Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was in flight somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, en route to a meeting of G20 leaders in Bonn, Germany, when Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at the White House earlier this month for what seemed to be a mutual attempt at a kumbaya moment. The convocation of Netanyahu and Donald Trump, two inscrutable world leaders, was widely anticipated for a number of reasons; not only did Trump’s fledgling administration appear keen on resetting its relationship with Israel and its leader, but they also seemed to be oscillating on their approach to facilitating peace in the region. Moreover, the two men, while notably different, shared a deep, and unusual bond. Trump, on the one hand, was a draft dodger, serially bankrupt real estate developer, who was enduring his first month of real governmental experience. Netanyahu, on the other, was a decorated war hero, who had worked at the staid and punctilious Boston Consulting Group, who became the leader of the Likud Party during the early days of the Clinton administration. But they did have one thing in common: Jared Kushner.
Upon his arrival, Netanyahu and his wife were greeted by Donald and Melania Trump before the two men walked onstage in the East Room of the White House. Framed by both an American and Israeli flag, with the room’s familiar gold drapes swaying behind them, the two prepared to address the media and top advisors. At one point, a reporter asked the president about the rise of anti-Semitic incidents across the country since he launched his campaign. Trump muttered a perplexing answer that was more of a boast about his victory in the electoral college than a reassurance to the Jewish community. Netanyahu, however, came to his new ally’s defense. “I’ve known President Trump for many years, and to allude to him, or to his people—his team, some of whom I’ve known for many years, too,” he said. “Can I reveal, Jared, how long we’ve known you?”
He was, of course, referring to Kushner, the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, and an observant Orthodox Jew who is the heir to a prominent New Jersey real-estate billionaire who has spent part of his vast fortune supporting Democrats and Jewish charities. Decades ago, Kushner offered his childhood bedroom up to Netanyahu when the prime minister visited the U.S., according to The New York Times. All these years later, it seemed, Kushner and Netanyahu’s bond had endured. The two had recently shared dinner with Tillerson, before his overseas trip, a source familiar with the situation told me. And Kushner, who enjoys something of a sprawling, amorphous West Wing portfolio (he is nominally in charge of job creation, cutting governmental I.T. costs and brokering peace in the Middle East, among other issues), appears to have grown more comfortable in meetings with foreign officials, despite his lack of political or diplomatic experience. When Mexican foreign minister Luis Videgaray visited Washington earlier this month to discuss his country’s strained relationship with the Trump administration, he sat down with Tillerson and Kushner to hammer things out, a source familiar with the situation told me. When Tillerson was planning his trip to Mexico, Kushner joined him to present the details of his plans to Trump. (Tillerson would reportedly not learn of Trump’s walk-back of his commitment to a two-state solution for Middle East peace until the press conference at which Netanyahu invoked the president and Kushner.)
Kushner has wobbled somewhat as he has figured out his footing in the West Wing. In his first week, one source previously told me that he lost seven pounds and got “fucking furious” with his father-in-law after he blew up a meeting with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto. But Kushner has nevertheless held court as some of the country’s most powerful executives visited the White House, and, as one source pointed out to me last month, chaos tends to break out in the West Wing between sundown on Friday and sundown on Saturday, when Kushner observes Shabbat, and the administration tends to clean up the mess once he is back to work by Sunday. (These weekend kerfuffles have become less frequent. The Kushners have traveled with Trump to Palm Beach or stayed with him in D.C. over the last three weekends.)
As the Trump administration moves into its second month in operation, it appears that the president is keen to rely less on the traditional levers of bureaucracy in Washington—agencies, cabinet secretaries and governmental departments—in favor of a management style somewhere between his own family business and a royal court. Rather than allow power to be spread diffusely across the so-called permanent state, he appears to want it gathered within a few hands in the White House. In the meantime, Kushner appears to be consolidating his power based on his connection to the president.
He is not the first to do so. Previous presidential advisers, such as Valerie Jarrett, have siphoned the traditional powers claimed by Cabinet members and other White House staffers by flexing their muscles in the West Wing. Hillary Clinton tested the bounds of her role as First Lady with her health-care initiative in her husband’s first term. But Kushner, whether due to his own confidence in his staying power, or his father-in-law’s instinctual distrust for bureaucrats outside his inner circle, has carved out a hybrid role for himself that appears virtually boundless. He has commissioned C.E.O.s from Dow Chemical, Walmart, General Motors, and IBM to help fill some of the 500,000 vacant government jobs with public-private partnerships to create job-training programs that will serve as pipelines for those roles, a source familiar with the situation told me.
Along with his slate of economic and innovation-focused initiatives, Kushner also has a foreign-policy role to play. It is a demanding job for a 36-year-old with no previous government experience. One person close to the Trumps told me that when Kushner and his wife, Ivanka, sat down for a casual lunch in the White House soon after the inauguration, the president looked his son-in-law in the eye and mused that he had a lot on his plate, pointing to his commitments on jobs, I.T., and the Middle East. Still, Kushner has yet to lose his faith, even as other members of the president’s inner circle fall in and out of favor. It was Kushner and his wife who kept President Trump company as he scarfed down a well-done steak slathered in ketchup in their own branded hotel this past weekend while Tillerson and his wife ate separately, across the room, outside of the security perimeter, according to an Independent Journal Review reporter who booked a table at the restaurant to observe.
Indeed, The Washington Post reported last weekend that Kushner was acting as “almost a shadow secretary of state,” hovering over the shoulder of Tillerson, who spent a decade as chairman and chief executive at ExxonMobil, the world’s sixth most valuable company. The source familiar with the situation told me that Kushner, who took over his father’s real-estate company when he was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison, has stood eye-to-eye with Tillerson and James “Mad Dog” Mattis, a retired general and current Defense secretary, and they have, in turn, sought out Kushner’s counsel before they have gone to the president with ideas or concerns. (Neither the State Department nor Mattis immediately responded to a request for comment.)
