88 OCTOBER 2019 THE ATLANTIC
found herself under siege on the Upper East Side. A
horde of New York artists— including some whose
work she personally collected—gathered outside a
downtown building where she kept an apartment to
protest her role in Trump’s “fascist” agenda. Activ-
ists launched a viral Instagram campaign juxtaposing
her glamour shots with appeals from frightened con-
stituents: “Dear Ivanka, I’ve been raped and I need
to have an abortion”; “Dear Ivanka, I’m afraid of the
swastikas spray painted on my park.”
This struck Ivanka as profoundly unfair. She—
the author of a forthcoming book on women in
the workplace and frequent participant in female-
empowerment luncheons—
was a misogynist? She—a
convert to orthodox Judaism
and supporter of numerous
respected Jewish charities—
was an anti- Semite? What
did these people expect
her to do, disown her father?
But as much as the
attacks bothered Ivanka,
they also made something
clear: The White House
wasn’t going to boost her
lifestyle business—if any-
thing, the coming years
would politicize it beyond
repair. To take advantage
of this moment, she would
need to think bigger. For-
tunately for Ivanka, A-list
celebrities and thought leaders were now flocking to
her. Leonardo DiCaprio, Sheryl Sandberg, Anne-Marie
Slaughter—all of them wanted a spot on her calendar.
She didn’t need to sell handbags or luxury condos to
command the attention of America’s elite. Her proxim-
ity to the Oval Office was enough.
The week before Trump entered the White House,
Ivanka announced that she was taking a leave of
absence from the Trump Organization and her fash-
ion line. The seat of the family empire wasn’t in Man-
hattan anymore. It was in Washington—and that’s
where she and Jared would be.
IV.
The American presidency has always been shaped,
for better or worse, by unelected family members.
Hillary Clinton was the architect of her husband’s
health-care plan. Bobby Kennedy served as his
brother’s attorney general. Eleanor Roosevelt traveled the country on
behalf of her wheelchair-bound husband to survey New Deal programs,
and Edith Wilson is said to have effectively run the White House after
Woodrow suffered a stroke.
Still, modern presidents do not, as a rule, hire their children to work in
the West Wing. So when, in March 2017, Trump made Ivanka an assistant
to the president, and Jared a senior adviser, the appoint ments attracted
more than a few critics. Some compared Trump to a third-world autocrat
stacking his regime with relatives. But Ivanka was certain the naysayers
would thank her in the end.
Her confidence was not unreasonable. People close to the Trump family
had long marveled at how Ivanka handled her father. The playful Aw, Dad eye
rolls, the giggles at his jokes, the strategically deployed fawning followed by
subtly asked-for favors—these little performances,
honed over a lifetime, had taken on an almost
mythical quality among Trump’s friends and
employees, who say no one’s better at getting what
they want from him.
The presidential agenda Ivanka envisioned
was one her former Manhattan neighbors would
approve of. With her help, Trump would enact
a paid-family-leave program and reform the
criminal- justice system. He would update the
nation’s infrastructure, and preserve LGBTQ
rights. Republican, Democrat, these were just
labels. Once fair-minded people saw what her
father had accomplished— what the Trumps had
accomplished— the family’s legacy would be secure.
The first test of Ivanka’s persuasive powers
came when White House officials began drafting
an executive order focused on expanding pro-
tections for religious conservatives. Ivanka, who
knew the order would be seen as anti-LGBTQ,
enlisted Tim Cook—the gay Apple CEO, whose respect her father craved—
to lobby Trump against signing it, according to a former White House aide.
She also privately reminded her father that Vice President Mike Pence
had faced nasty political blowback when he’d stumbled into a religious-
freedom culture war as governor of Indiana.
Ivanka’s crusade culminated one night in the president’s private study,
where Trump was discussing the issue with a small group of advisers. A for-
mer aide who was present at the meeting recalled Pence launching into an
impassioned defense of the exec utive order, only to have Trump cut him
off. “Mike, isn’t this the shit that got you in trouble in Indiana?” he snapped.
Pence quickly retreated as blood rushed to his face. It was clear to all in the
room that Ivanka—standing quietly in the corner—had won. When Trump
did eventually sign the order, it had been dramatically watered down.
But as time went on, Trump began to tire of Ivanka and Jared’s inces-
sant lobby ing. Every time he turned around, they were nagging him about
something new—refugees one day, education the next. It never stopped. Their
efforts to change his mind about the Paris climate accord exasperated the
president, who took to mocking their arguments when they weren’t around.
“They’re New York liberals,” he would say, according to a former White
House aide. “Of course that’s what they think.”
When the president withdrew from the Paris Agreement in June 2017,
the illusion of Ivanka the Trump whisperer collapsed. “Look, It’s Time
to Collectively and Officially Give Up on Ivanka Trump,” Vogue declared.
“Ivanka Trump is never going to come through,” a New York Times op-ed
announced. Vanity Fa i r published a savage story about her and Jared’s
early adventures in elite Washington, where they were widely regarded
as dilettantes. “What is off-putting about them,” one politico told the
magazine, “is they do not grasp their essential irrelevance. They think
they are special.”“He wasn’t angry at Don,”
a former White House
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