I. Air Force One

Donald Trump hoped the trip would draw a line under the Russia story, which had hounded his candidacy and was now damaging his presidency. His legislative agenda, including repeal of Obamacare, was already in trouble. Looming just ahead were his reckless rhetoric about North Korea and his reaction to the violence in Charlottesville—outright support for white nationalists. But the Russia story—Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections and the possibility of collusion by the Trump campaign—is one with no legal end point in sight. And when Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump woke up in the Hamburg Marriott Hotel on Saturday, July 8, in Hamburg, Germany, they knew that the story was about to get worse, and that the family’s involvement was about to widen.

The couple had accompanied Trump on his second major international trip as president, the centerpiece of which was a meeting of the G-20, hosted by German chancellor Angela Merkel. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are senior advisers to the president and were part of the delegation accompanying him, which included chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and a smattering of West Wing aides. But the 35-year-old Ivanka had a special purpose that day. She was unveiling a $325 million effort she had worked on for months: a World Bank fund, promised to reach $1 billion, to help finance women entrepreneurs in developing countries.

While Jared sat in on a bilateral meeting between Trump and British prime minister Theresa May, Ivanka anchored a panel that included the president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, and the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde. Onstage before a row of international flags, Ivanka, with her placid demeanor and her occasional midsentence smile, talked about the importance of enabling women to achieve “economic independence and financial security.” The pale-pink dress she wore, with bell sleeves and large bows, would be featured, as is nearly everything she wears, on fashion blogs and in the Daily Mail, where readers are beckoned to “get Ivanka’s look!” (for considerably less). Immediately following the panel, Ivanka stood in the front row of world leaders and heads of state to have her picture taken, and then listened to herself be praised by Chancellor Merkel, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, and her father. At one point, President Trump diverged from his praise of her to note, in a rare moment of self-deprecation, or possibly just self-pity, that “if she weren’t my daughter it would be so much easier for her. It might be the only bad thing she has going, if you want to know the truth.”

Two hours later, Trump tried to reward Ivanka, his favorite child, with a small perk. He asked her to briefly take his place at the conference table between Prime Minister May and the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. It’s not abnormal for a delegate to take the seat of a world leader at such an event, as Angela Merkel would later note. But when a conference aide tweeted a photo of Ivanka at the table, Twitter reacted with disdain at the clear nepotism, a response Ivanka must be getting used to. “This is strange,” noted Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama. “Very strange.” Even among some Trump loyalists, the breach of protocol was too much. “Excuse me,” said one former Trump adviser. “This is not a royal family, and she’s not the princess royal.” (In fact, “princess royal” is a term that some West Wing advisers apply to her, though never to her face.)

Later that day, as they boarded Air Force One to return to Washington, Trump and his closest aides were already grappling, as they had been for 24 hours, with a much bigger problem. The New York Times was about to break a story about a June 2016 meeting that Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka’s older brother, had held in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer who had ties to the Kremlin. It was the first evidence of any member of the Trump family having contact with Russian officials during the campaign—the implication being that some sort of deal was on offer. Worse: Jared Kushner had attended the meeting. A statement would be needed. Before they had even boarded the plane, Kushner and Ivanka had consulted with his attorneys about a telltale e-mail chain, which had turned up weeks before when Kushner’s legal team reviewed his records in order to respond to congressional investigators. Kushner and Ivanka and their advisers initially advocated for full transparency related to the meeting, in the sense of “reveal everything,” according to someone close to the deliberations. Donald Trump Sr.’s legal team, led at the time by Marc Kasowitz, had advocated engaging with a team of reporters from Circa, who had learned separately about some aspects of the meeting. Kasowitz’s team wanted to present the meeting as a setup by Democratic operatives. But during the G-20, circumstances changed, when Donald Trump Sr.—the president—ignored advice on all sides and decided instead to essentially draft his son’s statement for him, according to two sources familiar with the events.

