And Here We Have a Story About Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner Scamming Their Way onto Air Force Planes
NewsPoliticsA new book is coming out about our favorite walking nepotisms, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. In Kushner Inc., according to the New York Times, journalist Vicky Ward “portrays Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner as two children forged by their domineering fathers—one over involved with his son, one disengaged from his daughter—who have climbed to positions of power by disregarding protocol and skirting the rules when they can.”
The Times dug through the book and pulled out some choice bits. We learn, for example, that when she asked to travel on Air Force planes and was told no, Ivanka and Jared would get their way by dragging along Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin:
Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner wanted to control who could travel on trips funded by the State Department, Ms. Ward wrote, citing a source at the department. Ms. Trump also often requested to travel on Air Force planes when it was not appropriate. When Rex W. Tillerson, the former secretary of state, would deny the requests, the couple would invite along a cabinet secretary, often Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, to get access to a plane.
And that Jared and Ivanka’s parents were not initially on board with their unholy coupling:
When Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump decided to get married, both sets of parents were skeptical. Ms. Trump eventually won over the Kushners with her commitment to a grueling religious conversion regimen and her apparent intense desire to become part of a close-knit family.
Mr. Trump, meanwhile, did not understand why his daughter had to change her religion for anyone, even though he liked Mr. Kushner. He would joke that Ms. Trump could have married Tom Brady, the quarterback for the New England Patriots, and once joked to Robert K. Kraft, the team’s owner, that “Jared is half the size of Tom Brady’s forearm.”
And here’s how Ivanka allegedly responded to her dad’s remarks post-Charlottesville:
“My dad’s not a racist; he didn’t mean any of it,” Ms. Trump said of the president’s refusal to condemn white nationalists outright. Appearing to channel her father, she added, “That’s not what he said.”
And it seems all of Ivanka’s efforts to appease and win the approval of her father was, at times, for naught:
Over the past two years, Mr. Trump has waffled on whether he wanted his children serving in his administration. When he hired John F. Kelly as his chief of staff, a move that Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner supported at the time, he gave an early directive: “Get rid of my kids; get them back to New York.”
Mr. Trump complained, according to the book, that his children “didn’t know how to play the game” and generated cycles of bad press. Mr. Kelly responded that it would be difficult to fire them, but he and the president agreed that they would make life difficult enough to force the pair to offer their resignations, which the president would then accept.
Alas, Jared and Ivanka remain.