The following article by Greg Price with Newsweek was posted on the National Memo website December 14, 2017:
Ivanka Trump has been defying the stances of her father, President Donald Trump, repeatedly in the past few months, raising questions about whether the child the commander-in-chief once singled out as his favored Trump is now brewing a resistance of her own. And her husband, Jared Kushner, has apparently gotten on Trump’s bad side once again recently, following months of controversies tying him to the Trump-Russia investigations.
Ivanka broke with her father on supporting Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore after the Republican contender faced sexual misconduct accusations from nine women. “There’s a special place in hell for people who prey on children,” Ivanka told the Associated Press after Moore’s accusations were reported. “I’ve yet to see a valid explanation and I have no reason to doubt the victims’ accounts.” Doug Jones, the Democrat who ended up beating Moore on Tuesday, used part of that quote in a campaign ad.
Ivanka’s quote was seized upon by her father’s former chief political strategist Steve Bannon, who was an active Moore supporter.
“You have Trump robo-calling for Moore, and Jones using Ivanka in an ad,” a person close to Bannon’s decision to mock Ivanka told Vanity Fair. “If that doesn’t show you how fucked up that White House is, I don’t know what does.”
Ivanka’s attacks on Moore, and her encouragement for her father to stay away from the heated Alabama race, ultimately “worked only to push the president in the opposite direction,” Politico reported Monday.
Trump, as a candidate and president, jumped into the so-called “war on Christmas” by insisting that revelers should wish “Merry Christmas,” instead of the more politically correct “Happy Holidays.”
Ivanka, who converted to Judaism when she married Jared Kushner, didn’t share the sentiment.
Then there’s Kushner, who has been married to Ivanka for more than eight years and serves as one of his father-in-law’s senior advisers. Kushner apparently committed one of the gravest sins against the president: Accepting praise for something.
After Trump became the first commander-in-chief to acknowledge Jerusalem as Israel’s capital – flying full in the face of Middle East leaders who said the move could spark violence and outrage – Kushner was reportedly “greeted heroically” at last week’s White House Hanukkah party, two people at the party told Vanity Fair.
That might have been enough to put him in the crosshairs of his father-in-law.
“Everyone knows that all glory goes to him,” an unnamed party attendee said. “When you work with him, you don’t make it about you. They broke rule No. 1.”
The White House and a spokesperson for Kushner declined to comment to Newsweek.
Well before their recent flubs, both Ivanka and Kushner have become targets within the White House. Ivanka was chastised for briefly sitting in for her father during the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany in July, and her father once took to Twitter to chastise Nordstrom for dropping her clothing line, which raised conflict of interest issues for the first family’s businesses.
Kushner, though, has caused far worse headaches for the president. The young real estate magnate’s failed to properly file his financial disclosure forms and he even profited by not correctly listing his stake in one technology company earlier this year, Newsweek reported in October.
Kushner’s contacts with Russian officials have also made his national security clearance a sticky issue for an administration mired in accusations of collusion with Russia during the 2016 campaign, and he has been interviewed as part of the congressional probes into Russian interference. Kushner also joined Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort at a secret Trump Tower meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer in June 2016, which has become a focus of the Russia investigations.
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