Former President Donald Trump, known for having a flare for the dramatics when it came to dismissing employees in his administration, reportedly came close to firing his own kin via Twitter.
According to an early copy of New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s new book obtained by CNN, the then-president was seconds away from firing off a tweet that would’ve alerted his daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, that they were no longer employed in the White House.
Both Ivanka and Kushner were working as senior White House aides and the former president - who reportedly grew tired of his son-in-law’s presence and described him as sounding “like a child” - only decided not to fire them from the fury of his thumbs because his then-chief of staff John Kelly and then-White House counsel Don McGahn warned against it.
Mr Kelly reportedly stopped the president from firing off a tweet that would’ve promptly signalled the departure of the couple from Trump’s White House, warning that the news would be best delivered through an in-person conversation.
That conversation, Ms Haberman writes, never happened. Ivanka and Mr Kushner remained employed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue until their boss and relative departed in January 2021.
Despite publicly seeming to remain in the former president’s good graces up until his final hours in the White House, it has previously been reported that the relationship between the couple and Mr Trump began to fray in the weeks leading up to the January 6 Capitol riot.
Mr Kushner, apparently seeing the writing on the walls, began etching his plans to flee the coop before the former president had officially even lost his bid for reelection in 2020, according to The New York Times.
“We’re moving to Miami,” Mr Kushner reportedly told his wife a little more than a day after the last polls had closed in Alaska at midnight on 4 November, according to reporting from New York Times journalist Peter Baker and The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser for their book, titled The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.
More recently, Ivanka has been publicly iced out by her father after recorded testimony of her was screened this past summer at one of the January 6 House select committee public hearings.
During that prime-time hearing, Ivanka backed up the deposition that Attorney General William Barr had made during his recorded testimony, where he claimed that the twice-impeached president’s claims of election fraud was “bulls***”.
“I respect Attorney General Barr so I accepted what he was saying,” she said to the committee in her deposition.
Her father, who continues to peddle the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, was quick to dismiss his daughter’s testimony by accusing her of being “checked out” during her tenure as his employee.
“Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!),” Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social in June.
The final January 6 committee public hearing was slated to be televised on 28 September in the afternoon, but was postponed with less than a day warning due to Hurricane Ian, set to make landfall in Florida on Wednesday afternoon.
