While she could have stayed in New York, Ivanka decamped to Washington within days of her father’s election. Her purpose? To launch her boldest project yet: serving as First Daughter to be sure and, in some assessments, as a sort of “surrogate First Lady” while Melania Trump maintains her sanity in New York. Ivanka initially suggested that she might spend a lot of time in DC but not so much time at the White House (unlike Jared, who was sworn in as an “official senior adviser” to the president). But all that changed as winter turned to spring and Politico announced that Ivanka “is now officially setting up shop in the White House.”
“The powerful first daughter has secured her own office on the West Wing’s second floor—a space next to senior adviser Dina Powell, who was recently promoted to a position on the National Security Council,” the DC-insider publication announced. “She is also in the process of obtaining a security clearance and is set to receive government-issued communications devices this week.”
Ivanka’s current brand is something of a theatrical production: a White House version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. She’s the good doctor; her father is the pathetic soul who cannot control his raging id. From the very beginning of Donald Trump’s White House bidding, Ivanka Trump has promoted herself (and to a lesser extent husband Jared) as the conscience of the campaign, the conscience of the transition, the conscience of the administration. But a fabricated liberal conscience does not undo the inconvenient truth of Trumpism. It simply, in the parlance of Alaskan philosopher Sarah Palin, puts lipstick on a pit bull. Ivanka may avert an executive order here, or celebrate International Women’s Day there, but Muslim bans are still initiated, environmental protections are still abandoned, health care is still denied, international family-planning services are still gagged and Betsy DeVos is still in charge of dumbing down education.
People who had paid attention to the Trump family knew how the relationship of father and daughter would evolve even before the election—back in the days when the “false hope” crowd was still peddling “Donald Trump is an urbane and maybe even kind of liberal New Yorker” happy talk.
“Ivanka Trump Is Not Going to Save Us From Her Father,” warned New York magazine in the summer of 2016. “Of course, we all know Ivanka. This is true especially in New York, where Trump’s eldest daughter has become, like her father, one of the city’s stock characters, albeit one whose personality is more in line with the city’s current self-image than his. Where the Donald scowls and stomps and blusters around town like a fat-cat ghost from another era, Ivanka moves gracefully, with the unwavering poise she displayed in the 2003 documentary Born Rich, in which she was one of the few heiresses to comport herself with dignity,” wrote Jessica Pressler, a savvy observer of the New York scene. “It is often noted that she is the polar opposite of Donald, the suggestion being that someone as controlled as Ivanka must be somewhat embarrassed by her circus-
clown father. But no: Ivanka is ‘absolutely proud to be a Trump,’ as she told the makers of Born Rich, and shares with her father a sense of outsize ambition. On her this patrilineal zeal looks so much better, more modern: less ‘Greed is good’ and more ‘You go, girl.’”
But, this wise writer counseled, there was about Ivanka a darker side, a willingness “to overlook ugliness in exchange for success.” “She is not, as the Latin-American and Mexican version of Marie Claire recently begged, going to stop her father by talking to him,” explained Pressler. “If she has tried to get him to tone it down, as reports have suggested, it should be pretty clear by now that she has failed… She is not, after 34 years of control, going to lose her cool and rebel. As Ivanka has told us repeatedly: ‘Trumps play to win.’ And that’s what she and her husband, Jared Kushner, seem to be exclusively focused on now.”
The proof of Pressler’s point came several months later, when media outlets went wall to wall with the old Access Hollywood tape that revealed Donald Trump in full “grab ’em by the pussy” sleazy old-man mode. After a discreet silence, Ivanka released a much mentioned statement to Fast Company magazine in which she offered a carefully crafted acknowledgment-cum-defense of the man whose own words marked him as a sexual predator: “My father’s comments were clearly inappropriate and offensive and I’m glad that he acknowledged this fact with an immediate apology to my family and the American people.”
