According to Donald Trump, who may or may not want to marry his eldest daughter, Ivanka could have married New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. Instead, she married a man who looks and sounds like a voice actor for a children’s puppet show.
The New York Times published a gossipy report on Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s tenuous relationship with others in the Trump administration, sharing a delightful tidbit that Trump expressed, several times, that he would have preferred Brady to Kushner:
Several times Mr. Trump joked that he “could have had Tom Brady” as a son-in-law. “Instead,” the president said, according to five people who heard him, “I got Jared Kushner.”
My condolences to Ivanka, who has been married for nearly a decade to not-Tom Brady!
Trump has not hidden his displeasure with Kushner, aside from his not being Tom Brady, in recent months:
It did not help that the president had gone from telling aides to “talk to Jared,” as he did during the campaign, to telling them that “Jared hasn’t been so good for me.” At various points, Mr. Trump told friends and his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, that he wished both Jared and Ivanka would return to New York.
Kushner, for his part, thinks things are going well. “I have greatly enjoyed working collaboratively with so many extraordinarily devoted and competent people,” he told the Times via a spokesperson, “but those who have tried to undermine the president have found me to be an obstacle.” He did not offer a comment on whether he regrets not being Tom Brady.