What Jared and Ivanka did next
Donald Trump has launched a new campaign for the White House, but this time his daughter and sonin-law won’t be joining him, Damian Whitworth writes.
Last week, as families across America gathered to celebrate Thanksgiving, Ivanka Trump was on holiday in Egypt and then at the World Cup in Qatar with her husband, Jared Kushner, and their three children. ‘‘A day at the Pyramids!’’ she wrote on Instagram beneath a picture of her riding a camel.
A series of other pictures showed the couple and their children, Arabella, 11, Joseph, 9, and Theodore, 6, enjoying the Pyramids and the Great Sphinx at Giza, and the temples of Luxor. Perhaps if Grandpa had been with them he would have suggested that these inspire similar awe to the other man-made wonders of the world. Like Trump Tower and that beautiful, if unfinished, wall on the southern border.
The golden pharaoh of Mara-Lago was not on this trip, though. He was back in Florida, brooding on his newly announced run for president in 2024 and a campaign that will be notable for the absence of Ivanka.
By posting her happy holiday snaps and tweeting pictures of the England v USA match as the family watched from the stand, Ivanka was reinforcing the message that she delivered to her father this month: I have a new life now. In a short statement to explain why she would not be involved in his run for president in 2024, she wrote: ‘‘I love my father very much. This time around, I am choosing to prioritise my young children and the private life we are creating as a family. I do not plan to be involved in politics. While I will always love and support my father, going forward I will do so outside the political arena.’’ One might raise an eyebrow at an approach to creating a private life that includes posting pictures of your children to your 7.5 million Instagram followers. But here was evidence that her priority is her immediate family, not the demands and chaos of her dad’s political life.
In the 2020 campaign Ivanka, 41, was the most-requested speaker from the family after the president. Her previous experience amounted to running her own fashion line and working for the Trump Organisation, but she and her husband, whose background was in the family real estate business, were senior advisers to Trump throughout the tumultuous presidency, sticking it out even when it felt like a thankless role.
Trump appeared to be keen to have her by his side again. This month the family gathered at Mara-Lago in Palm Beach for the wedding of Tiffany, his child from his marriage to Marla Maples. According to the New York Post, the former president spent time trying to persuade Ivanka to appear on stage at his campaign announcement. She resisted.
Kushner did attend the announcement, but it is not clear if he will be involved in the campaign. ‘‘They both feel they got burnt in Washington and don’t want to go back and expose themselves and their children to another bitter campaign,’’ an insider was quoted as saying.
Although they didn’t exactly shout from the rooftops that they disagreed with Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen, the couple did seek to distance themselves. When Ivanka’s views on the election were revealed during the investigation into the Capitol riot it provoked the sort of public rebuke from Trump that would make any daughter decide a vacation would be preferable to sitting down at the patriarch’s Thanksgiving table.
Ivanka and Jared decided they were moving to Florida (but not too close to Daddy) even before the 2020 election result was officially called. They are living in a rented three-storey apartment while work is done to the home they have bought on Indian Creek Island, an islet known as Miami’s ‘‘billionaire bunker’’. They bought a sixbedroom Spanish-style mansion, on a .5ha plot, for US$24 million (NZ$38.5 million), according to Vanity Fair. The 34 homes on the island are wrapped around a golf course. Previous inhabitants include Beyonce and Jay-Z and Elle Macpherson. The island has its own police force and is accessed only by boat or a guarded bridge.
Florida, once evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, is now a GOP stronghold and the Trumps find a warmer welcome in social gatherings than they do in New York. The couple have apparently made friends through their children’s school and on her birthday last month Ivanka posted pictures of herself celebrating with a large group of female friends. She goes for walks with Pitbull, the rapper. When her husband was on a business trip last month she was in Beverly Hills with Kim
Kardashian. A few weeks ago she travelled to Prague to collect a posthumous award on behalf of her Czech-born mother, Ivana, who died in the summer.
Ivanka has also found time to take up surfing and wakeboarding. If she has plans to launch a new career she has kept them close to her chest. A shadow on the horizon is a civil lawsuit, brought by the New York attorney general, that accuses Trump and three of his children, including Ivanka, of fraudulently inflating his net worth.
Kushner, who was treated for thyroid cancer while he was in the White House and underwent surgery again last summer, has been busy with new projects. He set up Affinity Partners, an investment firm that has raised US$2 billion from a Saudi government fund. In the White House Kushner maintained good relations with Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, even as US intelligence concluded that the prince approved the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey. A House committee began investigating the investment this year.
Kushner’s business operates from an office building a few minutes’ drive from Indian Creek Island. His parents have a home nearby, as do his younger brother Joshua and Karlie Kloss, his supermodel wife.
Mar-a-Lago is a little over an hour’s drive away. All the indications are that relations between Trump and his daughter and son-in-law are complicated. Kushner became skilled at dealing with Trump, but even he did not escape his detonations. Maggie Haberman, the New York Times reporter who has written a new book about him, Confidence Man, wrote about an incident during his presidency when Trump behaved in a way that might be regarded as putting the psycho into the family psychodrama.
She reported that Trump frequently told John Kelly, the White House chief of staff at the time, that he wanted Ivanka and Kushner to leave their roles at the White House.
Perhaps the biggest rift came over Trump’s claim that the election had been taken from him. When Ivanka gave evidence to the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, she said she agreed with Bill Barr, the former attorney general, that there were no signs of significant fraud. Trump lashed out at her. ‘‘Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, election results,’’ he wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform. ‘‘She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr,’’ he said.
‘‘I was disappointed by the outcome of the election,’’ Kushner wrote, with characteristic extreme caution, in a memoir published in August.
When Trump was raging about fraud Kushner tried to keep his head down and focus on seeking peace agreements in the Middle East during the final days of the presidency. Kushner was on a flight back from the region when the mob took the Capitol and his wife was trying to persuade her father to rein them in.
His book, with the strange title Breaking History, made the New York Times bestseller list, albeit with a dagger symbol next to the title to indicate that some retailers had reported receiving bulk orders. The newspaper’s own review was brutal, observing that he had been in over his head in the White House, ‘‘a cocky young real estate heir who happened to unwrap a lot of Big Macs beside his father-in-law’’.
There was talk that Ivanka at one time saw herself as a future president. Does Kushner now entertain ideas of a political future when the big beast has finally crashed out of the jungle?
Does Ivanka see that? It is probably a stretch to see a hidden message in the pictures she posted from the tomb of Nefertari, the Egyptian queen who was a wife of Ramesses the Great. But Michael Wolff, who has chronicled the Trump era in three books, does not rule out Kushner’s eventual ascendancy.
‘‘There are some things even in the age of Trump that might still seem inconceivable - like President Jared,’’ he wrote last year. ‘‘And yet who would not want to bet that the [at the time] 40-year-old – already the beneficiary of a political opportunity as extreme and unwarranted as any in modern times – isn’t planning his future? That the currents of the remade Republican Party, and the new oligarch-tilted world, won’t lead, once again, somewhere unimaginable?’’
At an event to promote his book Kushner suggested that it was conceivable he might become immortal. Exercise had become a priority since leaving the White House because he could be part of ‘‘the first generation to live for ever’’.
That would give him plenty of opportunity to run for president. And then after him, perhaps, with all that time and all that money, there will come a line of Trumpian descendants to make the pharaohs look like a flash in the pan. For as Ivanka and Kushner no doubt picked up on their travels, even the Ptolemaic dynasty didn’t last for ever.