Deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday said the United States “should be proud” that Ivanka Trump took her father’s place at a meeting of G20 leaders over the weekend, a decision which quickly drew criticism.
“I think that we should be proud to have Ivanka sitting in that seat, considering particularly the topic at hand was part of her portfolio,” Sanders said at an off-camera White House briefing.
An unnamed senior administration official told CNN that when Ivanka Trump stepped in “the topic involved areas such as African development — areas that will benefit from the facility just announced by the World Bank,” an initiative Ivanka Trump helped develop.
President Donald Trump on Monday defended his decision to step away and have his daughter, a senior White House adviser, take his place at the meeting of world leaders.
“Very standard,” he tweeted, and claimed that if Chelsea Clinton did the same “the Fake News” would endorse her for president.
Asked when the President will stop re-litigating issues from the 2016 election, when he attacked not just his opponent Hillary Clinton but her daughter and husband as well, Sanders said his tweet “wasn’t about putting them in the front.”
“This was about responding to an outrageous attack against a White House senior adviser,” she said. “And it’s a pretty standard protocol that when the leader gets up, someone takes their seat.”
