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Jared Kushner’s ‘Breaking History’ Is a Soulless and Very Selective Memoir

In this lengthy book, Kushner recounts the time he spent in the White House during his father-in-law’s term.

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By Dwight Garner

BREAKING HISTORY A White House Memoir By Jared Kushner 492 pages. Broadside Books. $35.

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The United States Secret Service isn’t known for its sense of humor, but when it gave Jared Kushner the code name “mechanic,” was someone betting that he’d call his memoir “Breaking History”?

It’s a title that, in its thoroughgoing lack of self-awareness, matches this book’s contents. Kushner writes as if he believes foreign dignitaries (and less-than dignitaries) prized him in the White House because he was the fresh ideas guy, the starting point guard, the dimpled go-getter.

He betrays little cognizance that he was in demand because, as a landslide of other reporting has demonstrated, he was in over his head , unable to curb his avarice, a cocky young real estate heir who happened to unwrap a lot of Big Macs beside his father-in-law, the erratic and misinformed and similarly mercenary leader of the free world. Jared was a soft touch.

“Breaking History” is an earnest and soulless — Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one — and peculiarly selective appraisal of Donald J. Trump’s term in office. Kushner almost entirely ignores the chaos, the alienation of allies, the breaking of laws and norms, the flirtations with dictators, the comprehensive loss of America’s moral leadership, and so on, ad infinitum, to speak about his boyish tinkering (the “mechanic”) with issues he was interested in.

This book is like a tour of a once majestic 18th-century wooden house, now burned to its foundations, that focuses solely on, and rejoices in, what’s left amid the ashes: the two singed bathtubs, the gravel driveway and the mailbox. Kushner’s fealty to Trump remains absolute. Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo.

The tone is college admissions essay. Typical sentence: “In an environment of maximum pressure, I learned to ignore the noise and distractions and instead to push for results that would improve lives.”

Every political cliché gets a fresh shampooing. “Even in a starkly divided country, there are always opportunities to build bridges,” Kushner writes. And, quoting the former White House deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell: “Every day here is sand through an hourglass, and we have to make it count.” So true, for these are the days of our lives.

Kushner, poignantly, repeatedly beats his own drum. He recalls every drop of praise he’s ever received; he brings these home and he leaves them on the doorstep. You turn the pages and find, almost at random, colleagues, some of them famous, trying to be kind, uttering things like:

It’s really not fair how the press is beating you up. You made a very positive contribution. I don’t know how you do this every day on so many topics. That was really hard! You deserve an award for all you’ve done. I’ve said before, and I’ll say again. This agreement would not have happened if it wasn’t for Jared. Jared did an amazing job working with Bob Lighthizer on the incredible USMCA trade deal we signed yesterday. Jared’s a genius. People complain about nepotism — I’m the one who got the steal here. I’ve been in Washington a long time, and I must say, Jared is one of the best lobbyists I’ve ever seen.

A therapist might call these cries for help.

“Breaking History” opens with the story of Kushner’s father, the real estate tycoon Charles Kushner, who was imprisoned after hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, having the encounter filmed and sending the tape to his sister. He was a good man who did a bad thing, Jared says, and Chris Christie, while serving as the United States attorney for New Jersey, was cruel to prosecute him so mercilessly.

There is a flashback to Kushner’s grandparents, Holocaust survivors who settled in New Jersey and did well. There’s a page or two about Kushner’s time at Harvard. He omits the fact that he was admitted after his father pledged $2.5 million to the college.

If Kushner can recall a professor or a book that influenced him while in Cambridge, he doesn’t say. Instead, he recalls doing his first real estate deals while there. He moved to New York, and bought and ruined a great newspaper (The New York Observer) by dumbing it down and feting his friends in its pages.

His wooing of Ivanka Trump included a good deal of jet-setting. Kushner briefly broke up with her, he writes, because she wasn’t Jewish. (She would later convert.) Wendi Murdoch, Rupert’s wife, reunited them on Rupert’s yacht. Kushner describes the power scene:

On that Sunday, we were having lunch at Bono’s house in the town of Eze on the French Riviera, when Rupert stepped out to take a call. He came back and whispered in my ear, “They blinked, they agreed to our terms, we have The Wall Street Journal.” After lunch, Billy Joel, who had also been with us on the boat, played the piano while Bono sang with the Irish singer-songwriter Bob Geldof.

With or without you, Bono.

Once in the White House, Kushner became Little Jack Horner, placing a thumb in everyone else’s pie, and he wonders why he was disliked. He read Sun Tzu and imagined he was becoming a warrior. It was because he had Trump’s ear, however, that he won nearly every time he locked antlers with a rival. Corey Lewandowski — out. Steve Bannon — out.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who begged Kushner to stop meddling internationally — out. (Kushner cites Tillerson’s “reclusive approach” to foreign policy.) By the end, Tillerson was like a dead animal someone needed to pull a tarpaulin over.

