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A real estate broker who thought they could make deals together introduced Jared and Ivanka to each other in 2005. While they had much in common—they were both children of wealthy real estate developers—when it came to romance, religion was a problem. Jared’s parents, Charles and Seryl Kushner, hoped that Jared, an orthodox Jew, would marry a Jewish woman.
“I know he loved Ivanka dearly,” Jared’s friend Nitin Saigal told the New Yorker. “But the religious thing was important to him.”
Like her father, Ivanka was raised a Presbyterian. After he married Melania, a Catholic, Trump began going to church more often. He keeps a Bible in a nightstand next to his bed at Mar-a-Lago.
In the documentary Born Rich, Ivanka appears wearing a necklace with a silver cross. She was not what Kushner’s parents had in mind for their son. Jared was close to his parents, calling them every day when he attended Harvard and visiting his father on weekends in prison. Charles Kushner was serving two years after pleading guilty to felony counts of filing false tax returns, making illegal campaign donations, and retaliating against his sister—a government witness—by hiring a prostitute to entrap her husband.
Ivanka was hurt that Jared didn’t take her side against his parents. The couple broke up in 2008. The split was brief. Wendi Deng, who was then married to Rupert Murdoch, invited Jared on a cruise with the media king on the family yacht. When Jared arrived on the yacht, he found that Ivanka had been invited as well.
During their courtship, Kushner had met Donald a few times in passing. When it seemed the relationship was getting serious, Jared asked Trump for a meeting. Over lunch at the Trump Grill in Trump Tower, Jared said to him, “Ivanka and I are getting serious, and we’re starting to go down that path.”
“You’d better be serious on this,” Trump said.
Once the couple had reconciled, Ivanka converted to Judaism under the instruction of Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of the Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, known as K.J., a Modern Orthodox synagogue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She took the Hebrew name Yael. Jared bought Ivanka a 5.22-carat diamond engagement ring. They were married in 2009. They keep kosher and observe the Sabbath.
Before entering the White House, Jared was chief executive officer of his father’s Kushner Companies, a real estate holding and development company, and was publisher of the New York Observer. Ivanka was an executive vice president of the Trump Organization. She oversaw the development of Trump International Hotel in Washington, a sparkling, luxurious addition to the city. Earlier in her life, she was a model.
Ivanka has her own fashion line of clothes, handbags, shoes, and accessories available in major U.S. department stores. Her book Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success was a bestseller full of advice and wisdom for both men and women.
When Trump was accused of tweeting what some erroneously claimed was a Jewish Star of David superimposed on a photo of Hillary Clinton surrounded by hundred-dollar bills with the caption, “Most corrupt candidate ever!” Kushner sprang to his defense.
“My father-in-law is not an anti-Semite,” he said in an op-ed published in his newspaper. “The fact is that my father-in-law is an incredibly loving and tolerant person who has embraced my family and our Judaism since I began dating my wife. His support has been unwavering and from the heart.”
Indeed, close to half of Trump’s top executives in New York are Jewish, including several orthodox Jews who take off early on Fridays to observe the Sabbath.
As White House aides, both Kushner and Ivanka, who forgo government salaries, operated independently of Priebus, who found himself chief of a staff whose most senior members did not report to him. In fact, the president’s own daughter and son-in-law were bad-mouthing Priebus in the press. Hyperconcerned about his image, Kushner even put Josh Raffel, a New York public relations man, on the White House payroll to promote him and Ivanka and arrange background interviews for them with reporters about their pet initiatives. While at the White House, Bannon retained his own public relations consultant, Alexandra Preate, as his “personal spokeswoman.”
Bannon saw Jared and Ivanka as liberals whose views were closer to Hillary Clinton’s than to Trump’s. Bannon and Jared went to war, leaking critical material about each other.
“Oh, you’ve got to be moderate, you’ve got to make everyone your friend,” is the way Bannon characterized advice from Javanka, as he derisively called Jared and Ivanka.
“They’re nice people, but they don’t know anything,” Bannon told me. “If their name wasn’t Trump, they would be midlevel marketing managers somewhere,” he said. “They are so opposed to his program that they’re there to destroy him. This White House was very divided from the beginning, but those divisions were papered over during the campaign because everyone was focused on winning. But it was always from the very beginning the Democrats versus the conservatives.”
Jared had a particular dislike of Chris Christie, who, as U.S. attorney in New Jersey, had prosecuted his father. No matter what Christie proposed, Jared would block it. In the end, Jared was the chief reason Christie never got a position in the Trump cabinet.
