President Trump was fed up with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s nagging during his attempt to pull the United States out of the Paris agreement.
“They’re New York liberals,” the president told a White House aide according to the Atlantic. “Of course that’s what they think.” Trump mocked the two for their “incessant lobbying” when they were not around.
In June 2017, the president pulled the U.S. out of the agreement, declaring, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh — not Paris!”
Kushner and Ivanka, both senior advisers to Trump, have staked themselves out as two of the more moderate members of the Trump family.
Ivanka, 37, has made passing family leave a personal policy pet project of her father’s presidency. During the 2016 Republican convention, she introduced her father in a speech that advocated for passing laws on equal pay for women and universal access to affordable childcare.
When Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate accord, Ivanka and Kushner skipped the president’s announcement in the Rose Garden. She had told her friends that climate change was one of the fights she would be willing to pick to influence her father toward her more moderate policy positions.
Despite the occasional differences, the Trumps have kept their disagreements behind closed doors.
“So where I disagree with my father, he knows it, and I express myself with total candor,” Ivanka said in a 2017 interview. “Where I agree, I fully lean in and support the agenda and hope that I can be an asset to him and make a positive impact. But I respect the fact that he always listens. It’s how he was in business. It’s how he is as president.”
