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Photo by Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Over the past two years, Donald Trump has waffled on whether he wanted his children serving in his administration. When he hired John Kelly as his chief of staff, a move that Ivanka Trump and Kushner supported at the time, he gave an early directive: “Get rid of my kids; get them back to New York.”

Donald Trump complained, according to the book, that his children “didn’t know how to play the game” and generated cycles of bad press. Kelly responded that it would be difficult to fire them, but he and the president agreed that they would make life difficult enough to force the pair to offer their resignations, which the president would then accept.

Ivanka Trump and Kushner, however, have outlasted those plans, and Donald Trump’s desire for them to leave the West Wing has come and gone in waves, associates said. Kelly resigned in December, and the couple has only gained in power since his departure.

If there is sympathy in Ward’s book for her protagonists, it is found in explaining how they grew up. Ivanka Trump, she wrote, was wealthy but isolated. When she went to tour Choate Rosemary Hall, the elite Connecticut boarding school where she would attend high school, Trump arrived in a white stretch limousine. But she emerged from the car all by herself. “No one was there with her,” said her tour guide, who remained anonymous in the book.

Kushner’s father, meanwhile, had been grooming his son since childhood to become his successor in the family real estate company, Kushner Cos. When Kushner went away to Harvard, Ward wrote, his parents had a business associate keep an eye on him — by taking him out for dinner and reporting back on his activities — to make sure he was not dating non-Jews or doing drugs.