First Family

“No One Really Knows What They’re Telling the President”: As the Kavanaugh Drama Unfolds, Ivanka and Jared Hunker Down

While the Kavanaugh nomination roils Washington, Ivanka and Jared’s inscrutability may suggest a new chapter in their lives in the West Wing.
Jared and Ivanka photographed in Jerusalem.
Jared and Ivanka arrive for the inauguration of the US embassy in Jerusalem on May 14, 2018.By Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images.

For Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, it was a good week to be out of Washington. Last week, as millions of Americans watched Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh offer raw testimonies before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ivanka and Kushner had already made plans to be a couple hundred miles north in New York. Ivanka spent the week sitting for a series of panels and meetings at the United Nations, alongside the president of the World Bank, Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, and Prime Minister Theresa May. Kushner was similarly preoccupied. During the week, he held a round table on prison reform and, on Thursday evening, as the testimony was wrapping up, he met with Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu. Meanwhile, Canadian officials sent him their final notes for a renegotiated version of NAFTA earlier that day. “What Jared provided is a level of credibility that he knows what the president wants,” according to a person familiar with the situation. “They understand he has the ear of the president.”

Ever since they arrived in Washington, Ivanka and Kushner have leaned in to their family ties. During one memorable passage in Bob Woodward’s Fear, Ivanka bristles when Reince Priebus attempts to restrain her influence by giving her the same privileges as other staffers, reminding him that she is the First Daughter. In an interview with NBC’s Peter Alexander earlier this year, she dodged a question about her father’s alleged sexual misconduct by informing him that it was not appropriate for her to answer. She and Kushner have used the familial sway to varying degrees of efficacy. When the president was mulling whether to pull out of the Paris climate accord, Ivanka and Kushner privately voiced their concerns. Ivanka, in particular, pressed her father to more forcefully condemn the white supremacists who rallied in the streets of Charlottesville, and expressed her distaste for Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate who Donald Trump endorsed after he was accused of assaulting teenage girls when he was in his thirties. More recently, the couple introduced Trump to Kim Kardashian, as part of Kushner’s prison-reform initiative, leading the president to issue clemency for Alice Johnson, a first-time offender who was serving a life sentence in prison. Most of this advocacy has occurred in private, although it has often found its way to the press.

Last month, shortly after Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was thrown into question on account of sexual misconduct allegations, many observers assumed that Ivanka and Kushner would provide similar counsel. Ivanka, after all, initially came into the White House as an official staffer in order to advocate for women’s issues. But the reality was more complex. In private, according to two people familiar with the situation, Ivanka has aligned herself with the position of her father and Kellyanne Conway—that while Ford deserved to be heard, Kavanaugh seems to be a good man. She has emphasized to her father that his measured response to the allegations, and acceptance of an F.B.I. investigation, had been generally well-received.

But the lack of details surrounding these conversations reflects a fundamental change in both how the West Wing operates, and how the Trump family has adapted to life in the Washington fishbowl. When President Trump first took office, in the initial period of chaos and warring factions, Ivanka and Kushner felt the need to be involved in an outsized number of decisions and meetings. There were few voices they did not believe they should counterbalance. But the Wild West was tamed with the arrival of John Kelly and the departures of Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon. With a modicum of order in place, Ivanka and Jared took a step back from the Oval Office to manage their own fiefdoms. “If they thought it was necessary to get involved in something, they would,” one person familiar with the situation told me. “But now that he is properly staffed, it frees them up.”

This person didn’t rule out the possibility that Ivanka and Kushner are privately offering their opinions to the president on matters of personnel and optics. But, as they have settled into their roles, they have also grasped a profound truth about the way the media covers them. Press reports containing their private advice to the president only provokes more criticism, and often from both sides of the aisle. Trump, too, has recognized that invoking Ivanka doesn’t help either of them. (His remarks that his daughter had urged him to do something about the child-separation crisis at the border sparked days of negative coverage about Ivanka.) “It’s indicative of them getting the way it works now that no one really knows what they’re telling the president on this,” this person told me. “They’ve wisened to it.”

Ignoring the Kavanaugh drama is just the latest, most pronounced example of how Ivanka (and to a lesser extent Kushner) has reconfigured her relationship to the public, and reset expectations in the process. Ivanka has settled into a routine of meetings on Capitol Hill, event appearances, and visits to schools and job sites to promote female entrepreneurship, STEM education, and workforce development. Kushner has delimited his duties around a handful of bipartisan objectives, including prison reform, the Middle East, and trade. (As the person familiar with the NAFTA negotiations told me, Kushner is already looking for a new way to work with U.S. trade Representative Robert Lighthizer on projects going forward, and is in no rush to get back to New York.)

For the Trump-Kushners, having “wisened” to Washington has meant learning to keep their heads down, compartmentalize, and ignore the constant chaos raging around them. Sure, the Kavanaugh contretemps on Capitol Hill has Democrats and Republicans at each other’s throats, and left many women watching Dr. Ford’s testimony feel gutted. But Ivanka had panels to attend. Kushner met with Netanyahu and plugged away at trade negotiations. Soon after the Senate concluded its tense negotiations over whether there would, in fact, be an F.B.I. investigation into Ford’s claims, Kushner continued to work on the NAFTA deal and Ivanka welcomed a rabbi at the White House to perform some of the customs to celebrate the Jewish holiday Sukkot.

Perhaps this is the survival strategy that gets them through to their post-White House careers, if they do decide to leave Washington. Those hopes have been tested, mostly unsuccessfully, by others who left the administration. Besides Dina Powell, who returned to her old stomping grounds at Goldman Sachs, no other members of the New York contingent have managed a soft landing. Gary Cohn is still without a job, as is Hope Hicks and Josh Raffel. It is possible that they are merely decompressing and weighing their options. It is also possible that the White House stench doesn’t wash off so easy, at least at the present moment. Whether the same strategy will pay off for Ivanka and Kushner—two people who cannot wash off the Trump name no matter how much time passes—depends, of course, on Ivanka’s father. If the special counsel’s office turns up nothing, and the Republicans keep control of Congress, and the economy continues on a tear, well, then they have set themselves up just fine. And if one or all of those things go the other way, it is still possible they could end up O.K. Trump, after all, has demonstrated an uncanny ability to escape political doom without a scratch, only to amass more power in the process. Whether that is hereditary or transferable by marriage will be Ivanka and Jared’s proposition to test.