White House aides reportedly have a nickname for Ivanka Trump: 'Princess royal'
The first daughter's lofty - and, critics say, unearned - position in her father's administration has sparked frustration among some aides, who say she and her husband, senior adviser Jared Kushner, are ineffectual additions to the president's team.
Some are put off by the Trump family's nepotism. Critics were incensed when Ivanka temporarily took her father's seat at a meeting of the G-20 in Germany earlier this summer.
"Excuse me," one former Trump adviser told Vanity Fair. "This is not a royal family, and she's not the princess royal."
White House advisers have reportedly taken to calling Ivanka by this nickname behind her back.
Trump has uncharacteristically taken some of the blame for the undoubtedly stressful position his daughter finds herself in.
"If she weren't my daughter it would be so much easier for her," the president reportedly said at the G-20 gathering. "It might be the only bad thing she has going, if you want to know the truth."
While Ivanka is criticized on the left for her inability or unwillingness to rein in her father's most extreme policies, and on the right for her reported attempts to do just that, Kushner, whose portfolio includes heading the Office of American Innovation and crafting Middle East policy, is ridiculed for his inexperience.
"What is off-putting about them is they do not grasp their essential irrelevance," a Washington insider told Vanity Fair. "They think they are special."
And the criticism is getting to them. As one friend of the couple's put it, Washington "punctures their self-esteem on a daily basis."