It was a warm Thursday evening in October, and the gilded crowd inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art was traversing the various delights at the inaugural All Hallows’ Eve benefit, a highlight of the under-50 society season. The event, co-chaired by Wendi Deng, Dasha Zhukova, and Karlie Kloss, among others, was attended by Ellie Goulding, Nicky Hilton, and Joan Smalls, who were decked out in Minnie Mouse ears, Dior gowns, glittering Gucci jumpsuits, and elaborate headdresses in accordance with the evening’s “mystical costume attire” theme. They shuffled among the interactive theater experiences set up inside the 16th-century Vélez Blanco patio and onwards to the 18th-century Wrightsman Galleries, where they found tarot card readings, musical performances, and dancers weaving through a ring of flickering candles, eventually plopping themselves down on the cool floor in the shape of a cross.

It was the sort of event where Ivanka Trump, before her unexpected career detour to Washington, D.C., might have once held court. In the past, Trump has walked the red carpet outside the annual Met Gala; for years, Kloss has been dating her brother-in-law, Josh Kushner, who flew home from a conference in Saudi Arabia in time to swipe on some eyeliner, don a tuxedo, and stand beside his supermodel girlfriend for the benefit. (As Josh was flying back for the event, his brother, Jared Kushner, a senior White House adviser, was on a commercial flight for an unannounced trip to Saudi Arabia as part of the administration’s Middle East peace discussions, where a source familiar with the visit said he met with Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who recently jailed his 11 cousins in an alarming crackdown with global reverberations.)

Ivanka and Zhukova, meanwhile, are also longtime friends. And it was Deng who reportedly reunited Ivanka and Jared aboard her ex-husband Rupert Murdoch’s yacht nearly a decade ago after their short-lived breakup. Ivanka had been a trustee for their daughters, and the Trump-Kushners were on hand for their baptism in the Jordan River in 2010. More recently, Deng vacationed with the couple in Croatia last summer, sat by Ivanka’s side on the eve of her father’s inauguration in January, and has been spotted visiting their Kalorama home in Washington since. So as masked guests made their way through the Met last month, some wondered about the First Daughter’s conspicuous absence. According to four sources, Ivanka had been invited to attend months ago. One said that she had decided not to go last month.

Video: Ivanka and Jared’s First Year in Washington

It has now been a year since the Trump-Kushners walked out onto the stage of the Midtown Hilton, after midnight, to the astonishing reality that Donald Trump would become the next president of the United States. The historic election commenced an equally extraordinary opportunity for two scions who had built their own careers largely upon their parents’ success. After the election, the two proceeded apace.

Despite anti-nepotism laws and looming conflicts of interests, the couple quickly determined that they would re-route their ambitions through the White House, impervious to any sort of significant public-relations setback. They benefited from both clever legal maneuvering and an American public so paralyzed by the thought of a President Trump that it could countenance the prospect of two political neophytes entering the inner sanctum of American government. Among a motley crew of Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Jeff Sessions, and Mike Flynn, they didn’t merely seem moderating—they seemed human. Even if they were ambitious, inexperienced creatures of privilege, so the argument went, they were at least a secure line for the liberals they left behind in their globalist cuckocracy—the world of the All Hallows’ Eve benefit, the Met, the Upper East Side they left behind.