Standing before a backdrop of the polished marble and gilded elevators on Tuesday afternoon, President Donald Trump did a full 180 in every sense. A day earlier, he carefully read prepared remarks from a teleprompter in the Diplomatic Room of the White House condemning neo-Nazis, the Klu Klux Klan, and white supremacists. This statement was, in and of itself, a volte-face from this tepid initial response to the violent unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, after which his advisers, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, and other world leaders urged him to come out stronger against hate groups. But on Tuesday, Trump did a double-reverse, seemingly sympathizing with neo-Nazis while simultaneously condemning the left. Albert Speer’s neoclassicism was replaced by Trumpian grandeur.
We know by now that the 45th president does not like to feel backed into a corner or told what to do, which explains, perhaps, why so many top staffers came and went throughout the campaign and his first six months in the White House after unsuccessfully trying to tame Trump. And so on Tuesday, when those gold elevator doors opened in Trump Tower for a press gathering meant to be devoted to his administration’s infrastructure agenda, he backtracked toward his initial reaction—that the events in Charlottesville were the result of violence from “both sides.”
“You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent,” he said. “Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.” He added that the “alt-left” was also “very, very violent” in confrontations with neo-Nazi groups and white nationalists, who wielded torches and waved flags with swastikas and Confederate flags and chanted “Jews will not replace us.”
The impact within Trump’s inner circle was unmistakable. Gary Cohn, the president’s chief economic adviser, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, both Jews, stood beside the president during the exchange, which, again, had been billed to them and everyone else in the room as a talk about infrastructure, with blank countenances. John Kelly, his new chief of staff, winced and kept his eyes glued to those marble floors as the president spoke.
Curiously absent from the event, the president’s first return to Manhattan since he took office, were his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, both of whom moved to Washington in order to serve in senior roles in the administration. Both are also practicing modern Orthodox Jews, who observe Shabbat each weekend and send their children to Jewish day schools, and would presumably reject Trump’s commentary for profound personal reasons. Ivanka had tweeted denouncing the racism witnessed in Charlottesville on Sunday morning at the hands of neo-Nazis and white supremacists—long before her father did—after reflecting on the news once Shabbat ended. The New York Times reported that the couple, who had been with the president at their golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, at the time, urged Trump to moderate his tone after his initial statement. Kushner, of course, is the descendant of Holocaust survivors. A story of their remarkable journey, The Miracle of Life, sits in the entrance of the Kushner Companies’ headquarters at 666 Fifth Avenue.
This has become a common trope in the brief history of Ivanka and Kushner’s place in the Trump administration orbit: President Trump will take an extreme stance; people wonder why this New York, cosmopolitan, well-groomed, formerly Democratic couple didn’t talk their father out of it; and then people close to them recount that they had, in fact, urged him to moderate, but that the president is his own man or has others in his ear or was simply fulfilling a campaign promise—that their hands were bound by their own golden handcuffs, but they sure did try. This is what happened with the president’s immigration platform (Ivanka, according to people close to her at the time, expressed her concern about what would happen to “Dreamers” under his plan). And again with the Paris climate accord. And again over the weekend with Charlottesville.
The other repetitive beat in the Trump-Kushner timeline has been that when things are at their worst, they also tend to vanish. As the Trump campaign imploded last August, the couple jetted off to Croatia, where they unburdened themselves aboard David Geffen’s yacht with Wendi Deng. When the president was in the midst of a full-court press to repeal and replace Obamacare—the first time around—earlier this year, the Trump-Kushners joined their siblings on the slopes of Aspen for a petite spring break. As the Russia investigation ramped up in July and the focus turned to Kushner’s involvement in a Trump Tower meeting with his brother-in-law and a Russian lawyer, the two spent a couple days in more familiar territory, breathing in fresh mountain air in Sun Valley, Idaho, where they attended Allen & Co.’s annual billionaire confab. On Tuesday, while Trump defended the white supremacists and pleased David Duke, Ivanka and Kushner were in Vermont, on a pre-planned, two-day vacation.
It is fair to see these well-timed getaways as a chicken-egg situation—whether the scandal prompted the vacation, or the vacation prompted the scandal. As one person close to the couple explained to me soon after inauguration, the president tended to get in most trouble on Saturdays, when the couple was observing Shabbat, and couldn’t advise him away from his more self-destructive tendencies.
By now, though, it is clear that they don’t have nearly as much sway as anyone had assumed. They do, however, deserve credit for perfect timing and honoring their real-estate scion roots and birthrights to a spring break in March and a subsequent August vacation regardless of the fact that they are now in charge of Middle East peace and job creation.
While their absence always draws a certain amount of attention, it was particularly felt on Tuesday. Infrastructure, after all, is under Kushner’s vast West Wing portfolio. Ivanka Trump had been the highest-ranking White House official besides her father and member of the Trump family to publicly denounce hate groups. Still, they decided to go ahead with a two-day trip, just up north to Vermont, while the country was raging on an issue that touches the parents of three Jewish children directly. The two are worth as much as an estimated $740 million. They can foot a late cancellation fee. Vermont will still be there in the fall, and it happens to be quite lovely that time of year. (There is a Vermont Teddy Bear Factory bear modeled after the First Daughter "ready to head out to business meetings with her briefcase and pearls.”)
Many believed that this moment in Trump’s presidency may be the final straw for the more rationally minded members of the administration. Cohn told a person close to him that he was disgusted by the president’s comments, and two of the president’s business advisory panels disbanded Wednesday as a growing number of C.E.O.s resigned.
But to think that this is the moment that may send Ivanka and Kushner back to New York misses the mark. The administration has already crossed so many moral lines that many believed should have had them packing that it is hard to imagine that any such line exists for them at this point. (For what it's worth, Cohn, not a family member, also has not resigned, despite his disgust.)
Perhaps there was a moment in which this could have happened, when Kelly first arrived and was praised as a general who would run a tight ship. If he had been able to turn the West Wing around, to rein in the president’s Twitter habits and control the flow of information and various agendas that tend to veer him off course, then maybe they could have said the administration would function best without family members around, and they could return to their cushy real-estate empires and a brand with their names on them.
That moment very clearly passed, as we witnessed on Tuesday, and they are stuck in the swamp with her father, who gave credence to neo-Nazi groups like “Unite the Right.” Its spokesperson told Vice News Tonight in Charlottesville that he faults the president for giving his daughter to a Jew.”
“I don’t think you can feel about race the way I do and watch that Kushner bastard walk around with that beautiful girl,” Christopher Cantwell, told Vice.