Aside from advising her father on key decisions, Ivanka had her own pet projects, including promoting the STEM initiative to enhance science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education in the schools. She also advocated for women’s issues, including pushing legislation to provide a child-care tax credit and required paid family leave. She weighed in as well on topics ranging from climate change and deportation to education and refugee policy.
In advancing her agenda, Ivanka had to put up with incidents such as occurred in Connecticut when some parents complained about her visit to Norwalk Early College Academy at Norwalk High School with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. The two spoke about a new educational model IBM developed and that is already being adopted by communities throughout the country. It prepares students for what Rometty calls “new-collar jobs” with six-year public high schools. The schools combine a relevant traditional curriculum with practical skills taught at community colleges, along with mentoring and real-world job experience. Some of the Norwalk school parents complained to the news media that they would have pulled their kids from school that day if they had been given notice of Ivanka’s visit.
“Suddenly, after my father declared his candidacy, it became that all the things that I was doing that I was praised for, the same people, the critics, viewed them through this different lens,” Ivanka said at one point, as quoted by the New York Times. “Somehow, all the same things they applauded me for as a millennial, as a female entrepreneur, were now viewed very cynically as opportunistic.”
Jared took on a range of duties that included establishing what he called the Office of American Innovation. Complete with a staff, its scope was ridiculously broad and included upgrading the federal government’s $82 billion worth of information technology, spurring the creation of new jobs, changing how the country thinks about apprenticeships, and “unleashing American business.”
Other aides felt Jared was way over his head as he mouthed platitudes about achieving peace in the Middle East and solving problems but had no real idea what he was doing.
“Jared is the kind of guy who likes to go to meetings and say, ‘We need to solve this problem’ or ‘We need peace in the Middle East,’ ” Spicer says.
Aides felt Jared and Ivanka were simply power hungry and were happy to throw their weight around, a malady known as White House-itus.
“Every administration has people in it who get White House-itus,” says Robert Gates, a former National Security Council staffer in the White House and a former director of Central Intelligence. “The first giveaway is when a relatively junior staffer has his secretary place calls saying, ‘The White House is calling,’ instead of ‘Joe Schmo from the National Security Council is calling.’ ”
During one heated discussion with Bannon, Ivanka made it clear she did not have to go through Priebus to discuss issues with her father. Bannon told her she was just a staffer. Ivanka reminded him that she is the first daughter, above staff.
Both Jared and Ivanka are all about “puppies and rainbows,” says an aide. In the view of many Trump aides, the notion of neophyte Jared Kushner negotiating with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas was laughable. But like Ivanka, Jared could claim real contributions.
“I do think Jared does a very good job of handling big issues overseas,” Priebus says. “He has to get credit for the Saudi Arabia trip. It was really Jared’s creation. He came up with the idea of visiting Riyadh first, showing that Trump is not anti-Muslim and is ready for business as a world leader.”
In the end, Jared and Ivanka would push the most disastrous and most foolish decisions of Trump’s presidency. Trump even admitted to aides that Jared and Ivanka had screwed up and that he understands that they are a problem. Trump repeatedly told Jared and Ivanka that they had made a mistake by joining his White House team.
“A couple of times, he told them right in front of me in the Oval, ‘I told you guys you should have stayed in New York, because it’s going to be vicious,’ ” Bannon says. “He wasn’t saying that they’re useless but that you’re hurting yourselves by being here. But I think he was also giving a hint. If they had taken the hint and skedaddled, he’d be fine with it.”
“He told them both before they came to Washington that they shouldn’t come to the White House,” a Trump aide says. “He said that would be a big mistake. He told them, ‘You don’t understand how this town is going to kill you. Don’t come.’ ” Once they came, Trump told Jared and Ivanka “the worst thing they ever did was to come into the White House, they shouldn’t have, and he warned them not to.”
Trump was not just looking out for them.
“He didn’t really want them to come,” another aide said. “He encouraged them not to. The thing is he’s a good family man, and he loves his family. So once they decided they had to come and they must come, then the president said, okay, fine, he supported it. But his instincts were don’t do this. It’s not worth it.”
After it became clear that they would be attacked daily in the media and that they had pushed some of his biggest fiascoes, Trump told them in front of aides, “Remember I told you not to do this, and you had to do it? Now look.”
Displaying her usual candor, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times said in the interview with David Remnick of the New Yorker that “if Jared Kushner were not related to the president—any other person with this fact set would have been fired, in any other White House. There is a reason why nepotism laws exist.”
Yet they were the Teflon aides, their status intact by virtue of the fact they are family.