Eric Trump said in a new interview that he believes his sister Ivanka Trump played a fundamental role in convincing their father President Donald Trump to launch missile strikes against Syria following a deadly chemical attack.
“Ivanka is a mother of three kids and she has influence,” Eric Trump said in an interview with The Telegraph. “I’m sure she said: ‘Listen, this is horrible stuff.’”
Trump launched unilateral strikes on Syria last week after a chemical attack earlier in the week killed dozens of civilians, including children. Eric Trump, who has no role in the Trump Administration, took over his father’s real estate business after he ascended to the Oval Office, but his sister moved to Washington, D.C., and recently announced she was formally becoming a government employee in the White House.
Eric Trump said his sister voices her opinion on issues she is passionate about in her role, and is able to tell their father when she disagrees with him.
“She is not involved in everything,” said Eric Trump. “I think she comes and goes with issues she deeply cares about, but when you get to a certain level of power a lot of times, and you see this in business too, a lot of times people will say yes just because you happen to be the boss.”
“I think the beautiful thing about family,” Trump added, “is you play on a little bit of a different dynamic and once in a while you can pull them aside and say: ‘No disrespect but you might want to think about this or maybe you crossed the line here.
His analysis echoed Ivanka Trump’s own sentiments. “Where I disagree with my father, he knows it, and I express myself with total candor,” she recently said on CBS.