If anyone missed the point of her defenses of “my father,” Ivanka explained that her dad was really just the victim of media that portrayed Donald Trump as, well, Donald Trump. “The greatest comfort I have is the fact that I know my father. Most of the people who write about him don’t. I do,” Ivanka told Fast Company. “So that gives me an ability to shrug off the things that I read about him that are wrong.”
Of course, what Donald Trump said on the Access Hollywood bus was wrong—so wrong that the parents of young children could not let them near the news for several days at the close of what the Republican nominee for president referred to as “the very sacred election process.” But here was the self-proclaimed advocate for women and children covering for the candidate at precisely the point when he needed it most. It was the stuff of the Saturday Night Live skit that it became some months later when actress Scarlett Johansson portrayed a glamorous Ivanka peddling a new perfume named “Complicit.”
“A feminist, an advocate, a champion for women,” says the classic commercial voiceover before asking: “But, like, how? She’s loyal. Devoted. But probably should have bounced after the whole Access Hollywood bus thing.”
Ultimately, however, it is not Ivanka who is complicit. It is those who fall for the fantasy that she is going to smooth over the rough edges of her father’s presidency and make everything nice and New Yorky. Ivanka has made no secret of the fact that she is and will continue to be her father’s enabler, and that her husband is, if anything, even more complicit.
Like Ivanka, Jared Kushner is ideologically pliable and exceptionally loyal to Donald Trump. An overseer of his own family’s real estate empire—operating out of a skyscraper at 666 Fifth Avenue, just down the street from Trump Tower—Kushner is young and reportedly savvy. “It’s hard to overstate and hard to summarize Jared’s role in the campaign,” tech billionaire Peter Thiel, another Trump enabler, said in 2016. “If Trump was the CEO, Jared was effectively the chief operating officer.” That is somewhat overstated and rather poorly summarized: Jared played a genuine role in developing the social-media focus of the Trump campaign, but he had plenty of help from Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and a rogues’ gallery of hangers-on. The same goes for his position in the White House, which supposedly involves him in everything from reforming the criminal-justice system to addressing the opioid epidemic to reinventing government. As Fortune magazine notes: “Kushner has been given a litany of tasks, from international diplomacy to daily White House operations.” Sean Spicer says he’s in charge of “applying the president’s ahead-of-schedule and under-budget mentality to a wide number of government operations and services—enhancing the quality of life for all Americans.”
That’s a tall order. And the fact that some media outlets imagine that Kushner is actually endeavoring to fill it speaks to the fabulism that continues to be embraced by those who have not figured out that neither Trump nor Kushner keeps track of everything that this “always in campaign mode” administration claims it is going to do.
The essential fact with regard to Ivanka and Jared is that they are facilitators. They help Trump get things done; but they do not define what is getting done. The president’s daughter and son-in-law were, during the campaign, and remain to this day, trusted counselors for Donald Trump. They are empowered by that trust. But the counsel, to the extent that it errs toward the left of the administration’s trajectory, is only rarely taken. For the most part, Ivanka and Jared are props—and in Jared’s case a reported “person of interst” in the ongoing investigation into possible ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.
On the eve of Trump’s inauguration, the presid
ent-elect announced that he would charge Jared, whose Orthodox Jewish family has funded controversial right-wing settlement activity on the occupied West Bank, with sorting out ancient differences between Israel and Palestine. “If you can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can,” Trump told Jared at a festive dinner where the president-elect’s cabinet picks were celebrated. Trump’s aides and allies were smiling; they recognized that the president likes to talk about Kushner because he knows the guy who married his daughter a lot better than he does the people he has nominated to run things.
That does not mean that Jared won’t be meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a Kushner family friend and associate for decades. It does mean, however, that “Jared Kushner, who has no diplomatic experience or regional expertise” (as the Daily Beast explained), has an exceptionally ill-defined role. So ill-defined that, after meeting with Kushner, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger said, “It’s not clear to me in what way he’s in charge of it, whether he’s in charge of it with supervision from the White House, or whether he’s supposed to be the actual negotiator. Nor has it been defined what they’re negotiating about.”