There are 85 phone lines available on Air Force One, and the scene that followed aboard the president’s plane was described to me as “a frenzy.” For his own statement, Kushner spoke to and e-mailed back and forth with his attorneys, both of them Washington veterans: Jamie Gorelick, of WilmerHale, and Abbe Lowell, of Norton Rose Fulbright. The Kushner statement as it eventually emerged was sparse. It emphasized how busy Kushner had been during the campaign and the transition, noting that he had had “over 100 calls or meetings with representatives of more than 20 countries.” Only later would he give a full explanation for what he had been up to during this period. In written testimony, submitted to the Intelligence Committees of both the House and Senate, he explained that he had been so busy he had mistakenly not included any meetings with foreign persons on his first form, an omission he blamed on a misunderstanding with his assistant; his second two updates were the results of discoveries his lawyers made as they combed through his e-mails. Laura Terrell, a partner at the multi-national law firm DLA Piper, worked in the George W. Bush White House, where she was responsible for assisting high-level officials with security-clearance forms. She told me that it was “unusual” for someone in a senior White House job to have had three updates to his or her security clearance, adding that she could not recall another case in which it had occurred.

Kushner’s lawyers referred the Times’s questions about the meeting itself to Donald Trump Jr., whose personal statement, The Washington Post first reported, had been drafted as much by the president as by Don junior and his advisers, with Hope Hicks, then a press secretary, acting as an intermediary. (Former White House spokesman Sean Spicer, perhaps to his subsequent relief, was relegated to the back of the plane.) President Trump signed off on a statement that suggested the meeting with the Russian lawyer was focused on adoption, nothing more, which was misleading in more ways than one. Adoptions of Russian children by Americans were prohibited by Russian president Putin in retaliation for the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. measure that bans certain Russian officials from entering the U.S. or using its banking system. Moscow would like to see the act undermined or reversed—that was the potential “quid.” The next day, the Times reported that the meeting had been set up on the premise that the Russian lawyer was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton—the potential “quo”—spurring yet another statement from Don junior. Soon after, as the Times prepared to publish the contents of the e-mail chain between Don junior and an intermediary to the Russian lawyer, Don junior released the exchange himself. Had his father not insisted otherwise, he might have released the exchange earlier, sparing himself and his family three days of embarrassing media attention, not to mention the adding of cover-up as a potential target for Robert Mueller, the special counsel in charge of the Russia probe.

In recent conversations, I’ve heard people close to President Trump wonder aloud whether it was Kushner’s team that leaked the Don junior e-mails to the Times in the first place. The implication would be that Kushner was willing to sacrifice his brother-in-law in order to distance himself from the uncomfortable reality of the meeting. There is no evidence for this. But it illustrates the tension among Donald Trump’s advisers. The pressure of the Russia investigation has created rifts among members of the Trump family and their lawyers.

Inside the Trump White House, where advisers are regularly subjected to ritualistic debasement or worse at the president’s hands, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are the two people who up till now have managed to float above the fray. They have become a feared duo inside the West Wing, as much for an apparent vindictive streak as for their favored status with the man Washington operatives now call “the principal.” No one except for the president is surrounded by a larger battery of legal and public-relations representation. They appear to be driven in equal parts by family loyalty and brand preservation. Ivanka, like her father, relies on her name and image to propel her fortune. Kushner, while less comfortable in the spotlight, has a stable of advisers and staff who report to him as the czar of a shadow government known as the White House Office of American Innovation.

The stark contrast between the hopeful scene at the G-20 meeting and the chaos and panic aboard Air Force One highlights the key facet of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s existence in Washington. It is the contrast between the world they want to appear to inhabit and the one they actually do.

To report this story, I spoke to West Wing advisers, personal friends, and various other associates of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Surprised to find themselves in Washington to begin with, the couple has undergone a serial transformation. First, they were awestruck by the seeming power of their new positions, and approached Washington as one giant research project, setting up meetings and phone calls with experts in the areas that interested them. It was as if the entirety of Washington’s expertise was laid out in one giant smorgasbord. For Kushner, this approach was a continuation of one he had adopted during the campaign, and one that came with some peril, as he would later discover. When I asked a longtime associate how Jared and Ivanka felt about their time in Washington, the first word uttered was “sacrificial.”

