Opinion: Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner go their own way on January 6
(CNN)Ivanka Trump’s recent eight-hour testimony before the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack by her father’s followers was perfectly “on brand,” as marketers say, for her personal image. Depending on what she said, it may also have increased the legal threat faced by the former President and further tarnished his legacy. It undoubtedly added a new element to the long-running examination of a rarefied family dynamic.
It’s notable that Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner chose to voluntarily cooperate with the House committee examining the violent attempt to stop the certification of Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. This choice saved them from the prospect of being subpoenaed and forced to decide whether to testify under the threat of being cited for contempt.
Although nothing has been revealed about Ivanka’s testimony, the mere fact that she appeared before the committee marks her as perhaps the most important of the three highest-level allies of the former President to assist the investigation. The second was Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, who cooperated briefly and then ceased. And the third was Kushner, who also worked in the White House but wasn’t in Washington on the day of the riot. He, nevertheless, gave testimony that one committee member called “really valuable.”
Other people close to Trump, including former adviser Steve Bannon, White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and onetime trade adviser Peter Navarro, have chosen to fight the committee’s effort to get them to testify, and Trump himself went to court in an unsuccessful bid to stop White House records from being turned over. Bannon is expected to be tried in July for defying the committee’s subpoena. And the House voted Wednesday to recommend Scavino and Navarro be referred to the Department of Justice on criminal contempt of Congress charges.
Ivanka testified Tuesday for two hours more than her husband, and as someone who was in the Oval Office on January 6, she could have offered specific memories of events. Committee members are particularly interested in any discussions about Donald Trump’s 2:28 p.m. tweet chastising Vice President Mike Pence for not supporting the plan to block certification of Biden’s electoral win. They are also curious about the planning and her father’s state of mind on that day.
It’s hard to imagine that anyone in the world can better assess Trump’s state of mind than his daughter. The Trumps long operated their business as a close family unit, which meant she worked with him directly. She seemed to enjoy an unusual latitude when it came to establishing an independent identity.
While her adult siblings rarely appeared in the press as they focused intently on the family empire in the rough-and-tumble real estate business, Ivanka built an eponymous fashion line beginning with jewelry priced as high as $25,000.
As the face of her company, she fashioned an image that was refined and polished compared with her father’s, and she enjoyed access to certain precincts of high society where he was shunned.
But as it turned out, the high-price jewelry business had been captured by the likes of Cartier and Tiffany brands. Ivanka went mass market with affordable but chic shoes and clothes that were embraced by working women. She became a woman-of-the-people, popular for her accessible elegance, achieved as she became the mother of three and steered clear of her father’s controversies.
In the beginning of her high-profile political life she tried, as The New Yorker put it at the time, to “float along…unsullied” during her father’s ghastly 2016 campaign. She stressed she was “a daughter, not a clone,” adding, “of course daughters often disagree with things their fathers say.” Then, as the White House absorbed her attention, Ivanka’s brand was shuttered and her remaining wares were sold at a discount.
Despite her effort to stand slightly apart from her father, he chose her, and not either of his adult sons, for a top White House job. (As he told one reporter, he loved all his children but he described her as “unique” among them. He also reportedly called her “Baby.”)
In the beginning she openly broke with her father on the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and on the controversial candidacy of Roy Moore, who faced sexual misconduct allegations, for the US Senate representing Alabama. However, she gradually receded from public view to the point where, in 2019, a CNN headline asked, “What does Ivanka Trump do?”
What she is doing as she cooperates with the January 6 committee is re-establishing herself as a figure independent from her father and willing to respond to a legitimate inquiry. This may be due to a reported “rupture” with her father, which the Washingtonian magazine attributes to the events of January 6. It may also be driven by the knowledge, at the age of 40, that she must fashion a life after Washington. Until now she has been frustrated in at least one arena, high society, where she has struggled for acceptance.
How will the former President react to her choice to go her own way, even if she risks hurting him? Considering his respect for the power of image-making, and that she is the one he calls “Baby,” he’ll likely let her get away with it. And since she’s always been his golden child, he might even be happy for her if it helps her reach her goal of rejoining the social elite.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/07/opinions/ivanka-trump-jared-kushner-january-6-strategy-dantonio/index.html