Jared is not going to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. He can’t be in the cabinet, nor can Ivanka. Nepotism rules see to that. But Jared did play a weird role, based more on personal pique than measured assessment, in shaping the cabinet, if jarring insider reports from the transition process are to be believed.
One of Trump’s essential backers in the late stages of the 2016 Republican primary campaign was New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who endorsed the billionaire developer after folding his own presidential bid. Christie was a stalwart supporter, to the point of embarrassing himself with shameless displays of loyalty that made him little more than a gofer. But Donald Trump appreciates that sort of surrender and, when it came time to name a vice presidential running mate, Christie was reportedly the frontrunner. According to some accounts, the presidential candidate offered his most enthusiastic backer the number two slot. “Days before the Republican National Convention, however,” CBS News reported, “Trump reneged on the deal after others in his inner circle convinced him otherwise.”
The specific “others,” according to several accounts of the House of Cards scenario, were Jared and Ivanka. A source with direct knowledge of the situation told CBS that “it was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a key adviser, who made the final moves to seal [Indiana governor Mike] Pence’s fate and oust Christie.”
No problem. Christie got another gig as the head of the transition team that was supposed to put the pieces in place for a Trump presidency, with a special emphasis on building a strong cabinet. That made sense. While Christie may be a hothead with dubious ethics, he is also a sitting governor with actual experience putting together cabinets, making appointments and framing agendas. But when the Trump candidacy became the Trump presidency, Christie and the able associates he had pulled in to help organize the transition were tossed from the team. Just as the administration was embarking on its perilous journey, the people with the maps and the GPS systems were told that their assistance was no longer required. Why? Because, despite the fact that he wears cardigans and tennis shoes and affects a boyish persona, Jared Kushner can be as cutthroat and calculating as his father-in-law.
Jared “led the ouster of Christie allies from the president-elect’s transition organization,” explained USA Today, while less gentle commentators referred to the move as a “Stalinesque purge.” To be clear, there are plenty of reasons to dislike Chris Christie, and plenty more to argue for his exclusion from positions of public trust. But Jared had a distinct, particularly personal reason of his own. “It all goes back to his dad being prosecuted by Christie,” an in-the-know source explained.
A decade earlier, as a hard-charging U.S. attorney in New Jersey, Christie had indeed prosecuted Jared’s father, Charles Kushner. After Charles Kushner was convicted on eighteen counts of witness tampering, making illegal campaign donations and tax evasion, he headed to prison for fourteen months. The prosecutor then took a victory lap. “The court of law was the great equalizer for Mr. Kushner, who had obviously convinced himself that his power, influence and immense wealth put him above the law,” declared Christie, sounding populist themes that anticipated the 2016 campaign. “We are very pleased that justice was done.”
Christie’s prosecutorial bravado came back to haunt him, and Donald Trump, as the transition process moved into high gear. Kushner and other members of the Trump team denied that the knives were out. But as Christie allies and associates were purged one after another, Rutgers University political scientist Ross Baker, a veteran analyst of New Jersey political intrigues, told New Jersey’s Asbury Park Press: “I have to believe it’s a Kushner revenge.”
“That’s the only way to explain these demotions and departures,” Baker explained. “I don’t buy the argument that Christie flunked some kind of loyalty test. I think it’s Jared Kushner’s high hand behind this whole thing and it’s a little bit of karma, because Christie is known for getting even with people, too.”
The problem Kushner did not fully anticipate was that, when Christie and his allies were elbowed out of the transition process, months of work on the transition and decades of connections to potential White House appointees, especially in the legal and law-enforcement communities, were lost. Former congressman Mike Rogers, a key player on intelligence issues and close friend of Christie’s, left the transition team when his longtime ally was booted. The chaos became ever more evident, as the void opened by the purge went unfilled. “They really have to get the train on track,” argued Baker in mid-November, just weeks into what was turning into a very rocky transition. “Plus you’re trying to set up an administration for someone with no governmental experience and who operates a lot on whim and impulse. People who are trying to read the crystal ball are going to find it cloudy on how this is going to look by Inauguration Day.”
