Jared Kushner wasn’t in the audience Tuesday evening in Phoenix, where the temperature rose well over 100 degrees and his father-in-law and boss Donald Trump melted down in prime time. “I hit ‘em with neo-Nazi, I hit ‘em with everything. . . . K.K.K.? We have K.K.K. I got ‘em all,” the president told the crowd, defending his response to the violent protest propagated by tiki torch-bearing white supremacists more than a week earlier in Charlottesville, Virginia. This played out while Kushner is on his third trip to the Middle East since he joined the administration, where he is making a stop in the Gulf states before arriving in Israel on Wednesday evening. Kushner, along with Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell and Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt will meet with leaders from the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Qatar, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia in the days before “to continue discussions with regional partners about how best to support the peace effort,” according to a White House official.

A veteran Washington hand who knows Kushner said that the 36-year-old scion, who is certainly out of his depth, is carrying out this particular task the only way he knows how. “Kushner thinks he’s just negotiating another real estate deal devoid of history or morals, rights or wrongs,” this person said. “It’s just a real estate deal to him.”

Trump’s Charlottesville response has scrambled Jewish politics beyond all recognition, and his son-in-law is a kind of silent emblem of this tumult. Kushner comes from a Democratic family whose cause, aside from making huge sums of money in the real-estate business, has long been Judaism and Israel. But as his father-in-law is being widely derided for not initially explicitly calling out the extremism and anti-Semitism that drove the turbulence in Charlottesville last week, Kushner, a senior adviser to the president, stayed quiet. Privately, he advised his father-in-law to take a more pointed stance, according to a person familiar with the situation. Under pressure from Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, chief of staff John Kelly, and others, the president acquiesced, giving what looked like a hostage-style teleprompter address from the White House last Monday. Trump promptly undid that a day later with his now infamous, impromptu, unhinged press conference in the lobby of Trump Tower.

Kushner wasn’t on hand for that, either, despite the fact that the president was addressing his administration’s infrastructure plans, which happens to be one of the many issues the West Wing royal is involved with. Much of the rest of the country—including the Jewish communities to which Kushner and Ivanka, as practicing modern Orthodox Jews, belong—raged at the president’s comments and bowed their heads at the state of the nation. In fact, the rabbi who converted Ivanka Trump wrote a letter to their congregation in New York condemning the president’s language. “While we always avoid politics, we are deeply troubled by the moral equivalency and equivocation President Trump has offered in his response to this act of violence,” the letter read.

As the battle lines were hardening, the Trump-Kushners took off on a Trump Organization helicopter to Vermont for a pre-planned, two-day getaway. A person familiar with the situation said that the couple paid for its use.