It’s clear that, after an initial period of awe at the sheer power of their positions, Jared and Ivanka have been stung by the vitriol directed at them. But, as Ivanka has been known to tell her six-year-old daughter, Arabella, “for every problem, there is a solution.” For Kushner and Ivanka, the solution has been to fight back: against New York friends who disapprove of them, against West Wing foes, and even against the president himself. Increasingly you hear chatter in Washington that Jared and Ivanka won’t last, not because they are at risk of being pushed out, but because they will save themselves from a damaged White House. One well-connected strategist in New York told me that the two were eyeing a move at the end of the school year in 2018. A person close to the couple said they weren’t planning that far ahead. “When they decide it’s more important to protect their own and their children’s reputations than it is to defend their indefensible father’s, that’s a sign the end is near,” one influential Republican donor told me.

When might that moment come? The president’s abhorrent commentary about the events in Charlottesville, in which he described some of those marching with neo-Nazis as “very fine people” and decried the removal of Confederate statues as “sad to see,” is among the most toxic and racist public statements ever made by an American president. Any masquerade that Kushner and Ivanka could maintain that they were moderating influences in the White House flew out the window the moment Trump waved his hand and said that there were “many sides” to the Charlottesville violence. He did so on a Saturday, and Kushner and Ivanka were observing Shabbat. When she awoke early on Sunday, Ivanka tweeted, “There should be no place in society for racism, white supremacy and neo-nazis.” Kushner was silent about the white-supremacist violence in Charlottesville, where many of the so-called Unite the Right protesters chanted anti-Semitic taunts such as “Jews Will Not Replace Us.” On Tuesday, Trump doubled down on his comments. In doing so, he risked alienating much of the Republican Party and also members of his own administration, including Gary Cohn, his chief economic adviser, who was reportedly disgusted by the comments, as well as his new chief of staff, General John Kelly, who could only look at the floor and shake his head as he listened to the president talk. According to a person familiar with their thinking, the military leaders in the Cabinet have reportedly been made “despondent” by the president’s comments, but feel compelled to stay in place to carry on essential government business, including crafting a strategy to deal with the looming threat of North Korea. But Ivanka has had nothing more to say publicly, not even after a widely viewed Vice News broadcast about the protests in Charlottesville featured a white nationalist who said he faults the president for giving “his daughter to a Jew.”

Kushner and Ivanka will leave the White House at some point. When they do, it will be a welcome development for those who view the pair not merely as Trump’s protectors, as they see themselves to be, but rather as one of his greatest weaknesses. As a former West Wing staffer from a previous administration told me, speaking about Jared and Ivanka, “There’s nothing more obstructive and distracting and unhelpful than to have a bunch of stupid apolitical family members calling all the shots.” The arrival of Kelly as White House chief of staff has introduced an official layer between the couple and the president. People close to Kushner and Ivanka say they welcome his promise of discipline. He has also been useful: Kelly assisted in the ouster of chief strategist Stephen Bannon, leader of the nativist faction in the White House and a longtime Kushner foe. But Kelly’s discipline also challenges the family-business nature of the Trump administration, which favors Kushner and Ivanka above all others.

II. Caught by Surprise

The way Ivanka sums up her current position is by now famous: “I didn’t ask for this.” It’s a statement she has made on television and in conversation with friends, as if the election of her father to the presidency is a kind of disappointment, one for which she cannot be blamed—indeed, as if she had not served as a surrogate throughout the campaign and her husband had not been deeply involved in managing it. Still, Ivanka and Jared seemed to readily embrace their roles as the translators of the Trump presidency to their old elite circles in Manhattan, most of whose members were dismayed by his win. Ivanka was generally the instigator of the couple’s social relationships, often with people far older than they. Kushner and Ivanka used to socialize with the likes of onetime Democratic politician Jim McGreevey, billionaire investor Ron Perelman, and Rupert Murdoch and his ex-wife Wendi Murdoch, with whom Ivanka maintains a friendship.

