It’s not about Ivanka

The horror of migrant children being separated from their families at the border has caused a great deal of pain. A great deal, that is, for Ivanka Trump. The wails of babies and the anguish of their parents were “a low point for me,” she said in an interview Thursday with Axios.

It turns out she feels “very strongly about that, and I am very vehemently against family separation and the separation of parents and children.”

What’s more, it turns out immigration is complicated. “These are not easy issues,” she said. “These are incredibly difficult issues and like the rest of the country, I experience them in a very emotional way.”

Unlike the rest of us, Trump is in a position to have done something about it, given her unprecedented role as both first daughter and a top White House adviser. At a minimum, it might have been helpful if she had spoken up publicly months ago. Or proposed some kind of alternative. Or resigned.

But like pretty much everything else Trump does, her comments told us more about her than about the issue she supposedly cares so passionately about. Her tenure in Washington has amounted to little more than an elaborate personal branding exercise to burnish her modern-working-mom aura.

But that image has gone the way of her soon-to-be-defunct line of shoes and dresses. In the case of both, no one is buying it any more.