Marco Rubio's latest awkward moment: a failed hug with Ivanka Trump

Ivanka Trump’s ramrod posture and the ungainly movements of a Republican senator were all it took to distract the public from a government meeting on Wednesday about paid family leave.

The Florida senator Marco Rubio appeared to fail in an attempt to hug the president’s daughter before the meeting, creating an awkward image that adds to Rubio’s enduring collection of physical gaffes. He has also accidentally hit a child with a football and clumsily drunk water in a live speech broadcast to the nation.

Those moments required significant clean-up from Rubio’s press team, but he had an ally on Wednesday as he and Trump laughed off the awkward incident in nine tweets following the incident.

In the tweets, they exchanged banter about the hug being investigated by the Senate intelligence committee, which is expected to meet with Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner, this month as Congress investigates her father’s administration’s ties to Russia.

The Russia scandal seemed far from the minds of Rubio and Ivanka Trump as they tweeted about the failed hug, which went viral and overshadowed the ensuing meeting of Republican senators, representatives and Trump addressing family leave.

The United States is the only industrialized country that does not guarantee workers paid family leave, in part because of Republican resistance to providing federal funding for such a program.

Trump has proposed addressing this with a plan to offer six weeks of mandatory paid leave for mothers and fathers, marking a possible shift in typical Republican policy.

“There’s a growing desire in the Republican conference in the Senate and House to address the fundamental fact that there are people in America who have decided they can’t afford to have children because they can’t get a month off of work and not get paid,” Rubio told reporters after the meeting.

The meeting was only with Republicans, though Trump has expressed interest in hearing from the left about her plan. So far, Democrats have been critical of Trump for pushing for paid family leave as her father’s administration cuts other support programs geared towards low-income families.

The lingering moment from Trump’s meeting with Republicans, however, is likely to be the stilted hug.