For Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, it was a good week to be out of Washington. Last week, as millions of Americans watched Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh offer raw testimonies before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ivanka and Kushner had already made plans to be a couple hundred miles north in New York. Ivanka spent the week sitting for a series of panels and meetings at the United Nations, alongside the president of the World Bank, Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, and Prime Minister Theresa May. Kushner was similarly preoccupied. During the week, he held a round table on prison reform and, on Thursday evening, as the testimony was wrapping up, he met with Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu. Meanwhile, Canadian officials sent him their final notes for a renegotiated version of NAFTA earlier that day. “What Jared provided is a level of credibility that he knows what the president wants,” according to a person familiar with the situation. “They understand he has the ear of the president.”

Ever since they arrived in Washington, Ivanka and Kushner have leaned in to their family ties. During one memorable passage in Bob Woodward’s Fear, Ivanka bristles when Reince Priebus attempts to restrain her influence by giving her the same privileges as other staffers, reminding him that she is the First Daughter. In an interview with NBC’s Peter Alexander earlier this year, she dodged a question about her father’s alleged sexual misconduct by informing him that it was not appropriate for her to answer. She and Kushner have used the familial sway to varying degrees of efficacy. When the president was mulling whether to pull out of the Paris climate accord, Ivanka and Kushner privately voiced their concerns. Ivanka, in particular, pressed her father to more forcefully condemn the white supremacists who rallied in the streets of Charlottesville, and expressed her distaste for Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate who Donald Trump endorsed after he was accused of assaulting teenage girls when he was in his thirties. More recently, the couple introduced Trump to Kim Kardashian, as part of Kushner’s prison-reform initiative, leading the president to issue clemency for Alice Johnson, a first-time offender who was serving a life sentence in prison. Most of this advocacy has occurred in private, although it has often found its way to the press.

Last month, shortly after Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was thrown into question on account of sexual misconduct allegations, many observers assumed that Ivanka and Kushner would provide similar counsel. Ivanka, after all, initially came into the White House as an official staffer in order to advocate for women’s issues. But the reality was more complex. In private, according to two people familiar with the situation, Ivanka has aligned herself with the position of her father and Kellyanne Conway—that while Ford deserved to be heard, Kavanaugh seems to be a good man. She has emphasized to her father that his measured response to the allegations, and acceptance of an F.B.I. investigation, had been generally well-received.

But the lack of details surrounding these conversations reflects a fundamental change in both how the West Wing operates, and how the Trump family has adapted to life in the Washington fishbowl. When President Trump first took office, in the initial period of chaos and warring factions, Ivanka and Kushner felt the need to be involved in an outsized number of decisions and meetings. There were few voices they did not believe they should counterbalance. But the Wild West was tamed with the arrival of John Kelly and the departures of Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon. With a modicum of order in place, Ivanka and Jared took a step back from the Oval Office to manage their own fiefdoms. “If they thought it was necessary to get involved in something, they would,” one person familiar with the situation told me. “But now that he is properly staffed, it frees them up.”