Is this the start of the Trump dynasty?

Does Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka have an eye on the White House?

Could Ivanka Trump be a future US President? Picture: AP

It was Steve Bannon who persuaded Donald Trump to give White House jobs to his eldest daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner.

Most of Trump’s advisers are said to have been ambivalent. Ivanka, a self-professed feminist, had been a potent surrogate on the campaign trail, softening her father’s blunt nationalism. Jared, the heir to a billion-dollar property dynasty, had been at Trump’s side during one of the most extraordinary chapters in US politics. Neither of them, though, had a jot of government experience.

Trump wondered aloud at why his daughter would give up a gilt life as one half of a New York power couple for dowdy, politics-obsessed Washington.

Yet Bannon, the fire-breathing populist who had masterminded Trump’s election victory, pressed for them to be given roles inside the West Wing. It’s believed he wanted Ivanka and Jared close because, he argued, they were the only people capable of calming Trump “in moments of high crisis”.

That, at least, is the version of events given in a new book that has put “Javanka” firmly back in the spotlight. The account, by the British journalist Vicky Ward, sets out to investigate whether the Bannon plan ever stood a chance — were Jared and Ivanka ever the voices of reason in an otherwise unhinged presidency?

Jared Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump. Picture: AFP

When they came to Washington, in early 2017, they rented a palatial $5.5 million house in a posh neighbourhood close to the Obamas — a 7,000 sq ft home in the up-market Kalorama section of the city.

West Wing staffers are said to have christened Ivanka “Habi” — the “home of all bad ideas”. John Kelly, formerly Trump’s chief of staff and homeland security secretary, is quoted in Ward’s book as dismissing the couple as “just playing government”.

Yet Ward, as she has appeared on America’s politics shows in recent days, has pushed back at the idea that Jared and Ivanka are naive. Their swift rise to extraordinary power “is unprecedented”, Ward contends. You wonder whether this is true: think of how a wealthy John F Kennedy appointed his brother Bobby as his Attorney-General. It is accurate, though, that Washington has never seen a couple quite like the Kushners.

When they married, Jared brought a certain amount of baggage, mostly courtesy of his father, Charles. In 2005 Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to more than a dozen felonies, including an attempt to smear a witness in a court case. This involved hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, recording the encounter, then sending it to his sister, making sure it arrived on the day of a family party. He spent 14 months in a federal prison camp.

Having a father behind bars would be enough to knock any son for six, but for the Kushners, Charles’s downfall precipitated a dramatic shift in business too. The focus of the family property empire moved. Instead of apartments in blue-collar New Jersey and down-on-its-luck Baltimore, the Kushners ploughed into trophy acquisitions in toney Manhattan.

In 2006, Jared, then 25, negotiated the most expensive single-building purchase in US history, a $1.8 billion acquisition of a 41-storey skyscraper at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. When the property market crashed a year later, the building became a gargantuan white elephant, its debt threatening to topple the family business. More on this later.

Jared’s acquisition of The New York Observer — a paper that had perhaps been best known for publishing the Candace Bushnell society column on which Sex and the City was based — for $10 million, also in 2006, might have been another element of an image-rehab plan.

Shortly after that, he edged farther into the public eye when he become involved with Ivanka. They met when they were both 26, in 2007, at a business lunch arranged by a real-estate broker and another friend who thought they might do deals together. “They very innocently set us up thinking that our only interest in one another would be transactional,” Ivanka told US Vogue in 2015. “Whenever we see them, we’re, like, ‘The best deal we ever made!’ ”

The Vogue interview, published just weeks before her father announced his presidential bid, offered Ivanka a chance to promote her clothing range. Vogue marvelled at how she was “full-speed at work and hands-on at home”. Ivanka, the magazine decided, was a model millennial — “the exact demographic she wants to dress”.

Jared and Ivanka were married in 2009 at Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey in front of 500 guests. Ivanka converted to Judaism (Jared’s family is Orthodox); they now have three young children, Arabella, Joseph and Theodore. Trump is said to have had mixed thoughts on the match, telling friends that he would have preferred his eldest daughter to have married the American football star Tom Brady.

In the White House, Jared was handed a vast portfolio. He was made responsible for broking peace in the Middle East, streamlining the leviathan US federal government and ending America’s devastating opioid epidemic. According to one of Ward’s sources, he also promised to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in a matter of months. They called him the “secretary of everything”.

Unlike his father-in-law, he has preferred to operate out of the limelight, seldom speaking in public. His sprawling portfolio was bound to cause friction. According to The Guardian, during the first year of the administration, Jared was confronted by two of the most senior US government officials: Rex Tillerson, then secretary of state, and Gary Cohn, formerly Trump’s top economic adviser.

Mr Kushner, left, is thought to be close to Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Picture: AFP

Tillerson is said to have blamed Kushner for Trump’s abrupt decision to endorse a controversial blockade on Qatar led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in 2017. Tillerson allegedly told Kushner that his “interference had endangered the US”.

It would later be reported that the Kushner family had been in talks with a Qatari billionaire to ease financial pressure after the ill-timed $1.8 billion purchase of 666 Fifth Avenue. Jared is also thought to be close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi leader.

Meanwhile, according to The Guardian, Cohn rebuked Jared in January 2017 after it was revealed that he had dined with executives from the Chinese financial corporation Anbang — another potential investor in 666 Fifth Avenue. “You’ve got to be crazy,” Cohn, a former president of Goldman Sachs, is said to have told Jared in front of others.

As The New York Times noted this week, the Kushner family business was eventually rescued by Brookfield Asset Management, which has a substantial investment from the government of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. The Qataris have denied having any advance knowledge of the deal.

Mr Kushner, Ms Trump and their children. Picture: AFP

Critics will say that Ward’s book over-promises. The title mentions “corruption”, but Ward falls far short of demonstrating it. Unprecedentedly high levels of staff turnover achieved by the Trump administration means that there are plenty of axes to grind. It will come as no surprise that her portrait of Jared and Ivanka, which relies heavily on anonymous sources, is unflattering. There is a market for books that lift the lid on West Wing chaos. Her title? Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

Kushner’s lawyers have dismissed it as “fiction”, while the White House says it is “based on shady anonymous sources and false information”. Ward does, however, get a source on the record who marvels at how large a role Ivanka and Jared appear to play in Trump’s minute-to-minute thinking. Mark Corallo is a former spokesman for the White House legal team representing Trump in the Mueller investigation into Russian election meddling. Corallo describes how it was difficult to talk to the president without him mentioning his daughter and son-in-law: “Isn’t Ivanka fabulous? I mean, is she not one of the best-looking women you’ve ever seen? And they’re good kids, and I just think it’s crazy. They’ve got a nice life in New York. What do they want to do this for?”

Some critics will argue that Ivanka’s main concern is her personal brand. But a survey that ranked consumer approval of more than 1,600 brands at the end of 2017 found that Ivanka’s was now in the bottom ten.

Is this just the beginning of the Trump dynasty? Picture: AFP

Why, then, remain inside a polarising White House? It is possible that Ivanka believes she can do some good. Last month she announced a $50 million US government fund aimed at helping women in the developing world to “realise their economic potential”. Experts gave it a cautious welcome, asking for more specifics.

Ward offers another answer: that Ivanka thinks she can follow in her father’s footsteps. “She thinks she’s going to be president of the United States,” one source told Ward.

“Her father’s reign in Washington DC is, she believes, the beginning of a great American dynasty … She thinks this is like the Kennedys, the Bushes and now the Trumps.”

The Times