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The influential first daughter and her spouse, scion Jared Kushner, pushed back against a much-feared rollback of federal protections.
The decision to not move forward with an executive order rescinding Obama-era LGBT protections was mostly due to objections of President Trump's daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Trump adviser Jared Kushner.
Two sources told Politico that Ivanka Trump and Kushner -- a Modern Orthodox Jewish couple known to socialize with progressives and LGBT people -- scuttled the order and pushed for the White House to make a statement underlining the president's support of LGBT equality.
"President Donald J. Trump is determined to protect the rights of all Americans, including the LGBTQ community," read the White House statement, released on Tuesday. "President Trump continues to be respectful and supportive of LGBTQ rights, just as he was throughout the election. The executive order signed in 2014, which protects employees from anti-LGBTQ workplace discrimination while working for federal contractors, will remain intact at the direction of President Donald J. Trump."
Ivanka Trump and Kushner anticipated major blowback should the executive order rescinding Obama's protections, which required federal contractors to not discriminate against LGBT workers, be signed. Though he doesn't support marriage equality and is in bed with homophobes and transphobes like his vice president, Mike Pence, President Trump made several awkward overtures to the LGBT community during the campaign. He invited out PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel to speak at the Republican National Convention and even referenced LGBT rights in his RNC speech (though many thought of it as a cynical ploy to turn people against Muslims, whom Trump and his followers like to wrongly portray as roundly anti-LGBT). Without specifically mentioning the LGBT protections, Trump did say during the campaign that he would undo all of President Obama's executive orders.
It's not clear if Ivanka and Kushner had anything to do with the president not signing an anticipated executive order encoding "religious freedom" and giving businesses and bureaucracies wide berth to discriminate against LGBT people -- and women -- in the name of orthodoxy.
The Politico report is certainly good for Ivanka's image, which just took a hit after the Nordstrom department store pulled her line of shoes and clothing from its stores and website this week, ostensibly because they were no longer selling well.
