Standing before a backdrop of the polished marble and gilded elevators on Tuesday afternoon, President Donald Trump did a full 180 in every sense. A day earlier, he carefully read prepared remarks from a teleprompter in the Diplomatic Room of the White House condemning neo-Nazis, the Klu Klux Klan, and white supremacists. This statement was, in and of itself, a volte-face from this tepid initial response to the violent unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, after which his advisers, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, and other world leaders urged him to come out stronger against hate groups. But on Tuesday, Trump did a double-reverse, seemingly sympathizing with neo-Nazis while simultaneously condemning the left. Albert Speer’s neoclassicism was replaced by Trumpian grandeur.

We know by now that the 45th president does not like to feel backed into a corner or told what to do, which explains, perhaps, why so many top staffers came and went throughout the campaign and his first six months in the White House after unsuccessfully trying to tame Trump. And so on Tuesday, when those gold elevator doors opened in Trump Tower for a press gathering meant to be devoted to his administration’s infrastructure agenda, he backtracked toward his initial reaction—that the events in Charlottesville were the result of violence from “both sides.”

“You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent,” he said. “Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.” He added that the “alt-left” was also “very, very violent” in confrontations with neo-Nazi groups and white nationalists, who wielded torches and waved flags with swastikas and Confederate flags and chanted “Jews will not replace us.”

The impact within Trump’s inner circle was unmistakable. Gary Cohn, the president’s chief economic adviser, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, both Jews, stood beside the president during the exchange, which, again, had been billed to them and everyone else in the room as a talk about infrastructure, with blank countenances. John Kelly, his new chief of staff, winced and kept his eyes glued to those marble floors as the president spoke.

Curiously absent from the event, the president’s first return to Manhattan since he took office, were his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, both of whom moved to Washington in order to serve in senior roles in the administration. Both are also practicing modern Orthodox Jews, who observe Shabbat each weekend and send their children to Jewish day schools, and would presumably reject Trump’s commentary for profound personal reasons. Ivanka had tweeted denouncing the racism witnessed in Charlottesville on Sunday morning at the hands of neo-Nazis and white supremacists—long before her father did—after reflecting on the news once Shabbat ended. The New York Times reported that the couple, who had been with the president at their golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, at the time, urged Trump to moderate his tone after his initial statement. Kushner, of course, is the descendant of Holocaust survivors. A story of their remarkable journey, The Miracle of Life, sits in the entrance of the Kushner Companies’ headquarters at 666 Fifth Avenue.

This has become a common trope in the brief history of Ivanka and Kushner’s place in the Trump administration orbit: President Trump will take an extreme stance; people wonder why this New York, cosmopolitan, well-groomed, formerly Democratic couple didn’t talk their father out of it; and then people close to them recount that they had, in fact, urged him to moderate, but that the president is his own man or has others in his ear or was simply fulfilling a campaign promise—that their hands were bound by their own golden handcuffs, but they sure did try. This is what happened with the president’s immigration platform (Ivanka, according to people close to her at the time, expressed her concern about what would happen to “Dreamers” under his plan). And again with the Paris climate accord. And again over the weekend with Charlottesville.