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Joshua Kushner and Karlie Kloss at the 2016 Met Gala |
Javanka vs. the Klossy Possee
WASHINGTON
— Like England, we have our own famous princelings, brothers bound
close to each other and to the poised and beautiful young women at their
sides.
But while Will & Kate
& Harry & Meghan are seen as a unit, pulling for Mother England
together, Jared & Ivanka & Josh & Karlie are seen in
opposition, in a public tug of war over American values.
Even
as Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are inside the White House, helping
to shape policies, Josh Kushner and Karlie Kloss are outside it,
protesting against some of those policies.
It’s
a perfect illustration of the riven state of the country right now,
where all manner of Americans — from the Kushners to my family to the
characters on “Roseanne” — are glaring at each other over an
insurmountable fence.
When
Donald Trump was elected, Washington held its breath, waiting for the
Creature from the Black Lagoon to emerge from the Potomac. With Trump in
the thrall of the apocalyptic Steve Bannon, the creepy Michael Flynn
and the unconscionable alt-right, the only ray of hope lay in Ivanka and
Jared, glossy real estate scions who had been liberal darlings of New
York society and Sun Valley conferences.
At
first, Javanka found it heady here, ignoring those who called them
naïve and nepotistic. Talking about military deals with Saudi Arabia,
they got to use words like “deliverables.”
But
as Jared got more ensnared in the Russia investigation and infighting
in the West Wing, and Ivanka found that she could not reignite her
father’s more liberal impulses, any hope that the pair could be a
moderating influence vanished. Members of their old moneyed set began to
dismiss Jared as “dumb” and “arrogant,” as several put it to me, and
Ivanka as complicit, the label she got after Scarlett Johansson played
her on “Saturday Night Live.”
Even
Vogue, where Anna Wintour had once offered Ivanka a job, stuck in the
stiletto. “Look,” one Vogue.com headline sniped in July, “It’s Time to
Collectively and Officially Give Up on Ivanka Trump.”
The low point for the self-proclaimed daddy’s girl came a month ago when The Times reported
that the president might be using his chief of staff, John Kelly, an
adversary to Javanka, to push them out and back to New York.
Jared
and Ivanka seem torn about whether to keep crossing the rapids or turn
back to shore. And as someone in their camp says: “It’s not like they
could leave and all of a sudden you have this quiet life. Look at Don
Jr.” At this point, being a Trump is less a good brand than a bad state
of mind.
Besides, as their ally says, with Ivanka’s trip to the Olympics
in South Korea and her success helping Republicans increase the child
tax credit, “she feels she’s actually found her groove.”
Her
groove, if she even has one, is not as groovy as that of her
prospective sister-in-law, a supermodel who has become the First
Daughter of the Resistance.
The
25-year-old Karlie Kloss publicly broke from the Trump clan when she
tweeted a picture of herself voting for Hillary Clinton. Then she showed
up at the women’s march the day after the inauguration. Josh, 32, who
thought about giving a TV interview about his differences with his
brother but changed his mind, was spotted with her. But he also went to
the White House on his own and Instagrammed a picture of himself with
Jared, standing beneath the portrait of J.F.K.
Josh,
routinely described by mentors as “respectful,” has built a technology
investment firm called Thrive that is worth billions. His crown jewel, a
health insurance company called Oscar, was structured around Obamacare —
the main thing Trump has been trying to explode.
After Trump won, Forbes said,
Josh had to hold one-on-one meetings with nearly a hundred employees to
say he is neither responsible for this administration nor able to get
special favors.
Josh and Karlie, both
about 6-foot-2, ambitious and private, also showed up at the
gun-control march last weekend. Josh posted a picture on Instagram of
Karlie holding a sign that read “Load Minds, Not Guns” and donated
$50,000 to the cause.
(Tiffany Trump,
for her part, liked a post on Instagram showing a guy holding a sign
that said “Next massacre will be the GOP in the midterm elections.”)
While
many have become disillusioned with Ivanka’s status as an advocate for
women and children, Karlie’s status has been growing. She landed on the 30-under-30 cover
of Forbes in December; the magazine noted that her off-duty uniform was
a Planned Parenthood T-shirt with jeans. After taking coding classes
herself, she founded Kode with Klossy, a coding summer camp for girls.
Like
Ivanka before her, Karlie has had some rough patches in her romance
because of the severe pressure she faces from Seryl and Charles Kushner,
the parents of Josh and Jared, to convert to Orthodox Judaism. (The
brothers’ grandparents were Holocaust survivors.) Charles Kushner went
to jail in a messy sex and campaign finance scandal in 2005.
Karlie’s
friends describe her as “insanely nice,” as one put it, and often
showing up with homemade baked goods. Some of them are upset, claiming
that Ivanka has not been as supportive to Karlie as she could have been
during her trial by fire imposed by the Kushner parents over the
conversion issue.
In a story in The Forward,
Margaret Abrams noted that, of course, the Kushners would not have been
pleased with two such “WASP-worthy girls,” but given Charles’s
controversial past, “they can’t exactly complain about the shiksas
treating Yom Kippur like a juice fast.”(Dowd - a Catholic gets the farce, but Schachter and the RCA could care less what it looks like to the world at large, never mind the Jews)
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