Kushner was pleased that the other adults in the room, including the White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, the White House counsel Don McGahn and the later chief of staff John Kelly, left or were ejected because they tried, patriotically, to exclude him from meetings he shouldn’t have been in. The fact that he was initially denied security clearance, he writes, was much ado about nothing.

The bulk of “Breaking History” — at nearly 500 pages, it’s a slog — goes deeply into the weeds (Kushner, in his acknowledgments, credits a ghostwriter, the speechwriter Brittany Baldwin) on the issues he cared most about, including prison reform, the Covid response and the Middle East, where he had a win with the Abraham Accords .

This book ends with Kushner suggesting he was unaware of the events of Jan. 6 until late in the day. He mostly sidesteps talking about spurious claims of election fraud. He seems to have no beliefs beyond carefully managed appearances and the art of the deal. He wants to stay on top of things, this manager, but doesn’t want to get to the bottom of anything.

You finish “Breaking History” wondering: Who is this book for? There’s not enough red meat for the MAGA crowd, and Kushner has never appealed to them anyway. Political wonks will be interested — maybe, to a limited degree — but this material is more thoroughly and reliably covered elsewhere. He’s a pair of dimples without a demographic.

What a queasy-making book to have in your hands. Once someone has happily worked alongside one of the most flagrant and systematic and powerful liars in this country’s history, how can anyone be expected to believe a word they say?

It makes a kind of sense that Kushner is likely to remain exiled in Florida. “The whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret,” as Cynthia Ozick put it in “The Shawl.” “Everyone had left behind a real life.”

Audio produced by Kate Winslett .

Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008. His new book, “The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading,” is out this fall. More about Dwight Garner

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I’ve Read Nearly All the Books by Former Trump Officials. Now We Have the Worst.

Breaking history is the “look, daddy” account of a child born on third and desperate to prove he got there on his own..

In her memoir of her stint as press secretary during the Trump administration , Stephanie Grisham revealed that the White House staff had a nickname for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump: “the interns.” Kushner in particular, she wrote, had a propensity for poking his nose into other, more qualified officials’ bailiwicks, wreaking havoc with the chain of command while knowing that his status as the president’s son-in-law would protect him from the consequences. “Javanka,” as Grisham referred to the couple, were also regarded in the office as “obnoxious, entitled know-it-alls” who sought the spotlight on ceremonial occasions, even when protocol dictated that they be excluded—most famously when, barred from Trump’s meeting with Queen Elizabeth II, they had themselves photographed overlooking the occasion from a window of Buckingham Palace , an inadvertently creepy image that inspired comparisons to horror movies, haunted dolls, and VC Andrews novels.

The nickname seems a bit unfair to interns, but Kushner’s new memoir, Breaking History , does read like one long résumé. Kushner has a way of assuring the reader of his accomplishments that makes you doubt everything he says. Grisham (who, like her former boss, has a knack for nicknames), also called him “the Slim Reaper,” for his adeptness at eluding responsibility for the messes he made, as well as for his penchant for scooping up the credit for any successes. He wants readers to know that during the campaign, he turned MAGA hats into a profit center and introduced daily Facebook videos, for which he was given “a budget of $400,000, but only spent $160,000.” Good job, Jared!

As Trump administration memoirs go—and I’ve read a ton of them —this one is pretty dull, with dashes of the obligatory score-settling and self-justification but precious little color. Kushner gets his digs in when covering such fallen rivals as Steve Bannon, John Kelly, and Rex Tillerson (who understandably complained that there should only be one secretary of state). But he has no eye for character or flair for dish, and his whole schtick was that when the going got crazy, he was off in Dubai, or sucking up to Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi prince who according to the CIA ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi (and this spring invested $2 billion in  Kushner’s fledgling private equity firm , a deal currently under investigation by the House Oversight Committee ).

Kushner’s dilemma is the same as Trump’s. Both are sons of rich, unprincipled self-made men and are desperate to prove what can never be proven: that they, too, would have made successes of themselves even without Daddy’s help. Kushner’s marriage to Ivanka Trump compounded his problem. Obviously, he would never have had a shot at Mideast diplomacy and negotiating trade agreements if he hadn’t been Trump’s son-in-law. He was entirely unqualified to do any of it. The purpose of Breaking History is to argue that it was nevertheless America’s good luck that such a can-do fellow happened into the position to solve so many of the nation’s problems. Like Trump, Kushner is a businessman—although a businessman who started out with the massive advantage of his father’s money and connections. Like Trump, he claimed that his expertise at business brought much needed know-how and hard-headedness to government, a notion that mulishly ignores the fact that government is not a business and by necessity has a different set of norms and goals.

