On August 16, 2016, just a few weeks after his father-in-law, Donald J. Trump, had clinched the Republican nomination for president, Esquire magazine ran a story entitled “Jared Kushner’s Second Act.” It was written by veteran journalist Vicky Ward and exposed a number of less-than-flattering details about the then 35-year-old head of his family’s real estate firm, Kushner Companies.
Ward’s profile depicted a young, entitled scion who was at turns arrogant and vindictive. In one sense, the story emasculated Kushner, portraying him as a subservient son-in-law. This was certainly not the image of her husband that Ivanka Trump wanted presented to the world in the glossy pages of a popular men’s magazine.
So she did what any rich, New York City media-connected, powerful spouse would do—and then took it up a couple of notches: Ivanka, according to Ward, called Esquire’s editor-in-chief at the time, Jay Fielden, and literally started crying, pleading with him to take down the story. Firing on all cylinders, Ivanka also texted Ward and said she did not recognize her husband in the Esquire piece. Fielden, Ward told me, instantly saw through Ivanka’s “crocodile tears.” Jared and Ivanka’s side leveled against Ward for falsifying the story. But the piece remained online and was published in the October print issue; no substantive changes or retractions were made to Ward’s reporting. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment from Ivanka on the Esquire incident.)
“Every
reporter knows they will be on the phone to Rupert Murdoch. Their
guiding credo is PR above everything else. Ivanka thinks she is
brilliant at public relations.”
— Vicky Ward
That might explain, in part, why Hunter Biden has gone through a media inquisition about his dealings in Ukraine and China, while Ivanka received virtually no additional press scrutiny after The New Yorker detailed her work on a real estate project in Azerbaijan with local partners who had alleged ties to the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a designated terrorist organization. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee subsequently called on the Justice Department and the Treasury Department to investigate the deal for possibly violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Then there was Ivanka’s very close brush with a criminal indictment for inflating condo sales to potential buyers at the Trump Soho, a development project she helped oversee. And remember it was Ivanka, among others, who advocated for the hiring of Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn. (A spokesperson for a prominent Washington think tank told me it was “malpractice” by congressional Democrats that Ivanka hasn’t been subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee.) Somehow, though, none of these poor judgement calls have made it into the dominant media narrative about the first daughter.
While some may see this as business as usual—everyone in politics wants glowing coverage and it wasn’t like the Obama administration was a cakewalk for journalists, either—Ivanka, who along with her husband is an unpaid adviser to the President of the United States, is a whole other press animal. To start, she has spent “the near-entirety of her adult life working the media,” as The Financial Times noted in a 2017 profile. She also is that rarest of trifectas serving in the West Wing: a celebrity, a social media star, and a child of the sitting president. This status gives her unprecedented power to wield in the media arena, and wield it she does.
Ivanka doesn’t blast the press as the enemy of the people, like her father does. Rather, she sees the news media as her personal enrichment and image-enhancement tool—which was, for many years, very much the case when she was a socialite living on the Upper East Side, fawned over by the lifestyle and fashion press. One editor who has worked for three leading national publications told me that she thought that Ivanka is the hardest Washington beat to cover. “With Donald, it’s all out there. By contrast, Ivanka is secretive, cryptic, controlled, and poised,” the editor said speaking on the condition of anonymity.
She hasn’t been able to maintain this iron media grip alone. Early in 2017, shortly after getting themselves installed in senior Trump administration roles, she and Jared brought on their own PR flack, Josh Raffel, to serve in the West Wing’s communications operations. Raffel, who was a White House employee paid with taxpayer dollars, spent countless hours on the phone with reporters, including myself, defending the couple. The premise Raffel, who left the White House in 2018, pushed with some success into media zeitgeist: Ivanka has her narrow lanes—workforce development, human trafficking, global entrepreneurship—and therefore basically has a free pass on everything else.
It helps explain how Ivanka has managed to pull off the PR stunt of a lifetime: floating untouched above the reputational decline—she is, according to a June survey, polling better in swing states than her father—that has consumed the Trump administration’s entire inner circle, save her.
Like many other people living inside the Beltway fishbowl, Ivanka has made herself useful to reporters and employed the age-old Washington media practice of getting her message out there through surrogates and background and off-the-record conversations with journalists.
But Ivanka can also go into full attack mode when the news cycle winds aren’t favorable, specifically when she feels particularly embarrassed and belittled by the coverage. Take, for instance, the reaction of the White House press office after BBC reporter Parham Ghabodi tweeted a video taken by the French presidential palace showing Ivanka trying awkwardly to insert herself into a conversation with world leaders.
Ivanka, according to one Washington reporter, was extremely rankled by the media’s reaction to the video, which rang up nearly 23 million views and more than 100,000 likes and retweets. So Jessica Ditto, the deputy White House communications director who now handles most of the first daughter’s press, wrote a snarling email to Ghabodi: “Your speculative tweet has created negative attacks and press on something that could easily have been explained had you simply asked or read the information the White House and G20 released.” Ditto called critics of Ivanka’s “haters.” Rather than focus on advancing policy messages or American diplomatic objectives, the highest communications office in the country devolved into the attack dog and spin machine for Ivanka Trump.
“There are many White House reporters who are afraid to challenge her [Ivanka] and hold her accountable, because she and Jared are their entry into deeper relationships in the administration. I’ve talked to a least half a dozen reporters who have told me this,” one prominent public affairs professional in Washington, D.C., told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to compromise the organization’s relationship with the press.
I was astonished by how much time Raffel spent on the phone with me during the summer of 2017 while I was reporting a story about Ivanka for the Columbia Journalism Review. Given that Raffel’s portfolio ostensibly covered Jared and Ivanka’s full slate of policy issues, including the Middle East, why spend so much energy on a single story for a niche publication?
There’s no mystery here: Ivanka must win, or at least try to win, every piece, every snub, and every news cycle. And here’s how that strategy played out with my CJR story, which was examining, among other things, Ivanka’s accountability to the public for her record in business and government. On Sept. 3, 2017 I wrote to Raffel asking if I could get confirmation on the record of my distillation of Raffel’s previous statements about Ivanka; namely, that the White House believes Ivanka should only be held accountable by the media on the policy areas on which she works and oversees.
I told Raffel my deadline was Sept. 13 at noon. The day after my deadline, on Sept. 14, Raffel said Ivanka was officially declining to comment for my story. Coincidentally, that was the same day the Financial Times ran a flattering profile of the first daughter which Ivanka cooperated for, giving the paper three in-person interviews. Raffel wanted to make sure I had seen it, so on Sept. 15, he wrote me an email with a link to the Financial Times story and a short message saying: “probably worth reading this one. She [Ivanka] has said things on the record that are useful to ure [sic] story.”
“There
are many White House reporters who are afraid to challenge her [Ivanka]
and hold her accountable, because she and Jared are their entry into
deeper relationships in the administration.”
— A prominent public affairs professional in Washington, D.C.
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