In the weeks following Trump’s surprise victory, Ivanka and Jared were the favored port of call for activists, executives, and anyone else seeking a voice of reason. The campaign had been defined by the apocalyptic messages of Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller and the race-baiting themes of Steve Bannon, Trump’s final campaign manager and the former C.E.O. of Breitbart. Trump himself, wholly inconsistent and politically ignorant, seemed somehow up for grabs. Some liberals held out the hope that Jared, scion of a prominent Democratic family, and Ivanka, whose family politics amounted to whatever is good for Donald Trump, would together facilitate the elusive “pivot” toward sanity that Establishment Republicans, and everyone else, had been hoping for. During the transition, Ivanka met with Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio about climate change. She met with Queen Rania of Jordan to talk about women’s empowerment. She memorably sat in on a meeting with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, one of the many times the Trump family has flouted the rules and customs of the presidency. She was in the early stages of honing a platform of issues that she hoped would define her time in Washington. Kushner was engaged in his own constant stream of meetings, some of which he would reveal in later statements to Congress. During those heady weeks after the election, Ivanka realized that her previous life—running her own clothing-and-accessories brand and working alongside her brothers in their father’s real-estate company—was gone forever. The decision to move to Washington, where Ivanka and Jared occupy a $5.5 million home in the Kalorama neighborhood, just blocks from the Obamas, was as much driven by Jared’s deep role in the campaign as it was by Ivanka’s determination to remain at her father’s side. Ivanka initially planned to simply move to Washington with her family and work as an advocate for favored causes. But then she saw the potential opportunity to wield more clout.

While their divestments were certified by the Office of Government Ethics, neither of them chose to divest themselves entirely of their corporate assets before moving to Washington, an invitation to perceived conflicts of interest that Kushner himself has been particularly dogged by. Before taking on his official role, he had engaged in discussions with both Chinese and Qatari firms to help refinance the Kushner Companies’ signature building, 666 Fifth Avenue. He also secured a $285 million loan from Deutsche Bank for a separate property as the bank was settling a Russian-money-laundering case with New York regulators. These episodes have invited uncomfortable questions about his motives and his ties to unsavory governments.

A former associate said of the couple, “She was always the one with the personality, the one with a much stronger presence. He was a pretty quiet, soft-spoken, nice guy, and there was a certain formless quality to him.” As noted, Ivanka organized the social schedule. Kushner himself had few friends. Since his father-in-law’s election, he has talked in an interview about “exfoliating” those who are not supportive of his work with the president, perhaps not the most congenial way to talk about people you no longer need or want. He reportedly told one former associate, who had brought up the ugly rhetoric of the campaign Kushner had helped run, that he did not “give a shit” if the associate didn’t want to do business with Kushner anymore.

“I haven’t had anything to do with them since they moved,” said one New York friend, “and it is because the day that man gave an inaugural speech, what am I going to say? ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ ” When they lived in New York, Kushner used to remind Ivanka that “we’re in the zoo, but let’s try hard not to be part of the animals.” He often would add, “You want to be watching.” The friend noted that Kushner has traded up into a higher-powered circle: “He is rolling with the prince of Saudi Arabia and not the real-estate guys anymore.” In Washington, the couple regularly dines with Trump Cabinet members. They attended Steven Mnuchin’s wedding and spend many weekends at the Trump National Golf Club, in Bedminster, New Jersey, outside the Washington party circuit. Their close friends the Cordishes, who moved with them to Washington, where Reed Cordish works for Kushner in the West Wing, are a constant.

When I read Kushner’s recent written statement to Congress, where he talked about how he had contacted Henry Kissinger for foreign-policy advice, seeking to marshal expertise for his father-in-law, it reminded me of the way Kushner had approached his life as a newspaper owner. After buying The New York Observer for $10 million in 2006, Kushner called Rupert Murdoch and asked him to dinner. They met at the Waverly Inn, and Kushner told Murdoch, according to a former associate, that he wanted to learn from him. “He said, ‘I want to be like you when I grow up,’ and Rupert loved it,” the associate told me. Ivanka was eventually named a trustee for two of the Murdoch daughters, a position she relinquished when her father became president.

