Bannon committed two other Trump sins. The first was crossing his family, reportedly leaking information about and trash-talking Kushner. The second, and perhaps the gravest sin of all in the president’s eyes, was getting credit and attention for Trump’s success.

Because Bannon took on such a key strategic role so early in setting the tone of Trump’s campaign and, later, his administration, Bannon was quickly depicted as the puppeteer pulling the president’s strings toward his nationalistic agenda (Bannon himself admitted last summer that he had viewed Trump as a “blunt instrument” he could use to put his alt-right ideology into practice). A week into Trump’s presidency, Time magazine put Bannon on its cover as “The Great Manipulator” and, in its pages, asks if he is the “second most powerful man in the world.” Saturday Night Live depicted him as a Grim Reaper controlling Trump, who had been relegated to a tiny desk playing with toys.

The S.N.L. sketch infuriated Trump, The Washington Post reported, as did the Time cover, according to Axios. Trump’s comments to the New York Post on Tuesday—reiterating that he’d been successful long before Bannon joined his campaign in August—clearly show those wounds have not yet to heal.

Bannon is not the only one in Trump’s inner circle to face what is clearly a sort of West Wing curse. Kellyanne Conway, too, suffered its fate. Until last month, Conway was the sunny, obfuscating face of the administration. She showed up on so many morning programs and evening sit-downs, daytime hits and Sunday shows that S.N.L. parodied her running to a CNN camera in a towel with bath suds still clinging to her shoulders and New York put her on its cover last month as the “True First Lady of Trump’s America.” (She also ruffled Ivanka Trump’s feathers—a sin, as we know—when she promoted the First Daughter’s eponymous clothing line in an interview on Fox News.) The attention on Conway and her role in the president’s success got too hot. These days, she is rarely on television, and Kushner’s new innovation-focused White House office took over two of the issues she had said she had claimed as her own.

Kushner is poised to be the curse’s next victim. Last week, as he traveled to Iraq and settled into an expansive portfolio that includes his American Innovation task force, solving Middle East peace, liaising with foreign leaders, and leading infrastructure reform, the media labeled him “President Kushner.” CNN chyrons called him “the Secretary of Everything.”

But Kushner is family, and by all accounts, untouchable. He already weathered a Forbes cover stating “This guy got Trump elected” and a New York one labeling him “President in-Law.” He not only made it through those, but he has since ascended even higher in the president’s ranks.

There may be a limit to Trump’s patience, however, particularly if Kushner takes or receives credit for any policy wins that come out of his office. Trump values family loyalty more than most things, perhaps only apart from winning. That is why a 36-year-old with no political experience, and a resume filled only with a decade working for his own father’s real estate company, became one of the most powerful people in the Western world; Trump rarely trusts anyone as much as he trusts his own family to get the job done. But at the end of the day, the plaudits must redound to the patriarch. If anyone in the Trump White House is likely to have learned this lesson by now, it’s Kushner.