Will Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner stay, or will they go?
President Donald Trump has told the couple they should continue serving in their senior White House adviser roles—yet he also privately asked chief of staff John Kelly to help move them out, The New York Times reported Thursday.
Trump has said that the young couple should never have come to D.C., and White House staff is frustrated that the couple remains in their roles, according to the Times.
The conversations illustrate the latest chapter of Trump's struggle to decide the futures of his increasingly embattled daughter and son-in-law.
In September, Politico reported that Trump warned his daughter in front of other staffers after hearing criticism about her role in the administration. "Baby, you're getting killed, this is a bad deal," he told her.
I am so proud of my daughter Ivanka. To be abused and treated so badly by the media, and to still hold her head so high, is truly wonderful!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 11, 2017
A few months later, Vanity Fair cited sources saying the president "keeps pressuring them to go" back home, to escape damaging press coverage.
But the couple seem intent on sticking around. Ivanka Trump changed her Twitter profile location from New York to Washington on New Year's Day, and beefed up her White House credentials in her description. She and Kushner were also reportedly shopping around for another home in the nation's capital.
In the White House, however, the first daughter and her husband have "grown exasperated" with Kelly, the Times reported. Sources said they worried Kelly was angling against them and was standing in the way of Trump's success.
But the White House alliances aren't clear-cut. Trump called Kelly a "nut job [...] who thinks he's running things," and Ivanka Trump was entrusted with heading up the search for a new chief of staff, Vanity Fair reported in January. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders denied the report.
Yet Kushner's recent security clearance downgrade makes him a liability to Trump, as have legal problems and investigations into Kushner Companies, his family's real estate firm, two sources told the Times.
"In private conversations, the president vacillates between sounding regretful that Mr. Kushner is taking arrows and annoyed that he is another problem to deal with," the newspaper reported.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
A Los Angeles native, Jessica Kwong grew up speaking Spanish, Cantonese and English, in that order. Her journalism career started ... Read more