Kushner’s seeming deference, a trait he learned when he was forced to take over his father’s real-estate business in his mid-20s, served him well during the campaign. Among Kushner’s major achievements was helping to get Fox News behind Trump. Initially “Rupert hated Trump,” the former associate told me. “He thought he was a fraud.” The two men were a study in contrast. Trump was ostentatious and a loudmouth, while Murdoch was buttoned-down and traditional. Murdoch understandably had little respect for Trump’s business acumen. Murdoch’s dislike of Trump came as no surprise to a different Trump associate I spoke with. Trump’s constituency, this person told me, “was always normal people,” meaning the average guy on the street. “The rich guys always hated him.” But Kushner cultivated Murdoch. It was Kushner who acted as the intermediary in making peace between the Trump campaign and Fox News during the Megyn Kelly feud. Kushner has kept in close touch with Murdoch since the election. The two men, along with John Kelly, joined Trump for a recent dinner, during which Murdoch reportedly urged Trump to fire Bannon. (Bannon left the White House in August.) When a New York Post editorial labeled Don junior an “idiot” and “criminally stupid” for the way he handled the meeting with the Russian lawyer in Trump Tower, some commentators wondered if Murdoch was turning on Trump. In truth, he may have been turning on only one part of the Trump family—and channeling the views of another part.

III. Reality Bites

Thomas Barrack, a real-estate investor and close associate of Donald Trump’s, told me recently, “The best day that everybody has is the day they decide to go to Washington, and the worst day is about four weeks later.” Ivanka and Jared have lasted longer than that. People who have spoken with them say the couple habitually points out that the average tenure of a West Wing aide is 18 months—a tenure they intend to outlast. At the same time, neither has committed to staying the duration of the Trump presidency, which both must realize may well be cut short.

When Ivanka arrived in Washington, she went on a “listening tour” of sorts. Paid family leave was a signature issue for Ivanka during her father’s campaign, and she hoped to continue advocating for it in Washington. (A paid-family-leave proposal is contained in the administration’s recent budget document; The Wall Street Journal has called it “The Ivanka Entitlement.”) But her stated positions were frequently at odds with her father’s policies. Her efforts to bridge the divide have sometimes seemed unsuccessful, and she has often been out of the loop. As Politico has reported, she first got word of her father’s ban on transgender people serving in the military—not something she would have endorsed—the way everyone else did, by reading his peremptory tweet.

Ivanka may be willing to live with the inconsistencies inherent in her relationship with her father, but official Washington shows no such willingness. While Mike Pence was on Capitol Hill laying plans to repeal Obamacare, Ivanka requested a meeting with Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards. She and Jared went to see Richards in February for what Richards called an “explainer” on Planned Parenthood and the issues surrounding the organization. Ivanka went to the meeting thinking she might act as a kind of referee between the Republicans clamoring to de-fund Planned Parenthood and the organization itself. The meeting was cordial, according to a person familiar with it, although Ivanka and Jared did not commit to anything. When the first version of a health-care bill proposed to strip funding from Planned Parenthood, Ivanka’s surrogates reached out to the organization with an idea: stop offering abortions and the White House would advocate increased funding for Planned Parenthood clinics. Richards turned down the proposal. Then those same surrogates tried an end run, going around Richards and contacting Planned Parenthood board members. “It completely backfired,” said someone familiar with the effort. “It wasn’t just naïve from a Planned Parenthood perspective. It was naïve that the Republican House would have accepted it, because it would have meant keeping Planned Parenthood open.” After the failure of this gambit, Richards lashed out at Ivanka at a Women in the World event in New York: “Anyone who works in this White House is responsible for addressing why women are in the crosshairs of basically every single policy that we’ve seen out of this administration,” Richards told the crowd.

Other forays into the work of Washington society have been equally dismal. The couple recently attended an off-the-record dinner at the home of Atlantic Media’s owner, David Bradley, the sort of soirée Bradley holds on a regular basis with newsmakers and prominent Washington reporters and columnists. “They were terrible,” one attendee told me. The couple kept to platitudes and pabulum, as they often do in public conversations. People close to Kushner and Ivanka say that they have come to Washington for a limited time to work, not make inroads into the social scene, much less put down roots.