Is it any wonder, then, that Kushner seems most at home with the crown princes of the Arab kingdoms, men who enjoy an untroubled sense of entitlement to not only their wealth but also to their sovereignty over their people? In another shrewd assessment, Grisham concluded that Javanka’s shenanigans during Trump’s visit to the queen betrayed their belief that they were the royal family of America. At the same time, Kushner has also fully absorbed the language and narratives of American entrepreneurial narratives, portraying himself as the governmental equivalent of a technology “disruptor,” whose creative imagination busts through the calcified restrictions of custom and habit to provide bold new solutions.

In a chapter recounting Kushner’s involvement in the negotiations of a new trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, Breaking History even reproduces a slip of paper on which the Mexican foreign secretary had scrawled a rather cryptic diagram, which to judge by Kushner’s description mostly just illustrates the bargaining over what percentage parts a car assembled in Mexico needed to be American-made to avoid the car being taxed when imported to the U.S. Kushner, who in a state of great excitement carried this drawing to the U.S. trade representative, seems to think the slip is destined to become some kind of historical talisman, like the garage where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple.

If this sounds a bit pathetic, it is. Breaking History features the many confident pronouncements of someone who can never quite convince you that he actually possesses any true confidence. Business self-help books often urge their readers to fake it till they make it, and this is advice that Kushner has taken to heart. Although he participated in some genuinely praiseworthy initiatives—most notably the First Step Act , a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill—Kushner’s dishonesty about so much of the history of the Trump administration casts a shadow over the accomplishments he claims. This is primarily a dishonesty of omission. Whenever Trump or his minions screwed up or behaved badly—by, say, minimizing the threat of the coronavirus, or attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election—he simply fails to discuss it. In classic Slim Reaper style, Kushner extracts himself from Trump’s shadiest activities, claiming that he was off somewhere else working on something more important.

This strategy blew up in Kushner’s face during the Jan. 6 hearings. The committee televised videotape of him testifying that he’d paid little attention to Pat Cipollone and other White House lawyers when they threatened to quit over Trump’s illegal schemes to overturn the election, dismissing their objections as “whining.” For this, Kushner—who despite his self-portrayal as maverick innovator, clearly wants to retain credibility among mainstream business leaders and officials—earned a scolding from Liz Cheney , who portrayed him as indifferent to the fragility of American democracy. “People in positions of public trust,” she said, “are duty-bound to defend it, to step forward when action is required.”

This is another thing that Kushner has in common with Trump: a moral blind spot when it comes to the distinction between the values of business and the values of democratic governance. He shrugs off Trump’s notorious phone call to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, the impetus for the president’s first impeachment, as “Trump being Trump.” When the acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, gave a press briefing in which he stated that, as Kushner puts it, “presidents regularly leverage foreign aid to extract concessions from their foreign partners,” Kushner admits that this was a “disaster,” but only because the president was under attack by Democrats and it was a “high-stakes moment where our messaging needed to be tight.” Otherwise, he observes, Mulvaney’s point was “fundamentally valid.” He doesn’t seem to understand that the actions of the president as an elected representative should never be used to benefit the president as a political candidate—that to do so is in fact fundamentally corrupt.

For this reason, despite his efforts to pass himself off as a statesman, Kushner remained a businessman dabbling in foreign relations. As a businessman—and especially as a New York real estate developer—he regards the rule of law as an impediment, not a sacred trust. For all his talk of “service,” Kushner sees the good he did the way rich people do, as philanthropy, in which he made some minor sacrifice to help the disadvantaged, a sacrifice for which he expects to receive their gratitude and plenty of praise and glory. That attorneys, elected officials, and career public servants often see themselves as committed to democratic institutions and ethical frameworks that transcend the imperatives of “success,” self-interest, or good PR never seems to occur to him. They’re just whining. He’s here to disrupt all that nonsense.

And of course, Kushner can’t bite the hand that has fed all his delusions of grandeur. An early news item about Breaking History reported that Kushner took one of MasterClass’s online courses on how to write a book, one taught by James Patterson. I haven’t taken the class myself, but I’ve read enough Patterson thrillers to know that they have at least one rule of thumb: That in opposition to the noble, hardworking hero, there’s always an arrogant, dangerous sociopath who plays the villain. The obvious candidate for that part in Kushner’s story was ready at hand—as the candidate himself might have put it, he was “central casting.” But that is the one golden opportunity Kushner will never seize, because it’s the one thing he can’t afford.

