In recent conversations, I’ve heard people close to President Trump wonder aloud whether it was Kushner’s team that leaked the Don junior e-mails to the Times in the first place. The implication would be that Kushner was willing to sacrifice his brother-in-law in order to distance himself from the uncomfortable reality of the meeting. There is no evidence for this. But it illustrates the tension among Donald Trump’s advisers. The pressure of the Russia investigation has created rifts among members of the Trump family and their lawyers.

Inside the Trump White House, where advisers are regularly subjected to ritualistic debasement or worse at the president’s hands, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are the two people who up till now have managed to float above the fray. They have become a feared duo inside the West Wing, as much for an apparent vindictive streak as for their favored status with the man Washington operatives now call “the principal.” No one except for the president is surrounded by a larger battery of legal and public-relations representation. They appear to be driven in equal parts by family loyalty and brand preservation. Ivanka, like her father, relies on her name and image to propel her fortune. Kushner, while less comfortable in the spotlight, has a stable of advisers and staff who report to him as the czar of a shadow government known as the White House Office of American Innovation.

The stark contrast between the hopeful scene at the G-20 meeting and the chaos and panic aboard Air Force One highlights the key facet of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s existence in Washington. It is the contrast between the world they want to appear to inhabit and the one they actually do.

To report this story, I spoke to West Wing advisers, personal friends, and various other associates of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Surprised to find themselves in Washington to begin with, the couple has undergone a serial transformation. First, they were awestruck by the seeming power of their new positions, and approached Washington as one giant research project, setting up meetings and phone calls with experts in the areas that interested them. It was as if the entirety of Washington’s expertise was laid out in one giant smorgasbord. For Kushner, this approach was a continuation of one he had adopted during the campaign, and one that came with some peril, as he would later discover. When I asked a longtime associate how Jared and Ivanka felt about their time in Washington, the first word uttered was “sacrificial.”

It’s clear that, after an initial period of awe at the sheer power of their positions, Jared and Ivanka have been stung by the vitriol directed at them. But, as Ivanka has been known to tell her six-year-old daughter, Arabella, “for every problem, there is a solution.” For Kushner and Ivanka, the solution has been to fight back: against New York friends who disapprove of them, against West Wing foes, and even against the president himself. Increasingly you hear chatter in Washington that Jared and Ivanka won’t last, not because they are at risk of being pushed out, but because they will save themselves from a damaged White House. One well-connected strategist in New York told me that the two were eyeing a move at the end of the school year in 2018. A person close to the couple said they weren’t planning that far ahead. “When they decide it’s more important to protect their own and their children’s reputations than it is to defend their indefensible father’s, that’s a sign the end is near,” one influential Republican donor told me.

WATCH: Jared Kushner, Adviser to the President

When might that moment come? The president’s abhorrent commentary about the events in Charlottesville, in which he described some of those marching with neo-Nazis as “very fine people” and decried the removal of Confederate statues as “sad to see,” is among the most toxic and racist public statements ever made by an American president. Any masquerade that Kushner and Ivanka could maintain that they were moderating influences in the White House flew out the window the moment Trump waved his hand and said that there were “many sides” to the Charlottesville violence. He did so on a Saturday, and Kushner and Ivanka were observing Shabbat. When she awoke early on Sunday, Ivanka tweeted, “There should be no place in society for racism, white supremacy and neo-nazis.” Kushner was silent about the white-supremacist violence in Charlottesville, where many of the so-called Unite the Right protesters chanted anti-Semitic taunts such as “Jews Will Not Replace Us.” On Tuesday, Trump doubled down on his comments. In doing so, he risked alienating much of the Republican Party and also members of his own administration, including Gary Cohn, his chief economic adviser, who was reportedly disgusted by the comments, as well as his new chief of staff, General John Kelly, who could only look at the floor and shake his head as he listened to the president talk. According to a person familiar with their thinking, the military leaders in the Cabinet have reportedly been made “despondent” by the president’s comments, but feel compelled to stay in place to carry on essential government business, including crafting a strategy to deal with the looming threat of North Korea. But Ivanka has had nothing more to say publicly, not even after a widely viewed Vice News broadcast about the protests in Charlottesville featured a white nationalist who said he faults the president for giving “his daughter to a Jew.”