When Ivanka threw herself into the analysis of the Paris climate accord and the implications of the U.S. pulling out, she talked supportively to Andrew Liveris, chairman and C.E.O. of the Dow Chemical Company, about a letter signed by C.E.O.’s urging her father not to abrogate the deal. The ad ran, but Trump pulled out anyway. When Ivanka later tried to distance herself from her own efforts on climate change, the disavowal hurt her credibility with pro-environment business owners and Silicon Valley executives. To them, the episode showed not only her lack of pull with her father but also an unwillingness to stand on principle. A senior White House official said, in Ivanka’s defense, that “for something that was a campaign promise from the president, these are unrealistic expectations. She can get people into the White House to make their case, and that’s what she did.” Ivanka has tried hard to persuade associates and others that she is focusing on a few issues—job creation and women’s empowerment, including paid family leave, child-care tax credits, workforce development, and STEM education—and should be judged only on the success or failure of these, not on the broader positions of her father’s administration. But if her main value in Washington is her access to her father and she is unable to sway him, then she is simply a 35-year-old former real-estate and retail executive in over her head. Their supporters point out that they are aware of charges of nepotism but also point to their competence in managing real-estate deals and building their own businesses.

Kushner has plunged into an array of issues so broad that it has become a regular source of mockery among comedians and, more importantly, people in official Washington. He not only oversees the Office of American Innovation (whose projects include improving government I.T., improving veterans’ services, infrastructure projects, addressing the opioid epidemic, and developing “workforce of the future” programs) but also has a broad foreign-policy role and serves as a general adviser to his father-in-law.

But outside the White House, a key problem seems to be, as one Washington veteran told me, that Kushner and Ivanka don’t have the necessary self-awareness—don’t understand how to behave when you roll into Washington as the creature of someone else. Most such people take a seat a little off to the side, at least until they get their bearings. “What is off-putting about them is they do not grasp their essential irrelevance,” this veteran told me. “They think they are special.”

Washington’s bureaucratic levers and time-honored operating rules remain a mystery to just about everyone in the administration. Inside this disconnected White House, Ivanka and Jared have consolidated their influence on the level of personnel, even if they have been unable to have much impact on the actual world. Kushner has assembled his own team, including longtime business associate and friend Reed Cordish, whose father owns a real-estate business in Baltimore. Ivanka Trump introduced Cordish to the woman who would become his wife, and the two couples both have young children. Cordish helped out during the transition and has joined Kushner, alongside Chris Liddell, a former Microsoft C.F.O. and William Morris Endeavor executive. (Cordish draws no salary for his White House service; neither does Kushner or Ivanka.) Also involved in the Office of American Innovation are Gary Cohn and deputy national-security adviser Dina Powell, both former Goldman Sachs executives. Aides involved in projects blessed by Jared and Ivanka have special protection inside the White House. “If you are hitched to them, you are untouchable,” said the former Trump adviser.

While Kushner’s own politics are difficult to discern, he seems to excel at waging war against certain colleagues, whom he views as detrimental to his father-in-law. There has been a long-standing divide in the West Wing between Kushner and his “globalists,” on the one hand, and the Steve Bannon faction, which remains in place despite Bannon’s departure, on the other. Kushner supported Anthony Scaramucci as communications director because he was seen as someone who was not only blindly loyal to the president but also able to “break the cartel” of Reince Priebus, as Kushner recently told an associate. Kushner viewed Priebus, who was removed in July, as having a stranglehold on the communications shop, deploying Sean Spicer and his acolytes to combat negative stories about himself.

Ivanka is more practiced in the spotlight than Kushner, though she can be cold to staffers, particularly those who are not in favor with the president, according to a former West Wing aide. “She tries to charm you at first, and then there’ll be the cutting remark in front of her father,” the former adviser added. Kushner, though he tries to be casual and jokes with other staffers, can have even more of an edge. Once, when Priebus asked Kushner what his team of Cordish and Liddell had been up to, Kushner retorted, according to someone who heard the exchange, “Reince, we aren’t getting paid. What the fuck do you care?”