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Breaking History: A White House Memoir

It’s a hallmark of countless films about the mafia: the craving for respectability, the yearning for legitimacy, the desire to go clean. The ur-scene is from The Godfather , when Don Corleone tells his youngest son and heir apparent, “I never wanted this for you,” and rattles off the jobs he’d been hoping Michael might hold instead: “Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone…” To which I might add, special adviser to the president of the United States.

Jared Kushner, former special adviser to the president of the United States, is Don Corleone’s dream come to waking life: he is the grandson of immigrants to New Jersey who worked in the trades and the eldest son of a New York property developer and manager who did time in federal prison after entrapping his brother-in-law in a recorded encounter with a prostitute he’d hired and copping a plea to sixteen counts of tax evasion, one count of retaliating against a federal witness, and one count of making false statements to the Federal Election Commission regarding his and his company’s illegal campaign contributions, most of which were to Democrats, and some of which were to the Clintons.

Educated at Harvard, NYU Law School, and NYU Stern School of Business, the crown prince of this tabloid affair emerged onto the Manhattan social scene polished (enough), poised (enough), and ready to spend outlandish amounts of social capital and capital-capital trying to clear his family’s name. To read about Jared in the press—usually just “Jared”—was to read about a stunted, striving boy-man hell-bent on alternately earning and redefining the boldfaced surname that Page Six denied him. Online he was often referred to by his initials, as if a joke were being flagged: “JK.”

The story of his young career is like a mash-up of genres, a cautionary fairy tale, a tragicomic myth more Greek than Italian: in the process of forming himself around reforming his father’s reputation, he married a woman whose own lying, cheating, stealing father went on to become the forty-fifth president of the United States and whose single term resulted in two impeachments and multiple ongoing criminal and civil investigations—which suggests a variation on another famous line of the Corleones’: Just when you thought you were out, another dad pulls you back in.

Breaking History , Kushner’s new memoir, is nothing if not an attempt to exorcise those patrimonies—a nearly five-hundred-page book composed with all the beige rage not of a pezzonovante , a Big Shot, but of a Li’l McKinseyite consultant whose disciplined loyalty to family management would be admirable, or at least capable of eliciting sympathy from me, had he been a private citizen and not a public servant. Call it a bleaching, a blanching, a prose laundromat set to whitewash out all stain—Kushner’s tome isn’t interested in convincing you that, say, banning travel from certain majority-Muslim countries was a smart and useful move, or that opening detention facilities along the Mexican border was a forced-hand but efficient measure, or that the FBI ’s Russia investigation was grotesquely overblown and conclusively wasteful, so much as it’s interested in convincing you that Jared Kushner is a decent guy, and that his father Charles Kushner is a decent guy, and that the Don(ald) himself, he’s a good dude too, and Ivanka, well, if you’re ever lucky enough to meet her, she’ll take your breath away…

A China embargo, as Trump sometimes proposed, is an effective PR gambit when merely a threat, and tantamount to suicide if ever implemented, whereas a book embargo must be implemented and then constantly publicized for anyone to care about it. For weeks before the publication date of Kushner’s memoir, its marketing copy flashed online, posted widely by content mills and clickbait factories: Now, Kushner finally tells his story—a fast-paced and surprisingly candid account of how an earnest businessman with no political ambitions found himself pulled into a presidency that no one saw coming .

After this initial step of creating demand, the next step of a successful book embargo involves purposefully violating it through selective leaking, and the leaks here were as plentiful as they were on Trump’s Pennsylvania Avenue, or in one of the scores of beleaguered housing projects owned and/or managed by the Kushners. Days before publication, listicles began to spread across the Internet like toxic mold: Five revelations from Jared Kushner’s White House memoi r… Five noteworthy nuggets from Jared Kushner’s new boo k… The most revealing par t… The most ridiculous par t… All the juicy gossip from Jared Kushner’s boo k… Jared Kushner’s FIVE biggest secrets and scandal s… As I didn’t rate one of these early copies and had to wait like a deplorable, I found myself impatient and sucked in: Trump tried to get Ivanka to date Tom Brady?! Jared broke up with Ivanka because she wasn’t Jewish, but they got back together again on the French Riviera—actually on Rupert Murdoch’s yacht, where they were serenaded by Billy Joel, Bono, and Bob Geldof (cofounder of Live Aid, father of Peaches)?! Jared asked Trump for permission to propose to Ivanka, which Trump granted before calling Ivanka to tip her off and so ruining the surprise of the proposal?! John Kelly, former chief of staff, once bodychecked Ivanka in a West Wing hallway?! And wait, wait—all this time Jared, He Who Never Spoke, actually had thyroid cancer (which Peter Navarro, former assistant to the president, now claims he is faking to pump his book sales)?!

