It was one of Donald Trump’s favorite conspiracy theories — that Saudi Arabia was behind 9/11, and the U.S. government is covering it up: “You will find out who really knocked down the World Trade Center because they have papers in there that are very secret, you may find it’s the Saudis, OK?” he thundered at a primary-season rally in Blufftown, South Carolina.

But when the Republican platform committee set about putting Trump’s words into policy, calling for the declassification of 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission’s report relating to Saudi Arabia, the plank was quietly shelved. The identity of the person whose behind-the-scenes intervention helped scuttle the deal was, perhaps, a surprise: Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.


Kushner is the campaign’s unofficial ambassador to Jewish donors who fretted that the release of damaging information about Saudi Arabia could alter the balance of power in the Mideast. But the intervention — by one of Trump’s family members seeking to rein in the candidate's more destabilizing positions — has become increasingly common.

The young New York City real estate and media mogul, who is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, has become the most powerful operative atop the campaign in the month since the candidate’s children banded together and forced the ouster of Corey Lewandowski and his “Let Trump be Trump” approach.

Now, Kushner is making key hires, fine-tuning and sharpening Trump’s speeches and serving as the central emissary behind the scenes, meeting privately last month with House Speaker Paul Ryan, having direct conversations with billionaire Sheldon Adelson and asserting influence on everything from Trump’s search for a running mate — he pushed hard for Newt Gingrich, largely at Adelson’s behest — to his tweets.

Since Lewandowski’s dismissal, executed by three Kushner associates, including Trump’s son Donald Jr., no one has officially been named the new campaign manager. And while Kushner is working alongside Paul Manafort, a seasoned political operative three decades his senior who has been preoccupied with convention plans, there is a sense that the baby-faced billionaire is now effectively at the helm of a presidential campaign that is more of a family business than any in recent history.

“In my 30 years in the business, I’ve never seen such a positive impact from such a large family on such a complex campaign,” said Michael Caputo, a longtime Trump associate who oversaw Trump’s New York primary campaign before getting ousted.

Trump Tower insiders could see this coming for months. Trump holds a standing meeting with the children and his top advisers Monday mornings at 9:30. And sometimes he listens, at least to the family.

Trump tempered his attack on Planned Parenthood during a primary debate last spring, for instance, at the urging of his daughter Ivanka. In March, he appeared at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual policy conference and read a speech Kushner had written for him almost verbatim, relenting as he agreed to a teleprompter. He dispatched his two sons, both hunters, to go on a shooting photo op with reporters and backers in Iowa in an effort to solidify his credibility with rural voters and Second Amendment enthusiasts.

Kushner, perhaps most significantly, has developed a personal relationship with Adelson, who he now contacts directly without going through the billionaire’s aide, Andy Abboud, according to a campaign source. This past week, as Trump neared an announcement about a running mate, Kushner and the children flew hastily to Indiana to talk through the final choice and to keep their father from changing his mind.

And now, as the nominee and the Republican National Committee struggle to unify the GOP around this candidate, Trump’s children have even more decisively and deliberately taken control, traveling with their father to meet with GOP lawmakers in Washington and standing as better surrogates than any of the dozens of B-list Republicans the campaign has officially enlisted.

Trump’s children will each take a turn on stage in Cleveland this week, all in prime time — a reflection of the disinterest among some of the party’s more traditional standard-bearers and vulnerable members of Congress in sharing a stage with Trump but also the importance of Trump’s offspring, who are being asked to help soften their father’s sharp edges to general election voters.

“If I was working with them, I’d put them onstage too,” said Sam Nunberg, who was Trump’s political director for four years until being fired last summer shortly after Lewandowski was brought in (Trump is now suing him for allegedly breaching a nondisclosure agreement). “The kids are celebrities. He's going to turn them into surrogates who can fan out to all the states.”

Arguably, the Trump kids are the least controversial element of the family brand. Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), forced to take the stage with Trump earlier this month at a rally in North Carolina and seemingly at a loss for what to say, spoke briefly but glowingly about the candidate’s progeny.

“Even anti-Trump Republicans and pro-Hillary Democrats admire these kids,” said Caputo. “And I always say: ‘That’s a reflection of the father that raised them.’”

Indeed, Trump’s three adult children — a fourth, Tiffany Trump, is an outlier in that she has little role within the campaign — are critical in softening their father’s edges with swing voters, especially as Trump himself has seemed unwilling or unable to tone down his own bombast and heed his party’s frantic calls to focus on Hillary Clinton and not get distracted by side issues with little bearing on the general election.

According to campaign insiders, no one seems to make Trump prouder than Ivanka, his oldest daughter, who is a mother of two, fashion model, designer, Trump Corp. executive and Manhattan socialite who demonstrates poise and message control. No child is more capable of casting a glow upon her thin-skinned, insult-spewing father that could allow voters to see him in a more forgiving light. And no one has more sway when it comes to getting a hard-headed boss to heed advice that’s difficult to hear.

Unable to vote in New York’s GOP primary because she wasn’t registered as a Republican, Ivanka prevailed in getting Trump to stop short of completely disavowing Planned Parenthood during a Republican primary debate where most rivals were toeing the party line with calls to defund the organization entirely — a rare instance where Trump, who’d already endeared himself to the base, was taking a centrist position early on and avoiding the mistakes of previous, establishment-styled nominees.

Donald Trump, Jr., Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump and Tiffany Trump celebrate their father's nomination in Cleveland on July 19. | AP Photo

Similarly, Ivanka was among those who finally convinced her father to stop accusing the U.S.-born federal judge overseeing the Trump University lawsuit of bias based on his Mexican heritage.