Kushner and Ivanka have complicitly engaged in Trump’s humiliation of various staffers, be it West Wing aides Bannon, Priebus, and Kellyanne Conway, or Cabinet members such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the most high-profile member of Trump’s team to be dragged into a public flogging. (The president openly discussed in multiple settings his grave disappointment with Sessions for not investigating leaks from the intelligence agencies—notwithstanding the fact that many leaks come from his own White House, and even from him.) Kushner actively smeared Bannon when Bannon was getting too much attention from the media, and both he and Ivanka undermined Reince Priebus directly to Donald Trump. Kushner told Trump repeatedly that Priebus was “weak,” according to several people who heard the comments. And Kushner told Sean Spicer openly in West Wing meetings of his dissatisfaction. Recently, Kushner publicly spoke up in support of National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, who has been attacked in right-wing media outlets such as Breitbart (to which Bannon has now returned). Why was Kushner willing to stand up for McMaster but not for Sessions, to whom he is close? The main difference was that Trump himself was attacking Sessions, whereas going to bat for McMaster simply meant doing battle, yet again, with Bannon, if only by proxy.

Jared Kushner once described himself as “first among equals” in the West Wing, and one wonders as time goes on if he might be inclined to drop the latter part of that description. “Trump is emotionally dependent on his son-in-law and his daughter . . . but they can’t do anything for him,” said the Washington veteran. “All they can do is make him feel better about what his life has come to.”

IV. Exit Strategy

A combination of self-assurance and utter ignorance is a defining trait of this White House, along with cocky vulgarity and casual cruelty. Jared and Ivanka display the first two traits and can’t help but be tarred by association with the latter two. If they are watching the animals in the Washington zoo carefully enough, they will have noticed that, even as they themselves amass power within the West Wing, their juice outside of it is drying up. Washington is a place where you are judged by what you achieve, not by what you say you care about.

The disappointment among the kinds of people who were looking to them to be a moderating influence is undisguised. As a political consultant puts it, describing the current mood, “You can’t prevent him from trying to de-fund Planned Parenthood or getting out of the Paris agreement? What are you good for?” When Ivanka said soberly in an interview that she tries “to stay out of politics,” she was mocked mercilessly on late-night shows and on Twitter. As a guest on Seth Meyers’s program, Maya Rudolph channeled the First Daughter and echoed Ivanka’s statement, putting “politics” in air quotes: “We get it. We get it,” Rudolph said. “You are an adviser to the president, but not into ‘politics.’ ” She went on to note that Ivanka spoke through her teeth as if she had “a sexy secret,” in the manner of a saleswoman in a lingerie store. What Ivanka was probably trying to say was that she had gone to Washington hoping to work on commonsense programs that Democrats, Republicans, and independents could all get behind. It’s the kind of studied naïveté that fewer and fewer Washington figures are buying today.

John Kelly, the new chief of staff, has insisted that even Kushner and Ivanka check in with him before dropping into the Oval Office, a rule that might be difficult to enforce. Ivanka’s cameos during Trump’s West Wing interviews have become almost de rigueur. She and her daughter, Arabella, dropped in during an Oval Office interview with The New York Times, the same interview in which Trump expressed his disappointment with his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. She also stopped by during a Wall Street Journal interview with Trump, during which the paper’s editor, Gerard Baker, discussed a recent summer party they had both attended at Lally Weymouth’s house in the Hamptons, as well as the fact that both of them have daughters named Arabella. More recently, when Ivanka’s brother Eric and his wife, Lara, visited, the whole family had dinner together in the White House residence. Kelly may be able to instill a sense of discipline in the West Wing, but his authority will have limits.

