Once again, Trump makes one of his old tweets 'fake news'

Keeping it all in the family.
 By 
Marcus Gilmer
 on 
Once again, Trump makes one of his old tweets 'fake news'
German chancellor Angela Merkel (left) chats with Ivanka Trump (right) while Papa Bear President grumpily looks on in the background. Credit: UPI POOL/EPA/REX/Shutterstock

Anyone who has ever spent any amount of time on Twitter knows that other Twitter users are really just ravenous, blood-thirsty beasts who are waiting for you to slip up and contradict yourself so they can rub it in your face and taunt you about being a hypocrite.

Ask Mike Pence. And Kellyanne Conway.

Hell, this goes double if you're President of the United States. He's already had numerous tweets "come back to haunt him."

And here comes another one: a tweet sent by Trump in the days after the election, which insisted he wasn't trying to get security clearance for any of his kids (not even Tiffany!) as it would have created a conflict of interest, especially with regards to the family businesses they control.

On Tuesday, though, word broke that Ivanka would be getting security clearance, which allows her to see classified documents, and as an added bonus -- she will also be given her own office in the White House, even though she won't be officially working for her father's administration.

If it all seems really hinky, it's because it is. It's no less suspicious than when Ivanka sat in on Trump's first meeting with a foreign dignitary, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in Trump tower back in November, just one day after Trump's above tweet. And that meeting came at a time when Ivanka was still working on a business deal of her own with a Japanese company that had strong ties to the Japanese government.

All of this did not go unnoticed when word of Ivanka's security clearance hit the web on Tuesday.

And, according to the New York Times' Maggie Haberman, who has already done plenty of excellent reporting on the Trump White House, this decision wasn't new: it was the plan all along.

Now, Ivanka doesn't have a role in Trump's businesses anymore; that role has gone to Trump's two oldest sons, electoral map meme expert Eric and dollar store Brawny man Donald, Jr. But Ivanka has her own companies that have caused a bit of controversy already.

As Politico notes, Ivanka will experience all the access of a White House advisor without being subject to the same ethics rules that officially employed advisors are.

Thus, yet again, Trump has managed an impressive feat of gymnastics by taking one of his previous statements and turning it into the thing he hates the most: fake news.

Topics Donald Trump

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Marcus Gilmer

Marcus Gilmer is Mashable's Assistant Real-Times News Editor on the West Coast, reporting on breaking news from his location in San Francisco. An Alabama native, Marcus earned his BA from Birmingham-Southern College and his MFA in Communications from the University of New Orleans. Marcus has previously worked for Chicagoist, The A.V. Club, the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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