The US president issued a directive to his former Chief of Staff John Kelly to “get rid of” Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner shortly after the former general joined the White House, and send them back to New York, a new book on Trump’s presidency has revealed, as reported by The New York Times.
The book, titled “Kushner Inc”, has it that Trump wanted Kelly to remove his daughter and her husband from the White House, explaining that his children “didn’t know how to play the game”, the book states, with its author, journalist Vicky Ward, claiming that Trump used to complain about his children generating only negative publicity.
Ward portrays Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner as two children forged by their autocratic fathers: one overinvolved with his son, and the other “disengaged from his daughter”. The journalist went on to add that the pair has climbed to positions of power “by disregarding protocol and skirting the rules when they can”.
Kelly is alleged to have told Trump at the time that it would be difficult to give his children the sack, and later decided with him that they “would make life difficult enough to force the pair to offer their resignations”, The New York Times reported.
Ivanka and Jared, however, appear to have outlived those intentions, and Trump’s desire to oust them from the White House “has come and gone in waves”, associates claimed, as cited by the NYT.
Since Kelly resigned from his chief of staff position last December, both Ivanka and Jared have climbed the career ladder, gaining greater influence. Kushner, for instance, scored a legislative win, having championed a criminal justice reform that was successfully passed by Congress, whereas Ivanka, having paused her clothes retail business, has fully engaged in her women’s empowerment campaigning.
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White House officials have dismissed the claims in Ward’s book as totally wrong assumptions, their rhetoric echoing that of a representative for Kushner.
Peter Mirijanian, a spokesperson for Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, told The New York Times that “it seems [Ward] has written a book of fiction rather than any serious attempt to get the facts", adding that correcting everything would take too long and prove to be pointless.
