It’s another mind-bending day in America.
Fox News’ “Outnumbered” host Dagen McDowell defended Ivanka Trump Wednesday, saying if retailers had dropped brands owned by family members of past presidents, people would find it easier to call those scenarios “wildly sexist if not racist.”
“But I think that it’s unfair because she’s not the president. She’s a family member with the same last name,” she said. “And if it was any other family — female family member — of any other president in modern history, this move would be called wildly sexist if not racist.”
It was a comment that caught a few people off guard.
The Fox News host was addressing the controversy over Nordstrom’s recent decision to pull Ivanka Trump’s line of clothing and accessories from its retail and online stores.
Nordstrom brushed off claims politics is the reason behind last week's move. Instead, the company pointed to poor sales.
It’s a decision that riled the U.S. president, so much that Donald Trump assailed Nordstrom in a tweet from his personal account — retweeting it from the official POTUS handle, too.
When asked about what the president thinks about retailers breaking ties with his daughter’s company, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said it’s more a personal attack on his family than the business.
“He ran for president. He won. He's leading this country. I think for people to take out their concern about his actions or his executive orders on members of his family, he has every right to stand up for his family and applaud their business activities, their success,” Spicer said during Wednesday's press briefing.
McDowell’s comment, said less than a month after America bid farewell to its first black president, did not acknowledge how Trump’s presidency and businesses bring unprecedented potential conflict of interests to the White House.
And, with the exception of Barack Obama, all of America’s past presidents in modern history have been white. Obama’s two daughters were children when he took office in 2008. At the time, they did not serve as heads of companies bearing the family name.
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