On Saturday, a Russian official tweeted out a photo, that has since been deleted, of first daughter Ivanka Trump sitting in her father’s place at a meeting of world leaders at the G20 summit on the topic of African migration and health.
Ivanka, an unpaid but official White House adviser, briefly took President Donald Trump’s seat between Chinese President Xi Jinping and British Prime Minister Theresa May when Trump stepped out of the room.
A White House official told the Associated Press that Ivanka Trump had been sitting in the back of the room, and moved forward when the president of the World Bank began discussing topics related to a new women’s entrepreneurship fund she is working on.
“The official said that when other leaders stepped out, their seats were also briefly filled by others,” AP reported.
The stand-ins for other heads of state, however, were government ministers or senior officials, not a family member with no previous foreign policy experience. Several U.S. pundits condemned the move as “grotesque” and reminiscent of a “banana republic.”
Just a few weeks ago, in an interview on Fox News, Ivanka Trump said that she tries “to stay out of politics.”
“I don’t profess to be a political-savant,” she said. “I leave the politics to the other people and work on issues I deeply care about.”
