Still standing at White House, Ivanka, Jared stepping up their profiles
WASHINGTON — They disappointed climate change activists who thought they would keep President Donald Trump from leaving the landmark Paris accord. They enraged Democrats and even some Republicans by not pushing back against his immigration policies, and alienated business allies by their silence over threats to NAFTA. They regularly faced news stories about their unpopularity.
Even their relationship with the president seemed to suffer.
Several times Trump joked that he “could have had Tom Brady” as a son-inlaw. “Instead,” the president said, according to five people who heard him, “I got Jared Kushner.”
And yet, after 18 months of bruising internal White House conflicts and bitter criticism that they have failed to be a moderating influence on the president, both Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, the president’s elder daughter, are still in Washington and still working as aides to Donald Trump. They are as comfortable — and as close to the center of his orbit — as they have ever been.
As scrutiny of the couple often referred to as Javanka became increasingly intense during the president’s first year, Kushner and Ivanka Trump seemed to retreat from public view, and after several of their allies in the White House departed, there was a near-constant stream of questions about whether they would follow.
It did not help that the president had gone from telling aides to “talk to Jared,” as he did during the campaign, to telling them that “Jared hasn’t been so good for me.” At various points, Trump told friends and his chief of staff, John Kelly, that he wished both Jared and Ivanka would return to New York.
But as one staff member after another has disappointed him and has departed or been dispatched, Trump has retreated into the familiarity of his family — his daughter, above all, and eventually, her husband. As Trump, cut off from dissenting voices and convinced of his own popularity, has become more emboldened, so have his daughter and son-in-law.
It was only in May that Kushner had his security clearance restored after months of questions about whether he was in peril in the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Mueller’s investigators have not publicly cleared Kushner, and Kushner’s advisers issued misleading statements that indicated his clearance had been fully restored, when in fact he was still awaiting that status.
Ivanka Trump’s announcement last week that she would shut down her fashion brand, based in New York, seemed to symbolize a recommitment to her life and her husband’s in Washington. The woman who once said she did not intend to stay in the capital long enough to become one of its “political creatures” — people she feels are “so principled that they get nothing done,” according to someone familiar with her thinking — said Tuesday that she did not know “if I will ever return to the business.”
“Any suggestion that they were going to leave the White House was just ridiculous,” said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who was one of several allies the couple asked to speak on their behalf for this article. “They both have been dependable, valuable and effective partners for me and other members of the president’s Cabinet.”
Although they have kept a foothold in Manhattan, home is now in Washington, where their children attend Jewish schools and their house is routinely watched by paparazzi as they depart for work or go for a run. They live in a rented mansion in the Kalorama neighborhood, where they have courted groups of lawmakers and Washington hands in an effort to ease hyperpartisan tensions over cocktails and comfort food.
Their allies say this is a sign that the two, both children of businessmen, have adjusted to the market. But intentionally or not, Kushner and Trump have redefined the expectations that people in their New York social circle once had that the two would be horrified by the president’s policies and change them.
“I never counted on it, but they themselves promoted the idea that they would save us,” said Hilary Rosen, a Democratic strategist who has been a vocal critic of the administration, before ticking off a list of policies Donald Trump has sought to dismantle.
As for separating immigrant families, she added, “How do they sleep at night?”
In response to critics like Rosen, the couple have argued that they can temper Trump only if he is willing to listen. And sometimes he has been: Ivanka Trump pushed for the expanded child tax credit in the tax cut bill that passed in 2017, and Kushner has convinced the president that criminal justice reform is worthwhile, even as his attorney general remains a vocal opponent.