Primed by this sludge, I was disappointed when the book that finally arrived turned out to be as salacious as…thyroid cancer, with Wikipedic summaries of geopolitical disputes interspersed with analyses of the soft power that can be communicated through the size of luncheon buffets and motorcade honor guards.

If this banality is the inevitable product of an author writing as a devoted son, it’s also the product of an author writing as a devoted son- in – law —especially as a son-in-law to one of the most powerful men in the world who’s not exactly known for his tolerance of criticism or capacities for introspection and forgiveness. I feel for Kushner, I’m saying. I don’t want to, but I do. The task he had before him was insane: to write a book that rehabilitated his own family while not alienating the family he married into, which controls a vast direct-to-consumer sales network that can virtually guarantee best-sellerdom. That Kushner nonetheless embraced this crazy task must be taken as a mark of his narcissism, or his ego-neediness—of how desperate he is for redemption.

That the family he’s trying to redeem almost didn’t exist is never far from Kushner’s mind: “My family’s mere existence is improbable.” The Kushners (or Kuszners, a name meaning “furrier” in Yiddish) hail from Novogrudok, a town formerly in Poland, currently in Belarus, which the Nazis took in 1941, establishing a ghetto and then a labor camp where approximately 30,000 Jews were either worked to death or executed. The few hundred who managed to survive those initial slaughters included Kushner’s grandmother Rae Kushner, her sister, her brother, and their father.

By 1943, inmates of the camp had managed to dig a nearly six-hundred-foot tunnel under the perimeter fencing and attempted an escape. A group of the youngest went first and though a few made it out to the nearby woods, the majority were caught and shot, including Kushner’s great-uncle. The Kushner sisters fled in a later group, having stayed behind to help their ailing father through the tunnel. This act of filial fidelity wound up saving the sisters’ lives and provided young Jared with a lesson: Never leave anyone behind, whether it’s a father who can’t outrun the Nazis or a father who can’t outrun the federal charges of then US attorney Chris Christie.

Living almost ferally in the woods, Rae Kushner met up with one of the legendary Bielski brigades of Jewish partisans, a member of which, Joseph Berkowitz, became her husband. They married in Hungary, snuck across the Austrian Alps to Italy, and—because Berkowitz had accrued a rap sheet for smuggling goods into Italian displaced-persons camps—applied for visas to come to the States under Rae’s last name. This Shoah section of Breaking History is the one section its author didn’t experience firsthand, and yet it’s undeniably the book’s most poignant and vivid, due to its reliance on Rae’s published writings and the oral history she put on tape for the United States Holocaust Museum around the time of her grandson’s birth.

Once settled in America, “my Dad purchased, financed, and managed the properties, and my grandfather ran construction of the new buildings”—that’s it. The burdened epigone, the belated beneficiary of great expectations owed to great suffering, Kushner makes no mention of what it took to muscle into those businesses in the postwar world on both sides of the Hudson: the corners cut, the wheels greased, the accommodations with the unions and their protection. Everything comes easily, simply, as if in a dream, with years of Kushner’s life ticking by in barely a paragraph, barely a sentence: the only anecdotes from his college career involve him meeting his roommate while doing, yes, laundry, and then later persuading his father to put up the cash to help him buy some ramshackle properties that he thought were underpriced, because technically they were located in Somerville, not Cambridge. “I graduated from Harvard with honors,” he writes, “while making millions of dollars from my real estate investments”—the honors being an especially impressive achievement for a guy admitted to the school only a year after his father happened to give it a $2.5 million donation.

Stints at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, a JD / MBA at NYU —the silent infante , the dumb dauphin , breezes through them all, lingering only on his weekly trips down South to visit his father at the Federal Prison Camp, Montgomery. He tries to present his joining the family firm as a concerted effort to pitch in with the household expenses while his father was still wearing a jumpsuit:

I offered to drop out of grad school to help manage the company full-time, but my dad pleaded with me not to make that sacrifice. We compromised that I would stay enrolled, but spend the bulk of my time helping with the business.

He helped —Kushner can’t stop using the word, he can’t help himself—with a vengeance: “I went on a major buying spree, acquiring more than twelve thousand apartments across the country and completing $14 billion of transactions in roughly ten years.”

That list of acquisitions includes 666 Fifth Avenue, which at $1.8 billion was then the highest price ever paid for a building in this country, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters in Brooklyn, with its seven-hundred-some-thousand square feet of prime East River frontage. What it doesn’t include is Ivanka, who’s treated in her husband’s pages like a convertible asset, a fungible blonde whom Kushner won’t commit to until she’s ready to become a Jew—or until she’s ready to say that becoming a Jew was her idea. “Ivanka had made the decision on her own,” her husband tells his future father-in-law, who reportedly says, “That’s great. Most people think I’m Jewish anyway.”

