This was the must-watch clip of last night's cable news. Strap in, folks.
Transcript from last night's Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell:
Ivanka Trump publically proved today she is the only White House staffer who knows she cannot be fired. She did that by saying two things that no one else in the White House would dare to say. On the same day that the White House Press Secretary disgracefully ran around in angry verbal circles, refusing to say that the news media is not the enemy of the people. Ivanka Trump said this:
IVANKA TRUMP: No, I do not feel that the media is the enemy of the people.
"No, I do not feel that the media is the enemy of the people" looks easy when Ivanka Trump does it. But the White House Press Secretary wouldn't dare say anything like that today. She wouldn't dare disagree with the president who says that the news media is the enemy of the people. Ivanka Trump also said this today:
IVANKA TRUMP: I am very vehemently against family separation. And the separation of parents and children.
Very vehemently. Not vehemently enough to resign from her job working for a president who would do such a thing. Not vehemently enough to actually go to the southern border when her father was ripping those children away from their parents and witness it all up close and report back to him on what his cruelty actually looks like. Not vehemently enough to visit the children in their cages in Texas. Not vehemently enough to try to find the infant babies when no one knew where they were, infant babies in her father's custody. She didn't feel it vehemently enough to go down there and see how the girls were being treated to make sure that the boys and the girls were safe from abuse. She did not feel vehemently enough about it to sit in a federal courtroom in Texas and watch an immigration judge treat Spanish speaking three-year-olds with no lawyers as adults and bring her eyewitness experience of that legal atrocity back to her father to get him to stop his unspeakable cruelty to those children. Ivanka Trump was not so vehemently opposed to children being ripped out of the arms of their mothers that she actually did anything about it. Ivanka Trump added this personal note today.
I am a daughter of an immigrant. My mother grew up in the Communist Czech republic. But we are a country of laws. So, you know, she came to this country legally.
And what if she didn't? What if Ivanka Trump's mother, Donald Trump's first wife, violated immigration laws of multiple countries on her way to becoming the first Mrs. Trump and the mother of a daughter who feels so "vehemently opposed" to ripping children out of their mother's arms at the border, that he did nothing about it? An immigration reporter [Aura Bogado] noticed that comment this morning by Ivanka Trump and raised a series of important questions about her mother's manipulation and violation of immigration law to get into the United States. And it is an easy story to tell because the first Mrs. Trump told the story herself in her book that she published just last year. He posted the pages of Ivanka Trump's book in which she explains that when she was 22, she married an Austrian skier just to get an Austrian passport. And in her book, she said the marriage wouldn't be real. It was only for me to get the necessary papers. That is a classic fraudulent marriage according to immigration law, but that marriage got Ivanka Trump's mother an Austrian passport. She used that Austrian passport to travel to Canada where she lived before finally moving to the United States to marry Donald Trump. While she was still living in Montreal, she made the two-hour drive to Vermont because she liked the snow there so much. The snow is dry there. The powder was so light, I could ski circles around the Americans. In no time, I became a ski instructor and taught kids how, In other words, in no time Ivanka Trump's mother became the kind of criminal that ICE enforcement agents are rounding up and deporting. She was illegally working as a ski instructor in the United States while living in Montreal on an Austrian passport. What the first Mrs. Trump did to make it to the United States was completely understandable. The fake marriage, the works. He put it this way after telling the Ivana Trump story on Twitter today. People do what they can to get to the US. They fake marriages, cross borders, get by on unauthorized labor. Have children that are called anchor babies. Was Ivanka Trump an anchor baby? Were her brothers anchor babies? Their mother was not a citizen of the United States when they were born. The first Mrs. Trump did not become a citizen until 11 years after her marriage to Donald Trump. Ivanka Trump's mother told her story about getting into the United States in a book written last year with her daughter working in a White House that was trying to deport people like her mother, when her mother was working at a ski resort in Vermont. And the first Mrs. Trump told that story innocently and openly just last year because she trusted that we would all understand and accept everything that she did, including every violation of law from Austrian law to Canadian law to American law to find a better life for herself in this country. And that is as truly American it was then. And it still is now. Ivanka Trump owes her very existence to her mother's dream for a better life in America. And now Ivanka Trump and her father are trying to crush that dream for anyone who comes to this country, the way Ivanka Trump's mother did.
[end transcript]