Long skeptical of Lewandowski, who she viewed as an enabler of Trump’s most coarse and self-sabotaging impulses, she was also an advocate for bringing in Manafort to run things in late March and for Lewandowski’s eventual firing on June 21.

Campaign advisers inside Trump Tower recognize the unique bond between Trump and his successful daughter and that, as one Trump insider said, he clearly “wants her to be the face of his brand into the next generation.” It’s not only her appearance but her business acumen and warm personality that has implicitly elevated her over her brothers: Donald Jr., who is a lead on several of his father’s business projects including the redevelopment of Washington, D.C.’s, Old Post Office into a Trump hotel, and Eric Trump, who helps oversee his father’s portfolio of golf courses and hotels.

For a long time, Kushner was “just a trailer on that [Ivanka] train,” another campaign staffer, speaking privately, explained. “But the more Trump got to know and hear Jared’s thoughts about the campaign, the more he trusted him and saw himself in him,” the staffer said, recalling an instance in Trump’s office when the boss ended a phone call with Kushner by encouraging him to call him directly at any time.

“Jared is actually more successful than Trump was at his age,” the staffer continued. “So his opinion became more and more valuable to Trump the more he saw how smart and reasoned he is.”

Trump’s increasing reliance on his son-in-law — and Kushner’s increasing assertiveness as a political adviser — troubled Lewandowski. Likewise, Kushner, who wanted to replace Lewandowski after Trump’s second-place finish in Iowa, never meshed with the gritty operative guiding the campaign. Two sources recall a campaign event this spring at which Kushner happened upon the fiery Lewandowski yelling at a low-level staffer. “If you do that again, you’re gone,” Kushner reportedly told his father-in-law’s campaign manager, according to one witness to that interaction.

Around that time, Manafort was brought on to steady the campaign after its embarrassing setback in Wisconsin and to clean up a delegate operation that Lewandowski had apparently overlooked. “When Corey told staffers not to talk to Manafort and then fired one [James Baker] because he did, that also caught Kushner’s eye, and the situation bound him and the kids more closely to Manafort,” one Trump confidant said.

Lewandowski and Kushner also battled over the Adelson portfolio, which both wanted to control. Kushner and Adelson had worked to set up a trip for Trump to visit Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel — but without informing Trump himself. Given the controversy at that time over Trump’s proposed Muslim ban, Trump didn’t want to go to Israel and empowered Lewandowski to squash reports that a trip was in the works.

According to two sources with direct knowledge of the situation, it was around that time that Lewandowski, who continued to oversee the campaign’s communications strategy, began pushing reporters to write negative stories about Kushner — a fact that made its way back to Trump’s children and one that was, according to one insider, “the final straw” leading to his firing.

“Ironically, Corey shutting out a lot of reporters deemed to be unfriendly led many of them to establish relationships with the kids to get information that way,” one campaign insider explained. “But the kids wound up getting information from the embeds about things Lewandowski was doing that informed their thinking on him. So, in that way, his strategy backfired.”

Manafort quietly cultivated the children from the moment he joined the campaign. His cool confidence contrasted with Lewandowski’s frenetic energy; and while both operatives began to engage in a war of media leaks, Manafort shrugged off negative stories while Lewandowski only got more aggressive, according to campaign sources. Manafort "recognized [the children’s] importance early on and made sure they had everything they needed to be confident in his leadership,” one source said. “They’ve all been very curious about the process of running for president, and he’s always offered his experience and took time to answer their questions: everything from what to expect next to what kind of reporter this person is, he just was a source of credible information.”

It took more than two additional months of infighting before Lewandowski’s firing, which was agreed to and carried out by Kushner and the Trump children on June 21, days after Manafort told them he was going to resign if Lewandowski wasn’t axed. His firing broke the internal logjam that had hindered the campaign’s growth, and dozens of prospective employees, whose hiring Lewandowski had been blocking, were finally added to the campaign — mostly with Kushner granting final approval.

But being members of the family political business has not provided Ivanka Trump or her husband the ability to control the candidate. And if there was any doubt about that, Trump made sure Kushner knew when he publicly disavowed one of his son-in-law’s unauthorized actions.

It was the July 4 weekend, and Donald Trump, responding to a new poll showing that a majority of voters found Clinton to be “corrupt,” tweeted an image of the Democrat with the text “Most corrupt candidate ever” inside a Star of David. The criticism was swift and devastating.

"A Star of David, a pile of cash, and suggestions of corruption. Donald Trump again plays to the white supremacists," said Erick Erickson, the influential blogger and radio host who has been a constant critic of Trump.

"Donald Trump should stop playing the blame game and accept that his campaign tweeted an image with obvious anti-Semitic overtones and that, reportedly, was lifted from a white supremacist website," said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League.

After conferring privately, Kushner, Manafort and newly hired communications adviser Jason Miller were in agreement: The tweet should come down, despite Trump’s stated preference for keeping it up. They told social media director Dan Scavino to delete the tweet.

Trump, whose personal policy has long been never to back off or apologize, was infuriated, according to sources close to Trump.

And without naming names, he lit Kushner up publicly.

"'You shouldn't have taken it down,'" he said, as if he were speaking to a nameless staffer, during a rally in Ohio days later. "You know they took the star down. I said, 'Too bad, you should've left it up. I would've rather defended it, just leave it up and say, no, that's not a Star of David, it's just a star.'"

Kushner’s attempt to defuse the situation with an op-ed column a day earlier defending his father-in-law from claims of anti-Semitism also drew blowback — from one of his employees as well as several estranged relatives — and only prolonged media coverage of the controversy, distracting from the congressional testimony by the FBI director about Clinton’s private email server that was taking place at the same time.

“This is the problem: He has no political experience,” said one campaign source. “He has experience buying buildings.”