I’m not sure I buy Kushner’s claim that Ivanka chose conversion without being pressured, but that she went through with it is certainly a sign—of her love for him, or of how intensely she wanted to become someone else. Their alliance strikes me as the most significant rebellion the couple could muster: a mutual half-rebellion, which provided each of them with the distance they craved, whether consciously or not, from their respective tumultuous and boundaryless clans. Kushner’s portrayal of their coupledom reads like a relationship guide written by AI , a flashback montage starring sexless amnesiacs on date-night, chasing gentrification and tailed by paparazzi: “We’d…take cooking lessons at a local restaurant, or play shuffleboard at a new bar in a trendy neighborhood.”

Despite this dispassion, three children are engendered, though the book really only mentions one: the eldest daughter, Arabella, who’ll show up to recite Tang poetry and speak in fluent Mandarin before scampering off to brush her teeth, comb her hair, and put herself to bed. “Life was full,” Kushner writes of that six-year stretch of marital calm between his and Ivanka’s wedding at Bedminster in 2009 and Trump’s sixty-ninth birthday party at Bedminster in 2015, during which he tells the family that he’s running for president and asks Ivanka to clear next Tuesday—only two days later—so she can introduce him when he descends the escalator to announce his candidacy in the lobby of Trump Tower: “We had no idea that our world was about to turn upside down.”

As Trump’s candidacy turned from 2015 joke to 2016 certainty, the media, especially the legacy media—which Trump supporters were increasingly calling the elite media as a way of not quite calling it the Zionist or Jewish media—ramped up its coverage of Kushner, who after all was one of its own. Outlets that hadn’t believed Trump had any chance of clinching the nomination, and that still didn’t believe Trump had any chance of winning the election, amortized their almost subconscious dread in ever-hotter takes and chart-y explainers about how Kushner was really a liberal: he’s a Manhattan Democrat vegetarian Jew who once owned The New York Observer ! His brother, Josh Kushner, is a major tech bro! His wife is friends with Chelsea Clinton! Be assured, be reassured—they both voted for Obama!

Especially after the election burst the coastal bubbles and the unimaginable became the true, these real fake-news items were unavoidable, though they seemed more and more like panicked prayers or SOS signals: Jared and Ivanka, who were among the youngest people in the incoming administration, would be the adults in the room; together, they’d run some interference and prevent a next world war. Only Jarvanka—or, Twitter asked, was it Javanka?—stood between us and Armageddon, and by “us” the bloviators, who’d learned nothing from the election, meant not America but the blue states, or New York City minus Staten Island, or only about half of the Hamptons. Here was one instance where the Times could agree with Fox, and even with Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, Newsmax, Infowars, and all those counterfactual fan-fic message boards that spawned QAnon: an Ivy League sleeper cell might very well embed next door to the Oval Office!

By Kushner’s account, he was comfortable enough in his Manhattan milieu that he never even considered joining the Trump team in an official capacity until the campaign requested his—you guessed it—“help,” managing the social media ad teams and the e-commerce platforms hawking MAGA hats. (“Soon we increased online hat sales tenfold from $8,000 to $80,000 per day, which funded most of the campaign’s overhead costs.”) Lest anyone accuse him of not volunteering his services from the outset due to skepticism about his father-in-law’s policies, or lack of policies, or poll numbers, Kushner reminds us that even after the election, when an administration position was his for the taking, he remained adamant: he wasn’t sure yet. Ivanka was still figuring out her own role. There were worries about the children.

The road-to-Damascus moment, as Kushner tells it, came as late as the eve of the inauguration, when he and Ivanka tagged along with Trump and Melania to meet Barack and Michelle at the White House. “As someone who always paid attention to real estate, I was shocked by the limited square footage of the West Wing,” he writes, in full site-inspector mode, going on to bemoan the small cramped windowless offices, which were “the exact opposite of the open workspaces that I had found conducive to collaboration in my companies.”

After Melania and Michelle completed the obligatory exercise-in-sexism open house tour, and Trump and Obama’s one-on-one was over (at which Obama apparently warned Trump not to hire General Michael Flynn as national security adviser), the Trump entourage was making its way back to the SUV scrum when Obama took Kushner aside under the colonnade and asked, “‘Have you and Ivanka decided if you are coming to Washington?’” When Kushner hesitated, Obama delivered the pitch, as if straight from NPR , or from my parents: “You definitely should…you could do a lot of good here.’”

Whether this is factual or not is immaterial, or at least not as material as the fact that Jared wrote it—he wants it to be true, and Obama hasn’t yet denied it. Regardless, Kushner has provided his own disclaimer, and when I hit that line I went flipping back to the book’s preface to reread it: “In some instances, I recreated dialogue to help readers experience…” And then— HELP !—I flipped ahead to the acknowledgments section, where Kushner thanks at least a half-dozen lawyers. Nowhere could I find that “Thanks, Obama.”

