(Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Two sources close to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump say that the White House aides and First Family members are doing absolutely great, thanks for asking, and have nothing to do with anything controversial coming out of the White House, though they’re 100 percent responsible for anything that may have impressed you.

This new Vanity Fair article, however, paints a picture of the embattled Kalorama-based crew as miserable and constantly considering an exit plan, and it’s awesome.

Here are some highlights about all the ways D.C. “punctures their self-esteem on a daily basis,” as one of their New York friends put it:

“Excuse me,” said one former Trump adviser. “This is not a royal family, and she’s not the princess royal.” (In fact, “princess royal” is a term that some West Wing advisers apply to her, though never to her face.)

When I asked a longtime associate how Jared and Ivanka felt about their time in Washington, the first word uttered was “sacrificial.”

It’s clear that, after an initial period of awe at the sheer power of their positions, Jared and Ivanka have been stung by the vitriol directed at them.

The couple recently attended an off-the-record dinner at the home of Atlantic Media’s owner, David Bradley, the sort of soirée Bradley holds on a regular basis with newsmakers and prominent Washington reporters and columnists. “They were terrible,” one attendee told me. The couple kept to platitudes and pabulum, as they often do in public conversations.

A key problem seems to be, as one Washington veteran told me, that Kushner and Ivanka don’t have the necessary self-awareness—don’t understand how to behave when you roll into Washington as the creature of someone else. Most such people take a seat a little off to the side, at least until they get their bearings. “What is off-putting about them is they do not grasp their essential irrelevance,” this veteran told me. “They think they are special.”

The couple, somewhat famously, seems to skip town at the precise moment a political catastrophe befalls the White House—letting it be known, for instance, that they were on vacation in Vermont when President Trump delivered his deeply troubling statements about the violence in Charlottesville. (One West Wing aide noted to me that it isn’t that they leave when bad things happen; it’s just that bad things are always happening.)

Ivanka may be disingenuous when she says she “didn’t ask for this,” but she is right to say that she didn’t ask for this—that is, for the actual situation in which they find themselves: powerful, in a sense, and yet ineffectual; emotionally essential to Donald Trump, but lacking the skills to assist; impossible to fire and reluctant to leave; compromised ethically and perhaps legally; and facing reputational or familial harm no matter what they decide to do.

In a city where Donald Trump won 4 percent of the vote, let’s just say that Washingtonians are gloating.

Head over to Vanity Fair to read Exiles on Pennsylvania Avenue: How Jared And Ivanka Were Repelled By Washington’s Elite.