Maria Puente

USA TODAY

Ivanka Trump, her husband, Jared Kushner, and their three young children were confronted on a JetBlue flight by a hostile passenger who was subsequently kicked off the plane Thursday for causing "conflict."

Trump, 35, the elder daughter of President-elect Trump's five children, was preparing to travel on a JetBlue flight out of New York's JFK International Airport when a male passenger berated her, demanding to know why she was on the flight and, according to TMZ, telling her, “Your father is ruining the country!”

“Why is she on our flight? She should be riding private,” the man, later identified as Daniel Goldstein, exclaimed, TMZ reported. Another passenger told TMZ that Trump ignored the man and distracted her kids with crayons before he was escorted off the flight.

As he was removed, the man yelled, “You’re kicking me off for expressing my opinion?”

Goldstein's husband, Hunter College professor Matthew Lasner, said on Twitter that he and his husband were kicked off the flight after Goldstein "expressed displeasure" about flying with Trump.

Lasner also tweeted that his husband was chasing the couple down in the terminal "to harass them." He has since deleted his Twitter account but savvy Twitter users resurrected some of his tweets.

JetBlue cited the possibility of "the risk of escalation during flight" in explaining the decision to remove the men. The airline said the couple was rebooked for the next available flight.

"The decision to remove a customer from a flight is not taken lightly," according to an airline statement emailed to USA TODAY. "If the crew determines that a customer is causing conflict on the aircraft, the customer will be asked to deplane, especially if the crew feels the situation runs the risk of escalation during flight. In this instance, our team worked to re-accommodate the party on the next available flight."

A spokeswoman for the Trump family declined comment but did not dispute the accounts, according to The Associated Press.

Meanwhile, tweeters poured scorn on the ejected couple for "harassing" a mother and her children.

There weren't a lot of tweets defending the men's behavior but some tweeters did wonder why Trump — a successful businesswoman in her own right, the daughter of a billionaire with his own jet, and the wife of a multi-millionaire member of a New York billionaire real-estate family — would be flying commercial, and in coach.