Credit where it’s due: the wholesale import of Manhattan real estate realpolitik into the White House that’s usually attributed to Trump was just as much a contribution of Kushner’s—perhaps even more so, given that Trump spent vast swaths of his administration on the fairways and in executive-time social-mediating, whereas Kushner’s portfolio as an adviser kept growing, from renegotiating NAFTA to figuring out prison reform, with his father on his conscience and the lobbying of Kim Kardashian in his pocket.

Dealing with these disparate briefs, he was guided less by the Latin of the Great Seal— E Pluribus Unum —than by the outer-borough demotic of Greg Cuneo, a contractor-macher who used to work for the Kushner Company and once told Kushner, Tutti mangia , or “Everybody eats” (which Kushner leadenly translates as “Everybody has to eat”). It was this principle of spreading the dough around and making room at the trough that Kushner brought with him when he switched from negotiating air rights to negotiating treaties: “People found that they could make money by working with me, which led to many incredible opportunities.”

No matter the issue Kushner undertook, this anti-ideological ideology was asserted: his purpose was always to get the best deal for whatever party he represented, be it the business he was born into, the business he married into, or his unconscious conflation of those businesses with the American people, whose popular vote favored Hillary Clinton by a significant margin. Recounting his efforts at negotiating tables just outside Steve Bannon’s trashed, football memorabilia–strewn office and at lavish banquet halls in seaside Gulf palaces, Kushner asserts time and again that government—the US government—is not merely obstructive but purposefully obstructive. He seems to have been shocked—but in the way that only someone lying is shocked—to find out that it isn’t just the private sector that’s constrained by red tape and overregulation. The same problems that hobble the New York City Department of Buildings hobble the US State Department, whose slow-rolling of approvals contribute to permitting delays and cost overruns in foreign policy, putting all the choicest tariff deals and trade pacts out of reach.

Kushner presents his experience with negotiating zoning variances and scaffolding change-orders as if it’s somehow applicable to de-escalating a standoff with North Korea or combating a lethal airborne pandemic: in every case, he says, the most formidable adversary was the system itself, the number of mid-level personnel you had to deal with before you got to a decision-maker. Take it from the guy who bungled PPE availability, testing capacity, and ventilator distribution: America would never be Great or become Great Again until its Congress and courts and intelligence agencies started caring less about their own budgets, protocols, and procedures, and started caring more about their quarterly results. Having to do diplomacy only through the State Department, or health policy only through the Department of Health, or education policy only through the Department of Education was like trying to build a very tall and long and beautiful wall, but not being able to choose the contractor. If you could use only the contractor provided to you, what incentive would they have to work? How would you hold them accountable? If they’re going to pad the bills, wouldn’t it be better to just make Mexico pay for it?

Kushner toiled within a Washington establishment that refused to accept him or his father-in-law at face value, as it were, and instead tried to remake them in a more conventional executive-branch image, in much the same way that for decades after 9/11 the establishment refused to accept Iraq as it was, or Afghanistan as it was, and instead tried to remake those countries into democracies and bastions of freedom in the American image (or in the image to which America aspires).

Though he doesn’t quite make the connection explicitly, Kushner expresses frustration about imposing change, on the behavior both of presidents and of foreign regimes, and persists in interpreting the traditions and norms that constitute much of what we think of as government as inflexibility at best, sabotage at worst. In the business he was used to, negotiating parties must focus on common goals, not on common values. When it comes to the dotted line, moral and ethical ideals become encumbering preconditions. If America didn’t have to insist (or pretend to insist) that its bargaining partners respect civil liberties and uphold the rule of law, think of the deals that could be done—with China, with Russia, and especially with the Sunni sheikhs and their nepotistic dynasties composed of “the Jared Kushners of the Middle East,” as the Jared Kushner of the United States claims that Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman once described the guests at an official state visit party. These were the guys—and all of them were guys—you went to directly, ringing their private lines, when you didn’t want to bother going through Rex Tillerson or Mike Pompeo. With their cousins in the ministries and siblings in the treasuries, they knew how to get stuff done, and they also knew how to ignore Tillerson or Pompeo when what they said contradicted Kushner. And while some of the stuff they got done included, in bin Salman’s case, the indefinite detention and alleged torture of those cousins and siblings, not to mention the assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Kushner the naif waif contorts himself beyond all credibility to dwell in denial:

In the Arab world, politics is a family business, with members of royal families ruling for generations. As the son-in-law of the president, and a former executive of a family business, I represented something that [Arab leaders] found familiar and reassuring. They knew that when I spoke, I did so as an extension of the president in a way that few administration officials could.

