Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner Still Think They Can Salvage Their Reputations

As Donald Trump has learned over the past nine days, inciting a violent mob to lay siege on the U.S. Capitol building has consequences, including but not limited to being impeached for a second time, having future income evaporate before your very eyes, and, perhaps most devastatingly, being kicked off of Twitter and other social media platforms. Still, it’s not clear that the president realizes he’s completely and totally done for, that he will never ever again be accepted in polite society, and that he will very likely go down as the worst president in American history. That’s a delusion that seems to be shared by his adult children and children-in-law, among them Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who apparently believe that while things don’t look great at the moment, they’ll somehow eventually be able to come out of this—this being an insurrection started by their family that left five people dead, as well as the mother of all toilet scandals—with their reputations and aspirations intact.

CNN’s Kate Bennett reports that, tactically, the first daughter and her husband realize a farewell tour to brag about supposed “policy wins” wouldn’t go over great right now, and that plans for Ivanka to undertake such events have been shelved. Instead, in order to “fulfill their goals” of being “a powerful player in global politics” (Kushner) and “a shoo-in to a higher office” (Ivanka), the couple is “trying to keep the president from saying too little or too much” and, more importantly, trying to ensure people think that they’re doing very important behind-the-scenes work to save the country. Which definitely is not entirely motivated by protecting their brand, after enabling Trump for four years and doing nothing to stop him until shots were literally being fired. Per CNN:

From her office in the West Wing, Ivanka Trump was fielding calls from Capitol Hill politicians who were literally hiding from a vicious and violent mob. Senator Lindsey Graham, a ubiquitous presence with the president during golf outings and holiday jaunts to Mar-a-Lago, could not get in touch with Trump to beseech him to publicly call for a stop to the insurrection, a source familiar with the conversation told CNN. So Graham called Ivanka Trump, pleading for her to help talk to her dad.

Kushner intervened when other officials tried restoring the president’s social media presence on sites that are often havens for extremists, such as Gab, following the unprecedented ban from several major platforms. It was…Ivanka…who pushed the president to issue a subsequent video in the wake of his impeachment, again denouncing any future violence or plots to wreak havoc across the country.

According to sources who have worked and socialized with Ivanka Trump and Kushner, their motivation was likely their fear over the state of their beloved moneymaker—the Trump brand.

“They’re trying to keep what little is left for them in terms of sellable currency as Trumps,” a source told CNN, with the outlet noting that their currency has gone from “perilous“ to “dire.” That currency may further be devalued given that the time to stop Trump from whipping his base into a violent frenzy was well before last Wednesday. Now, according to The Washington Post, it’s very possible we’ll be living with the effects of Trumpism for months, if not years, to come:

It remains unclear when and where groups might launch follow-up attacks, but even if they do pull back in the days to come—and experts say there is some reason to think they might—the threat from Trump-inspired extremism is likely to remain and grow. “It has begun to shift from ‘We are going to win this’ to ‘This fight is going to be a long one,’” said Rita Katz, executive director of the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist groups and their use of social media to inspire and organize adherents. “The prevalent consensus across the movements involved in or supporting the Capitol siege is that they will keep pushing forward.”

Experts said that although extremist groups are loosely organized, they are firmly united in their belief that the election was stolen, an idea that will persist long after Trump leaves the White House. “This animating narrative that something has been taken away from them, stolen from them, is essentially a gift that has been given to them by the president, by others and will likely animate some extremists for the next four years at least,” said Oren Segal, the vice president of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League.