It was still cloudy on Inauguration Day. Thousands of executive branch positions remained unfilled, the new president’s initial address to the nation and the world sounded like a “written on the back of an unpaid bill” list of personal complaints and the festivities were so dismally organized that Trump landed in the middle of a bizarre debate about inflated crowd estimates.
The mess offered a measure of the influence that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner bring to the Trump White House. They might temper a statement here, or unmangle a message there, but they are more a part of the pettiness and the dysfunction than they are of the solution. To some extent this is because, like Donald Trump, they lack the basic experience that is required for governing. The most charitable thing that can be said about Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump is that they may not even know how their words and deeds prevent them from doing what they want to do.
It could be that Ivanka actually believes, as her website advises working women to believe, that “everything you need is already inside you.” But that’s a self-help mantra, not the agenda for the working women that Ivanka claims to champion (on her own and with Dina Powell, the former Goldman Sachs head of “impact investing” and veteran White House aide who has been charged with helping Ivanka advance an agenda of “entrepreneurship, small business growth and the global economic empowerment of women”). As author Amy Wilentz wisely observed in the Nation: “The fact that Ivanka is supposedly guiding women’s policy shows just how little—not how much—[Trump] cares about it.”
Even when Ivanka makes a seemingly meaningful move, it is often as disastrously ill-thought as Jared’s apparent purging of the adults from the West Wing at precisely the moment when they were most needed. Ivanka’s much heralded plan to develop a universal childcare system in the United States sounded great on the 2016 campaign trail. And it added a few good lines to Trump’s first address to a Joint Session of Congress. But the plan itself is awful.
A study for the Tax Policy Center by Lily L. Batchelder, Elaine Maag
, Chye-Ching Huang and Emily Horton determined “that about 70 percent of benefits go to families with at least $100,000 and 25 percent of benefits go to families with at least $200,000.” Bottom line: “Very few benefits go to the lowest income families who are likely to struggle most with paying for child care.”
“What kind of childcare plan gives the majority of its funding to families making over $100,000 a year?” asked the Nation’s Michelle Chen. The answer is that what Ivanka proposed was not a childcare plan; it was a campaign slogan. And the same goes for her image as the Trump administration’s moderator in chief. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are not the cavalry. They are not heroes; they are children of privilege who know their place. Jared is only on the scene by virtue of the fact that he married Ivanka. And Ivanka is on the scene because her father is the boss.
This is not a meritocracy, and nothing meritorious is going to come of it. These are just a couple of New York socialites with grifter instincts. “Shop Ivanka’s look from her #RNC speech” read the tweet posted after she spoke on her father’s behalf at the 2016 Republican National Convention; “Is Jared Kushner Getting a ‘Sweetheart Deal’?” asked the Vanity Fair headline two months into the Trump presidency, which went on to explain that “The First Son-in-Law’s family is set to receive $400 million from a Chinese company in a deal with ‘unusually favorable’ terms.” Like those sly con artists in all the best movies, Ivanka and Jared seek to create the impression that they are at once trustworthy and influential. But, when it matters, they are neither, as Ivanka readily admits. “I’m his daughter, so I give him my feedback, solicited or otherwise,” she told ABC’s 20/20 on the eve of her father’s inauguration. But when ABC’s Deborah Roberts asked if he actually listened to her, Ivanka acknowledged that it “depends on the day.” That was Ivanka comforting herself. But it is cold comfort. As Amy Wilentz reminds us, Ivanka Trump knows full well that “her only job has been to burnish Trump’s kinder, gentler side (if only he had one), to soften the Stephen Bannon blow, and to brand the new administration with a contemporary attitude toward women and women’s rights, rather than the attitude of a pussy-grabbing sexual predator.”