Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner once appeared as advisors alongside the newly elected US President Donald Trump. Would they do it again after the coming election? The couple has a pretty clear opinion on this.
This text is part of the “Trump’s Revenge” seriesin which our reporters investigate the question: What would happen if Donald Trump moves into the White House again? In this episode: What would a Trump re-election mean for his daughter Ivanka and her family?
He now has a three- to seven-day beard and his Sleekness is no longer what it once was. The hair, previously completely tamed with Kiehl’s Clay Pomade for $25 a pot, can now take on a little more space. Such casual Jared Kushner, husband of Ivanka Trump, recently presented himself at the NBA All-Star game in Indianapolis. And before that, at Jeff Bezos’ 60th birthday. And at a business event hosted by the US news site “Axios”. It seems as if the 43-year-old wants to say goodbye to the orbit of power in which he has circled for years.
Ivanka in navy blue with medium brown boots
And you? Looks the same as always: dark doe eyes under bleached, wavy Rich American hair, fresh as the morning dew. At Bezos’s she wore Roberto Cavalli, while in Indianapolis she wore a monochrome navy blue outfit with a $2,650 Bottega Veneta mini Jodie handbag and medium brown boots, People pages eagerly note.
It’s been six years since the daughter of the then most powerful man in the world moved alongside him at the center of everything. As a matter of course, Angela Merkel, the most powerful woman in the world at the time, sat down to discuss NATO disagreements and problems with global trade. In the photos from back then, she can be seen at this huge conference table in the White House, next to a Chancellor who is amused by the new arrival.
Even looking back, the image still seems irritating.Not just because Ivanka stands out by far as the youngest and blondest member in this grey-mottled big-head group. But also.
Donald Trump had been in office for two months at the time, in March 2017, and had promoted his 36-year-old daughter Ivanka to “presidential assistant.” Until then, she, who studied economics, earned her money through modeling and designing handbags. As a Trump daughter and society woman, she was actually a case for the city’s tabloids, but now the world press suddenly rallied around her.
Ivanka Trump thanks Angela Merkel in German
In fact, Angela Merkel and Ivanka Trump met even more often after that. This was the case during a visit to Germany, when the New Yorker found out about the German training system at Siemens and, years later, spoke enthusiastically about the “gold standard of training”. She made training people without much knowledge – such as prison inmates – her topic and even managed to convince the conservative-dominated Senate of another, deeply left-liberal project: twelve weeks of paid parental leave for state employees.
Angela and Ivanka in the White House in 2017. The two ran into each other more often
From then on, as “First Daughter,” she traveled around the world and became a popular conversation partner, a kind of it girl for decision-makers and rulers. Because Ivanka promised quick and direct access to the easily influenced but difficult to reach US president. Anyone who had a message for him could place it over her ear.
On top of that, the daughter was the opposite of her father in almost everything: charming, diplomatic, mediator, politically open and professional. After her visit to the Munich Security Conference 2019 she thanked Chancellor Merkel in German via Twitter, now X – her grandfather Fred’s native language.
What exactly drove her all this time remained unclear for a long time. Personal vanity, political plans, sharpening the Ivanka brand, lucrative contact cultivation for the time after the White House? Or was it a kind of sense of duty that came from being a Trump, a birth celebrity?
The Trumps have been a public family ever since patriarch Fred C. Trump from Jamaica Estates in Queens, New York City, began advertising his apartments and houses on showboats off Coney Island in the late 1930s. The art of self-expression has been passed on like a baton ever since. Donald, Fred’s fourth-born child, took them to the preliminary championship. The clan now consists of dozens of members, and almost all of them are an integral part of the gossip pages. Of course, and although not nearly of age, so are Ivanka and Jared’s three children: Arabella, Joseph and Theodore.
Jared is from a different league
Ivanka and Jared’s marriage was no coincidence either. Because both have led the same life for a long time: that of New York children from very rich real estate dynasties. Even though he comes from a different league than them. The “Kushner Company”, Jared’s father’s company, is worth around seven billion US dollars, more than twice as much as the Trump Organization and less than half as old. In any case, the Kushners seem to be more business-minded. Jared’s brother Josh is easily 30 places ahead of Donald Trump in the Forbes billionaires list with a fortune of $3.7 billion.
Jared and Ivanka, on the other hand, have a modest bank balance. They only own $750 million – earned, among other things, through their product lines and his job in his father’s company. With a short break of a few years. After his election as US President, Donald Trump not only dragged his daughter into the White House, but also his son-in-law. It certainly helped that he comes from a Jewish family that is close friends with long-term Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Under his father-in-law, Jared became chief advisor, quickly advanced to chief whisperer and, among other things, was supposed to ensure nothing less than a solution to the Middle East conflict. As usual, Trump promised Netanyahu a peace that would be better “than you could ever imagine.” Unfortunately nothing came of it. But Kushner came up with another, no less spectacular deal: the Abraham Accords Declaration, which was intended to normalize the long-tense relations between Israel and Muslim states, especially the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
Only Jared Kushner was able to initiate contact
Just as only Nixon could once go to China, only an Orthodox Jew like Jared Kushner could arrange the handshake between Israel and Muslim states. Just the strangely close contact with Israel’s arch-enemySaudi Arabia raised questions. Six months after taking office, the famous son-in-law flew to the Saudi capital, and shortly afterwards the then newly enthroned ruler Mohammed Bin Salman launched a wave of purges among opposition members. The suspicion quickly arose that Trump’s chief adviser had passed on relevant information from US intelligence sources to Bin Salman – which he denies. In any case, after his time in Washington, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund invested $2 billion in one of Kushner’s companies.
Kushner rejects the allegations of cheating. Instead, he recently praised Mohammed Bin Salman on a panel as a “visionary leader” because what is happening in Saudi Arabia is one of the “most exciting transformations we are currently seeing in the world,” said the 43-year-old. He obviously can’t completely abandon big politics, even if he now only concentrates on his various businesses – which of course doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive.
A return to the White House in the event that his father-in-law becomes US President again is out of the question for him, as he has now made clear: “I was very lucky to join Donald in the government. But as a family “We also enjoyed getting out of the spotlight and being down here in Florida with the kids,” Kushner said.
His wife, whose real name has been Yael Kushner since they married, and the famous family boss make the same statement. On Fox News last summer, Donald Trump responded to the question of whether he wanted to bring Ivanka and Jared back into the campaign boat with a bold “no.”
The Trumps are no longer disappearing – even if they wanted to
The Kushners are retreating from the spotlight, but only a little. In fact, they just change stages. Or end up on it, because like all Trumps, they have long been part of New York’s cultural inventory. The satirical musical “Five” about Donald Trump’s love life is running Off-Broadway until mid-March. “Ivana, Marla, Melania, Stormy, Ivanka” is the subtitle for the show. This refers to Trump’s three wives, an affair and his daughter. She doesn’t really fit into this series – true, but what does that matter in this family?
