First daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, have occupied a healthy portion of the media spotlight surrounding President Trump's administration. Kushner, the president's son-in-law, also serves as a senior adviser to Trump, while Ivanka occupies an office in the West Wing all her own.
The power couple were supposed to be "moderating influences" on the mercurial president, Vanity Fair reports. But in a long dissection of the couple's time in Washington, the magazine notes that neither Ivanka nor her husband have had much success in tempering Trump's more populist, right-wing instincts; after all, just look at his withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, his banning of transgender troops from the military, and his response to the white nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Not only that, but the Washington elite haven't taken kindly to the couple, who combined to have zero existing policy experience when they took office:
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A key problem seems to be, as one Washington veteran told me, that Kushner and Ivanka don't have the necessary self-awareness — don't understand how to behave when you roll into Washington as the creature of someone else. Most such people take a seat a little off to the side, at least until they get their bearings. "What is off-putting about them is they do not grasp their essential irrelevance," this veteran told me. "They think they are special." [Vanity Fair]
That means the couple's jaunt in D.C. might be short-lived. Kushner and Ivanka may well be planning an exit for as early as next spring — especially if they "decide it's more important to protect their own and their children's reputations than it is to defend their indefensible father's," one Republican donor told Vanity Fair. The magazine cites a "well-connected strategist in New York" in reporting that the couple may be "eyeing a move at the end of the school year in 2018," though another source "close to" Kushner and Ivanka denies they've already planned their escape.
But as Vanity Fair distilled it: "If [Ivanka's] main value in Washington is her access to her father and she is unable to sway him, then she is simply a 35-year-old former real-estate and retail executive in over her head."
Read more about Kushner and Ivanka at Vanity Fair.
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