Eric Trump: Donald Trump bombed Syria because Ivanka told him to

The president's daughter has "influence," and can apparently get him to alter his foreign policy at her whim

By Matthew Rozsa

Staff Writer

Published April 11, 2017 11:35AM (EDT)

 (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Less than a month after it was announced that first daughter Ivanka Trump was getting an unpaid job in her father's White House, her brother Eric is now speculating that she may have influenced President Donald Trump into abandoning his longheld opposition to attacking Syria and the Bashar Assad regime.

"Ivanka is a mother of three kids and she has influence. I’m sure she said ‘listen, this is horrible stuff.’ My father will act in times like that," Eric Trump told The Telegraph.

He added, "And by the way, he was anti doing anything with Syria two years ago. Then a leader gasses their own people, women and children, at some point America is the global leader and the world’s superpower has to come forward and act and they did with a lot of support of our allies and I think that’s a great thing."

Notably, however — and in keeping with Eric Trump's recent habit of accidentally stating truths that embarrass the rest of his family — he also used the interview as an opportunity to insist that there was nothing to see about his father's well documented connections to the regime of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

"If there was anything that Syria did, it was to validate the fact that there is no Russia tie," Trump told The Telegraph. This argument ignores the fact that Trump warned Russia before conducting his airstrikes on Syria,

Trump also said that he wasn't worried about Putin's threats of military retaliation over America's attacks on Syria, claiming that the president "is not a guy who gets intimidated. I can tell you he is tough and he won’t be pushed around. The cards will shake out the way they do but he’s tough."

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By Matthew Rozsa

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer at Salon. He received a Master's Degree in History from Rutgers-Newark in 2012 and was awarded a science journalism fellowship from the Metcalf Institute in 2022.

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Assad Chemical Weapons Donald Trump Eric Trump Ivanka Trump Syria Video