None of that is normal. Nor is it at all appropriate.

The seeds of this sort of weekend have been growing for a while now — ever since the President found a loophole in the Federal Anti-Nepotism Act that allowed him to appoint both Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, to senior roles in the White House. (Ivanka, Jared and Don Jr. were all officials on Trump’s presidential transition team, too.) The law, put into place after John Kennedy named his brother, Bobby, as attorney general, has been interpreted to only apply to federal agencies, which the White House is not. And in truth, the roots were even growing before that — when Trump refused to put his assets in a blind trust — instead delegating Don Jr. (and another son, Eric) to run the company in his stead. (It’s not at all clear that the President avoids talking about the health of his business with his two sons.)

Trump has never made a secret of his belief and trust in his children over, well, everyone else. He kept them close to him in his businesses and his reality TV world; Ivanka and Don Jr. were regularly presences on “The Apprentice” and “The Celebrity Apprentice” — playing the right-hand man (and woman) to “Mr. Trump.”

All of which makes the fact that Trump appointed Ivanka and her husband to senior — yet amorphous — roles in the White House all the more troubling, and predictive of a moment like the one we saw over the weekend. (Trump told Plott that he had no idea what Ivanka would do as a job at the White House; “So I didn’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure she knew.”)

Sidebar: Ivanka isn’t the only member of her family who likes to play at being secretary of state — often to the chagrin of the actual secretary of state. Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently recounted a series of episodes in which the first son-in-law was acting as a sort of top diplomat — including one time where Kushner was having dinner with Mexico’s foreign secretary without Tillerson’s knowledge. Step back and consider what we are talking about here: We have two people, both of whom are related (by blood and by marriage) to the President of the United States and neither of whom have been confirmed by the Senate (or anyone else) to their current roles, acting as quasi-official diplomats for our country. And a President who not only condones this behavior but encourages it!

And that’s not to mention that stateside, the eldest son of the President is stoking birtherism conspiracies against one of the leading Democrats running to unseat Trump.

The conclusion is simple yet startling: Trump runs the country like a family business — treating those related to him differently than everyone else. The problem — among a series of issues — with a setup like this is that we are NOT talking about a family business, we are talking about the United States government and, in the case of Don Jr., the campaign to reelect (or not) the President in 17 months’ time.

Allowing Ivanka and Don Jr. (and Kushner) to be free radicals of sorts in the chemistry of government is a dangerous experiment. […]