Despite widespread consternation over the news that President Donald Trump’s eldest daughter Ivanka Trump will be officially joining her father’s administration as an unpaid adviser, David Axelrod is looking on the bright side.
“There’s nepotism issues, there’s conflict of interest issues,” the former chief adviser to President Barack Obama said during an appearance on The View Thursday morning. As “bright” and “skillful” as Axelrod thinks both Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner are, he said, “they’ve never been in government, no one around the president in a senior role has ever been in government, the president’s never been in government, never served in the military.”
“This is one of the reasons why the first 70 days have been so calamitous, and I’m not sure she’s going to add to that,” he continued. “But I will say this. If the one thing she does is say, ‘Dad, let me just hold that cell phone for you.’ If she does that, then she will have done a great service to him and the country.”
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Axelrod, who was on The View to promote a special televised version of his podcast The Axe Files with Senator John McCain airing on CNN this Saturday night, was speaking the same morning that President Trump once again used his Twitter account to threaten his fellow Republicans in the House Freedom Caucus, vowing to fight both them and Democrats in 2018.
Earlier in the interview, Axelrod said he was “stunned” (if not “pissed”) when he first saw Trump’s tweets accusing Obama of “wiretapping” him, a claim that was officially dismissed as baseless during a congressional hearing with FBI Director James Comey.
“The thing was so ludicrous, it was just so incredible, because anybody who knows anything about government, which may let him out,” Axelrod said, taking a shot at Trump, “would know that a president can’t order a wiretap.”
“Even if you ascribe those kinds of motives or that kind of attitude to Barack Obama, which I found an astonishing claim, it would just be impossible to accomplish,” he added.