“They seek him out. If they’re about to go talk to the president, they ask him if they can stop by his office to talk about things,” this person told me. “They know Donald is going to ask him about what they come to him with anyway.”
Kushner’s maneuvers seem premised on the widely assumed idea that most of Trump’s top aides and advisers are merely passing through his enigmatic orbit. That has been clear during Trump’s first month in the White House, as a veritable scoreboard of who’s up and who’s down has been closely monitored and widely mocked. As leaks pour out of the West Wing about Kellyanne Conway getting benched from television appearances and Stephen Miller being praised for his interviews, Steve Bannon architecting the so-called Muslim ban, and Sean Spicer angering his boss with his liberal tailoring (and even a leak about leaks), Kushner consistently seems to be steady in place, whether the team comes out on top or crashes and burns.
On the economic front, Kushner is positioning himself for some layups. As one longtime friend told me earlier this month, he is focusing on reducing I.T. spending among government employees. He wooed Gary Cohn and Dina Powell over from their cushy perches at Goldman Sachs to serve alongside him in the West Wing on these economic issues, according to the source familiar with the situation. He got Dow Chemical C.E.O. Andrew Liveris, IBM’s Ginni Rometty, Pepsi’s Indra Nooyi, and GM’s Mary Barra to meet with him and agree to work on job-training initiatives to help fill hundreds of thousands of government positions that currently sit empty, the same source said.
And then there is the foreign-policy responsibilities that he has taken on, as a millennial New Jersey-native who has spent the entirety of his professional life until now running a real estate firm and a weekly newspaper, The New York Observer, about the goings-on in New York culture and society. The source familiar with the situation told me that Kushner is not jockeying for power or trying to be a shadow secretary of state. Foreign leaders began communicating with Kushner more than six months ago when it became clear that his father-in-law would be the nominee, and the relationships he’s built with dozens of them have carried over into the White House, the source said. Part of the reason they come to him is the familiarity, and another part is that they know Kushner will be close to the Oval as long as Trump is still there.
“People are coming to them because they know at the end of the day, they’ve been they’ve been there for 20 years before and they’ll be there for 20 years after. The world is not stupid,” the source said. “Foreign policy isn’t about the books you’ve read. This is real life. It’s about who speaks to the president.”
This has, at times, left the people whose official jobs are to deal with foreign leaders out of the loop. Trump rejected Tillerson’s choice of a deputy, Elliott Abrams, reportedly for disparaging the president during the campaign. As The Washington Post points out, Tillerson has made only one public speech as secretary of state and has not held any news conferences, nor has the State Department held any daily briefings, which have been a tradition since the 1950s. (State has said these will resume soon.) Many of the policy, hiring, and scheduling decisions have been made by the White House, the Post reported, leaving Tillerson without clear talking points or chance for a voice, which is why he has remained mostly quiet.
But the source close to the situation said that Kushner, Tillerson, Mattis, and John Kelly are all working together as a team, and instead of seeing Kushner as a rival secretary of state, they view him as a honest broker between the president, foreign leaders, and Cabinet secretaries. So when Tillerson was preparing for his trip to Mexico last week, according to this source, the triumvirate of Kushner, Tillerson, and Kelly planned and executed the trip together. It was the three of them who briefed President Trump on the trip. Kushner also met with Vice President Mike Pence ahead of his trip to Germany and Brussels last week, as he did with Mattis, with whom the source said “he talks constantly.”
While Kushner has managed to navigate the issue of nepotism in the West Wing, Ivanka Trump has had a harder time. In some ways, she is pushing through the sort of advocacy for women and children she’s said for months she wanted to do in Washington. Last week, she set up a meeting at the White House to discuss human trafficking and traveled to Baltimore to convene a meeting with small-business owners. She’s laid out a plan for Congress that would give income tax credits to help families pay for childcare and she sat in on a number of White House meetings in which leaders discussed opportunities for women in business. She was credited with helping Kushner convince her father to abandon a potential LGBTQ executive order, and as sources told me earlier this month, she has expressed her reluctance with the so-called Muslim ban to her father. She publicly commented about the rise in anti-Semitic attacks before her father did—in fact, he commented on them only hours after she did, with Ivanka, who converted to Judaism before marrying Kushner, by his side. A source close to Ivanka told me that while President Trump had wanted to comment on the threats on his own, Ivanka did support him making public remarks.
But when it came to the administration rolling back the transgender bathroom protections, Ivanka Trump stayed mum. She said nothing when millions of women across the country and outside of her father’s new front door marched in support of their rights. She has not publicly discussed much of anything. It is not the role of a First Daughter who holds no official role in the White House, to do anything, let alone speak out about policy. And given her relationship with her father, it is unlikely that she would ever publicly come down on something he supports. But Ivanka Trump has made it clear that she does not merely want to be a First Daughter. She has posted photos from a number of these White House meetings, from behind the desk in the Oval Office, from the steps of the Supreme Court, to show that she participated. At times, she is a vocal advocate and close adviser; and at others, she silently pulls the “I’m just a First Daughter” card. “She’s running this like a businesswoman, holding meetings, but she hasn’t gotten her hands dirty,” one source told me. “The reality is that she’s in line behind everyone else trying to get her father’s ear and keep his approval.”
While her husband seems to be enjoying rarified air, he, too, isn’t immune to the brush-off from his father-in-law, this source said. “Trump yells at him in front of people all the time,” the source close to the family told me. “He’s in line, too.”
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