The time may already be past when Kushner and Ivanka could fully save their own reputations, at least in the kind of society they have enjoyed for much of their young lives—the precincts of Upper East Side socialites for Ivanka and high-society New Jersey for Kushner. They are still trying to salvage what they can. The couple, somewhat famously, seems to skip town at the precise moment a political catastrophe befalls the White House—letting it be known, for instance, that they were on vacation in Vermont when President Trump delivered his deeply troubling statements about the violence in Charlottesville. (One West Wing aide noted to me that it isn’t that they leave when bad things happen; it’s just that bad things are always happening.) They are skiing, as they were in the days leading up to the first failed health-care vote; or observing Shabbat, as they were during the massive protests over the initial Muslim travel ban; or simply fraternizing with their old crowd, as they did during the extended health-care debacle, when they made a surprise trip to the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, the annual gathering of media and tech billionaires and their helpmates. Every election cycle, the conference holds a mock election, and last year Hillary Clinton won by a huge margin—“something like 80 to 20,” in the recollection of one attendee. So it was hardly a welcoming crowd for Kushner and Ivanka, who showed up in slightly dressier casual garb than everyone else. Just hours before they touched down, Barry Diller gave an interview to CNBC from the conference, calling the Trump presidency “just a joke.” He said that he was friendly with Kushner and Ivanka before the “current situation,” and that the two of them couldn’t be blamed for it. That attitude seemed to be widely shared among conference-goers. The attendee told me that “the chatter was ‘These people are horrible,’ and this and that, but of course, Jared and Ivanka show up and the air-kissing began.” Eric Schmidt, the former C.E.O. of Google and the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, seems to personify this shift. Schmidt was an early adviser on digital strategy for Hillary Clinton’s campaign but has been one of the most public fans of Jared Kushner’s work for the Trump campaign. He invited Kushner and Ivanka to Google’s exclusive retreat, called the Camp, in Sicily, but the couple did not attend, reportedly because of the renewed attention on the investigation into whether the Trump campaign had any connection with Russian efforts to tilt the election in Trump’s favor. The couple likely get more of a pass in Sun Valley than they do in Washington, where children often can’t escape the sins of their fathers.

Roughly 90 percent of Washington, D.C., residents voted for Hillary Clinton, which meant that the local reception for Kushner and Ivanka was fraught from the outset. Some parents at the upscale and politically liberal Jewish Primary Day School, where Arabella is enrolled and where former senator Joe Lieberman and former White House chief of staff (and now Chicago mayor) Rahm Emanuel sent their children, anguished over how to temper their disdain for Arabella’s grandfather while welcoming a blameless six-year-old into their ranks. The couple sometimes attend a small Orthodox synagogue, the Shul, near Dupont Circle, within walking distance of their home. Ivanka converted to Orthodox Judaism before her marriage to Kushner, and unless they receive special dispensation from a rabbi, the two are not to drive or use the phone on the Jewish Sabbath. They have needed that dispensation multiple times, including when they both flew to Saudi Arabia on the president’s first international trip.

V. Too Late?

The ever shifting nature of the story about the meeting between the Russian lawyer and members of the Trump family is of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. In July, Mueller sent a letter to the White House asking officials to preserve documents related to the July 8 meeting aboard Air Force One as well as “any decisions made regarding the recent disclosures about the June 2016 meeting,” according to a copy of the letter reviewed by CNN. As noted, Trump himself directed the drafting of the misleading initial statement about that meeting, and Kushner and Ivanka had advocated fuller disclosure. But questions about the statement remain: “Who was involved in creating this story?,” someone with knowledge of the White House legal strategy asked rhetorically when I inquired about the subject. “This is the problem. They are government employees and they work for the taxpayer.” The issue is no longer just about the appropriateness of a meeting in Trump Tower more than a year ago. The issue now also involves why the president would mislead the public so blatantly and deliberately. And it may involve obstruction of justice. Abbe Lowell, who has previously represented John Edwards and Jack Abramoff, recently noted that he has established a “confidential relationship with Ivanka Trump as part of my representation of Jared.” Politics is new to Jared and Ivanka, but it isn’t just politics that they are navigating. They are in a new town that “punctures their self-esteem on a daily basis,” a New York friend of theirs told me. They know they can never have their New York life back as it existed before Donald Trump started his campaign, nor do they want to give up the power of their current positions in Washington. The future unfolding before them looks nothing like the future they may have imagined five years ago. Ivanka may be disingenuous when she says she “didn’t ask for this,” but she is right to say that she didn’t ask for this—that is, for the actual situation in which they find themselves: powerful, in a sense, and yet ineffectual; emotionally essential to Donald Trump, but lacking the skills to assist; impossible to fire and reluctant to leave; compromised ethically and perhaps legally; and facing reputational or familial harm no matter what they decide to do. Early in the summer, the couple took a weekend trip to New York to visit friends, including Wendi Murdoch, and the trip managed to go unreported, until now. Such moments of privacy are rare. But privacy is less of an issue than the very real trouble that political malpractice and the wheels of justice pose for the entire Trump White House and the two of them. “They are partway across the battlefield,” the New York friend told me. “Turning back now would be more damaging than staying the course.” Whatever the damage, they have partly themselves to blame.