Pillars of the family-driven West Wing
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump: Duo’s rising influence raises concerns with GOP and liberals
One has an office down the hall from the president in the White House; the other just moved into an office a floor up. One recently visited war-torn Iraq as the president’s emissary; the other will soon head to Berlin at the invitation of Germany’s chancellor.
Both have seats at the table at any meeting they choose to attend, join lunches with foreign leaders and enjoy “walk-in privileges” to the Oval Office. And with the marginalization of Stephen K. Bannon, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have emerged as President Donald Trump’s most important advisers, at least for now.
More openly than any president before him, Trump is running his West Wing like a family business, and as he has soured on Bannon, his combative chief strategist, he has turned to his daughter and son-in-law. Their ascendance has some conservative supporters fretting about the rising influence of the urbane young New Yorkers, as some moderates and liberals swallow concerns about nepotism in the hope that the couple will temper the temperamental president.
“If you think of it as a classic business model, Trump likes to invest in winners because they make more money, and Jared has been pretty consistently winning,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an ally of Donald Trump. “You’re always on a what’s-your-quarterly-report kind of relationship with Trump.”
Pet projects
Neither Kushner nor Ivanka Trump has government experience. Kushner, 36, managed the real estate empire he inherited from his family and bought the New York Observer as a side project. Ivanka Trump, 35, ran a fashion brand that appealed to young, urban female consumers likely to align themselves with her father’s opponents.
But the quarterly report on Kushner shows he has been in merger-and-acquisition mode. One after another, he has expanded his portfolio into a farranging set of issues, including Middle East peace, the opioid epidemic, relations with China and Mexico and reorganizing the federal government from top to bottom. “Everything runs through me,” he told corporate executives during the transition.
Lately, he has pushed to overhaul the criminal justice system. But Kushner is running into opposition from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who favors toughening, not relaxing, mandatory minimum sentences.
Some colleagues, including Bannon and Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, regard Kushner’s breathtaking list of assignments with comic contempt, according to a dozen Trump associates who insisted on anonymity to discuss Kushner and Ivanka Trump. After Kushner’s trip to Iraq, White House aides referred to him as the “secretary of state.”
Family reputation
But they are warier of Ivanka Trump, who only recently arrived in the West Wing and until now has been a more sporadic player than her ambitious husband. Initially resistant to a formal role in the administration, Trump took an office and a government position — albeit, like her husband, without accepting a salary — out of concern over the troubles of her father’s first couple of months in office.
According to associates, she views her role partly as guardian of the family reputation and has fretted during and since the campaign about the long-term damage to the family business’ image that her father’s political career could cause.
The White House had no comment Friday.
But the supposed backstage liberal counterrevolution that critics fear has yielded modest results. Last week, the president signed legislation allowing states to deny federal funding to women’s health care providers offering abortion services, like Planned Parenthood. Ivanka Trump and Kushner were skiing in Canada, just as they were on the slopes in Aspen during the collapse of the health care effort.
The tempest
At the center of the Trump presidency is a paradox: Even allies acknowledge Trump is impulsive, indifferent to preparation and prone to embracing the last advice offered. He needs a strong hand to guide him, but insists on appearing in firm command. It was Trump, not his children, who pushed Bannon to the margins, motivated less by ideology than by dissatisfaction with recent failures and his perception that his chief strategist was running an off-the-books operation to aggrandize himself at Trump’s expense.
Neither Ivanka Trump nor her husband has so far plunged into day-to-day government operations or logged the 18-hour days the indefatigable Bannon routinely works.
The expectation that Ivanka Trump will push her father to the left on social issues has been unhelpful, people close to her said. She shares his economically conservative view and did not enter the White House to be a social issues warrior, they said.
For his part, Kushner has succeeded in part because he has served as the president’s eyes and ears. “Jared is constantly reaching outside the Trump inner circle to get feedback,” said Kathy Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, on whose board he served.
Kushner stays calm when others are frayed by Trump’s explosive temper. During the campaign, when the candidate was incensed by the performance of his aides, he reminded his father-in-law that four people could not be fired — himself and the three Trump siblings.