While many celebrities have outright disavowed the president, Jennifer Garner is trying to meet him where he's at and work with him. She already planned a meeting with Ivanka, and though it fell through, she's hopeful about speaking with her at some point — or, even better, her father.
She even knows where she wants to do it. "Send me a ticket to Mar-a-Lago. I’m ready to go down and have a steak and a good chat," she told The Washington Post. Her primary goal is to persuade him to help make education affordable through government funding of literacy programs and tax reform. She grew up around kids who couldn't start school on time, and she's also seen what happens when children lack a decent education as a board member of Save the Children, which offers programs for teaching kids how to read.
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
When she encounters a child from a rural area, she'll sometimes start singing "Humpty Dumpty." When they can't come up with the line "had a great fall," she knows they're probably from poor families. "You just wouldn’t believe the number of kids who have never heard a nursery rhyme," she said. "If there is tax reform and there’s nothing for poor, working families in this country, and families that are middle class and struggling, that’s not good."
So, she's taking Trump to task. "People felt like Trump really understood them, that he was going to come in and create jobs for them ... They felt like they needed something to just turn everything upside down," she said. "If he’s willing to help the poor kids who got him elected, then let’s do it. They certainly think he’s going to."
In the meantime, Garner's already advocated for better education policy at a National Governors Association meeting, Fox News reports, speaking about her childhood "surrounded by generational, rural poverty" and kids who "disappeared off the face of the earth" when they stopped going to school.