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world stage carrying out a singular mission.
Here was yet another battle to be won or lost. Bannon regarded Kushner and Cohn (and
Ivanka) as occupying an alternative reality that had little bearing on the real Trump
revolution. Kushner and Cohn saw Bannon as not just destructive but self-destructive, and
they were confident he would destroy himself before he destroyed them.
In the Trump White House, observed Henry Kissinger, “it is a war between the Jews
and the non-Jews.”
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For Dina Powell, the other Goldman hire in the West Wing, the main consideration when
Ivanka pitched her on coming to work at the White House was the downside assessment of
being associated with a Trump presidency. Powell ran the Goldman Sachs philanthropic
arm, a public relations initiative as well as a courtship of the increasingly powerful pools
of philanthropic money. Representing Goldman, she had become something of a legend at
Davos, a supreme networker among the world’s supreme networkers. She stood at an
intersection of image and fortune, in a world increasingly swayed by private wealth and
personal brands.
It was a function of both her ambition and Ivanka Trump’s sales talents during swift
meetings in New York and Washington that Powell, swallowing her doubts, had come on
board. That, and the politically risky but high-return gamble that she, aligned with Jared
and Ivanka, and working closely with Cohn, her Goldman friend and ally, could take over
the White House. That was the implicit plan: nothing less. Specifically, the idea was that
Cohn or Powell—and quite possibly both over the course of the next four or eight years
would, as Bannon and Priebus faltered, come to hold the chief of staff job. The president’s
own constant grumbling about Bannon and Priebus, noted by Ivanka, encouraged this
scenario.
This was no small point: a motivating force behind Powell’s move was the certain
belief on the part of Jared and Ivanka (a belief that Cohn and Powell found convincing)
that the White House was theirs to take. For Cohn and Powell, the offer to join the Trump
administration was transmuted beyond opportunity and became something like duty. It
would be their job, working with Jared and Ivanka, to help manage and shape a White
House that might otherwise become the opposite of the reason and moderation they could
bring. They could be instrumental in saving the place—and, as well, take a quantum
personal leap forward.
More immediately for Ivanka, who was focused on concerns about women in the
Trump White House, Powell was an image correction to Kellyanne Conway, whom, quite
apart from their war with Bannon, Ivanka and Jared disdained. Conway, who continued to
hold the president’s favor and to be his preferred defender on the cable news shows, had
publicly declared herself the face of the administration—and for Ivanka and Jared, this
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