When it comes to the use of personal social media accounts, the ethics office employs a "totality of the circumstances" approach. The fact that one's title appears among other details in the bio section of an account does not necessarily make an endorsement a violation. But... /1

it's a bad idea to include your title in the bio because that's a factor weighing in favor of finding a violation occurred. If, as Ivanka Trump does, you use an otherwise personal social media account to tout official activities of the administration, that's another factor. /2

If you use that social media account to tout a company's product a few days after the company's CEO publicly praised your father-president from the White House rose garden, that's one more factor weighing against you -- and a particularly strong one at that. /3

If you tout the company's product in an obvious response to the backlash the company is facing for the CEO's remarks about your father-president, you knowingly link your account in people's minds to your official activities; you create the appearance of official sanction. /4

Under these circumstances, if you're a top presidential adviser in the president's inner circle, there's a strong appearance that you're endorsing a product in your official capacity. It would be disingenuous for anyone to argue that you weren't making an official endorsement. /5

For this reason, Ms. Trump's Goya tweet is clearly a violation of the government's misuse of position regulation, 5 C.F.R. § 2635.702. Ms. Trump has had ethics training. She knows better. But she did it anyway because no one in this administration cares about government ethics./6

Why should she? Her father defended Kellyanne Conway when she told America to "go buy Ivanka's stuff." Contemporaneous reporting indicates that Ms. Conway's violation was profitable for Ms. Trump's product line. Ethics violations pay, if you don't mind the cost to the republic./7

There's a particularly unseemly aspect to this violation: it creates the appearance that the government's endorsement is for sale. Endorse the president and the administration will endorse your product. /8

That too is in keeping with the administration's track record. This is, after all, the president who asked Ukraine to investigate his political rival and conditioned the delivery of hundreds of millions of dollars in desperately needed aid on the performance of that favor. /9

There's no distinction in the minds of administration officials between the personal and the official. Their message is that the government and the people it represents exist to serve Trump's personal interests. The chief "public servant" aspires to be served by the public. /10

In a lawless administration, it would take strength of character and a conscious choice to abide by ethics rules. Few would expect a nepotist, whose only qualification for White House employment is her family relationship to the president, to exhibit such character. /11

In this regard, Ms. Trump's misconduct is not surprising. It's disappointing that she has lived down to our low expectations for members of her family, but disappointment has been the one consistent theme of the Trump administration in matters of government ethics. /12