispering a–hole. She is not. She is complicit. She is little more than her father’s enabler. Ivanka has to take the L for what happened this week too, because she actually tried to use her questionable influence to change her father’s mind on the Paris Climate Accord. And she failed.

During her father’s presidential transition, Ivanka Trump hauled Al Gore into Trump Tower to discuss climate change with Donald Trump. She sat down with actor and activist Leonardo DiCaprio, who gave her a copy of his climate-change documentary, “Before the Flood.” She told friends and associates that she was picking and choosing the issues where, as a one-time Democrat, she might be able to influence her father. Climate change was on the list.

On Thursday, in a peppy Rose Garden ceremony that included a brass band, Trump announced he was withdrawing from the Paris climate accords — a fulfillment of a campaign promise, but also a major blow to global efforts to combat climate change. After she organized five weeks of meetings focused on the Paris agreement — including her own sit-down with EPA administrator Scott Pruitt and enlisting people like Apple CEO Tim Cook to speak to the president about climate — Ivanka Trump appeared to have lost on one of the issues where she at one point expected to hold some sway.

“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh — not Paris!” a defiant Trump proclaimed, pitching his decision as a move that “represents a re-assertion of American sovereignty.”

Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, have taken the defeat in stride, according to two people familiar with their thinking on the issue. Their view of their roles in the White House is that they’re playing the long game, helping the president to be successful. And they don’t tally their own influence day-by-day or bill-by-bill. But they were notably absent from the row of top aides gathered in front of the podium for the announcement. There, Trump’s top political strategist Steve Bannon, who has clashed with Kushner in the past and had been pressing Trump to withdraw from the climate change agreement, smiled happily under the beating sun.

Ivanka Trump was out of the office observing the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, a White House official said. Kushner walked to the White House after attending synagogue in the morning for a long-standing meeting that was on his schedule before Trump’s remarks were put together, and he also did not attend the Rose Garden event. But the White House official said Kushner was “fully involved with the process of the announcement.”

[From Politico]

Here’s my real question: if Ivanka can’t actually influence her father, why the f–k is she there? She might as well pack her bags and move her family back to New York. Oh, right. You mean that she was never there to actually influence policy and moderate her father’s most unhinged views? You mean she was always there just to be the chipmunk-veneered, baby-whispering catface of fascism? Oh, right.

Meanwhile, the walls are closing in on Precious Ivanka’s husband, Precious Jared. It’s all very complicated, but please read the latest on The Mystery of Why Jared Kushner Spends So Much Time With Russians and Russian Bankers. It is going to feel so sweet when Precious Jared is frog-marched away in handcuffs.

Photos courtesy of Pacific Coast News, WENN.