The gravity of the task ahead had barely begun to register as members of the Trump family convened for an interview with 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl in their father's Liberace-esque pink marble living room on Friday. In the midst of his gilded triplex, Donald Trump grappled with “the enormity” of his new role. His wife, Melania, admitted there was a lot of work that needed to be done. (“It’s stuff on your shoulders,” she said.) Ivanka Trump, his eldest daughter and adviser, leaned into that mix of solemnity and awe. All breathy and with furrowed brow, Ivanka talked about how her father was changed during the campaign by meeting millions of Americans who might not normally hang out in a gilded pink triplex. “They speak to you with a candor about their struggles, their challenges,” she said, shifting in her gold-trimmed Baroque chair. “It is hard to put into words the experience or the emotion when your father becomes President of the United States of America,” she said. “We take that opportunity very seriously.”

No one has taken the opportunities in this campaign, and now in the transition to the White House, more seriously than Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner. For 16 months, while her reticent stepmother mostly steeled herself away in Little Versailles and her knuckleheaded brothers struggled to keep their feet out of their mouths, Ivanka hopscotched across the country, well into her third pregnancy, to stump for her father. She regularly sat down for solo television interviews when his campaign needed softening, and introduced her father on stage at the Republican National Convention. Kushner often escorted his wife but remained largely mum in public. Instead, he wielded his quiet influence behind the scenes—brokering relationships with the Republican establishment, retooling key speeches and staff shake-ups within the campaign. When the Trumps visited the White House on Thursday, he was spotted touring the grounds with President Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, stoking rumors that he would receive a plum job within the Trump Administration. And as a civil war appeared to rage within the newly forming inner circle over the last week, it was Kushner’s advice that President-Elect Trump seemed to listen to.

This is certainly an unusual degree of power for any presidential offspring or in-laws to hold. Patti Davis was more a thorn in her parents’ side than any kind of formal help. The Bush daughters got more attention for their college-age shenanigans than anything else while their father was in office. Chelsea Clinton and the Obama girls were too young to play any role other than First Daughter while they occupied the White House.

But the Trumps, fiercely insular, and the Trump-Kushners, intensely striving, are different. And they are about to occupy an unprecedented place in American history, more like a House of Cards plot-line than any prior White House reality.

For all their ambition and implied belief in Donald Trump as a candidate, both Ivanka and Jared Kushner seemed keenly aware that the prospect of a President Trump was unlikely. Kushner prepared for what many thought was inevitable by laying the groundwork for a media network that would capitalize on the swelling crowds and engaged online audience that turned a normal political campaign into what the Trump camp calls a “movement.” He reportedly floated the idea to media financiers and planted the seed in his father-in-law’s head about the possibility of a Trump News.