Ivanka Trump Tweets Fake Alexis de Tocqueville Quote That Said The Opposite Of What She Apparently Thought
Ivanka Trump took to Twitter this week to post a quote she attributed to famed political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville that warned about the dangers of partisan impeachment.
But, as many pointed out, there were two major problems — the quote was not actually from Tocqueville, and it the passage actually said the opposite of what Ivanka thought it did.
The tweet appeared to claim that once one group pushed an unfair or partisan impeachment process, it would signal a potential downfall of the United States. It seemed to be Ivanka pushing back against the impeachment hearings that President Donald Trump now faces.
“A decline of public morals in the United States will probably be marked by the abuse of the power of impeachment as a means of crushing political adversaries or ejecting them from office,” the quote read.
But as The Week pointed out, the quote was never actually written by the French diplomat and close observer of American democracy. Instead, it comes from an 1889 book called American Constitutional Law, Volume 1, by Judge John Innes Clark Hare. The quote that Ivanka cited was actually saying how the impeachment process was necessary in American politics, even if it had been abused in the past for President Andrew Johnson. Hare compared this to English law, where there is no check of the executive’s power and no means to remove one that is found to be incapable or corrupt.
Hare did cite Tocqueville, noting his prediction that America’s decline would be marked by the use of impeachment as a means of removing a political adversary from office, but noted that impeachment is one of the most important checks and balances in the American government.
This is not the first time that Ivanka has evoked a major political thinker in an attempt to defend her father. As The Inquisitr reported, she previously quoted founding father Thomas Jefferson in a widely criticized tweet. Ivanka cited a letter that Jefferson had written to his daughter, Martha, that reflected on his time in Washington. Ivanka quoted Jefferson as saying he was “surrounded by enemies and spies catching and perverting every word that falls from my lips or flows from my pen, and inventing where facts fail them.”
“Some things never change, dad!” Ivanka added.
Her tweet came just as the House of Representatives voted to formalize the impeachment inquiry and set the stage for public hearings that have now taken place over the course of the last two weeks.