Such was the kith-and-kin statecraft behind the Abraham Accords, a quasi-accidental policy success that emerged from failure—specifically from Kushner’s failure to broker peace between Israel and Palestine. Nobody was puzzled by Kushner’s inability to solve one of the world’s most intractable conflicts, and there were many, from the UN to the synagogue I grew up in, who scoffed at the boy wonder’s hubris at even annexing the region for his portfolio. And yet it’s hard to contend that what Kushner pried from the mess is anything short of sloppily epochal—a sheaf of agreements between Israel and the first Arab nations to normalize relations with the Jewish state since the treaties with Jordan (1994) and Egypt (1979), and an accomplishment that though it has no appreciable benefit to the United States still surely makes his father shep nachas . There’s even a garden now in Jerusalem called the Kushner Garden of Peace.

How the Abraham Accords came about is pure Midtown, and involved a reevaluation of the Palestinians and of Palestine itself, in terms of what former bankruptcy attorney and Trump ambassador to Israel David Friedman called a “bankruptcy proceeding”: “Israel is a secured creditor,” Kushner quotes Friedman as saying,

they are the only democracy in the region with a stable government, a strong economy, a viable market. The Palestinians are an unsecured creditor: they have corrupt leadership, a flailing economy, and no stability, and yet they think they have parity with the secured creditors. From my experience, you always end up in trouble when you let the weaker party think it can call the shots.

To put Friedman’s bad-faith analogy in plainspeak, the Palestinians had shown themselves to be so risky and unreliable that they’d alienated not just the Israelis (obviously), and the Americans (only slightly less obviously), but also the Sunni portion of the Arab world that was inclined to regard Shia-majority Iran as a mutual enemy. After realizing that no major Arab government cared about the Palestinians as much as they feared a resurgent Iran, Kushner summarily cut the Palestinians loose and signed, sealed, and delivered binding covenants between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and Kosovo, in addition to a reconciliation agreement between the perennially feuding Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Just as Trump, it was said, had set out only to boost his ratings and improve his network TV contract and along the way was elected president, Kushner had been seeking security guarantees from hapless, Hamas-and-Hezbollah-threatened Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, and instead found himself realigning the power structure of the Middle East.

The accomplishment is even more striking—or seems even more like unadulterated luck—when you realize that none of the parties involved expected the accords, or even wanted to agree to them for similar reasons: Kushner was looking to save face after botching Israel–Palestine; the Arab parties were looking for investment opportunities in Israeli tech, along with intelligence-sharing and defense cooperation against a soon-to-be-nuclearized Iran; and an on-the-ropes Benjamin Netanyahu was looking to claim any victory he could on the eve of yet another election. It didn’t escape Netanyahu’s notice either that the accords were a pseudo-mortal defeat for the Palestinians, whose influence in and usefulness to the Sunni ummah had waned to such a degree that Kushner was able to inveigle Trump into officially recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the Golan Heights as sovereign Israeli territory with hardly a murmur of dissent from Israel’s new Arab partners and only the faintest grumbling from the Arab street.

Explaining Kushner’s Middle East conquest is tricky only for those who’ve deliberately repressed how much of the Trump administration was the result not of careful premeditation and coordinated action but of unrepentant chaos and a sometimes imbecilic opportunism, which was responsible—whether you like it or not—for both the best [ sic ] and the worst moments of the Trump years, from the Abraham Accords to the attempted quid pro quo with Ukraine that offered military aid in exchange for kompromat on Biden. But unlike every other character in Trumpistan—from the only other presidential adviser who lasted the entire administration, Stephen Miller, to Anthony Scaramucci, the director of communications who lasted ten days—Kushner was married to the president’s daughter and followed her lead in how to cope with him, becoming an expert in ignoring Trump’s instability and even pretending that it didn’t exist. Far from being a “steadying influence” on the president (in the words of the Times ), Kushner took what he needed from his father-in-law and, when he had to, tuned him out; after all, he had more pressing issues to get on with, like salvation and vendetta, the sufferings of the grandmothers and the sins of the fathers.

These were the fields he excelled in—fields bloodied by inheritance and childhood trauma. Having grown up in the shadow of the Shoah, in a family that was friendly with Netanyahu, Kushner dedicates himself to the stewardship of Israel and getting Netanyahu re-elected; afflicted by the stigma of his father’s criminality, Kushner dedicates himself to the First Step Act, reducing prison terms for nonviolent offenders; along the way, he dabbles in discussions of free-trade arrangements that put him in contact with prospective investors, whose bank transfers will clear the moment Trump is out of office and the regulators move on.

This is the image of Kushner that remains in my head long after finishing his blandly self-aggrandizing memoir: behind the insipid prose and rigorously squeegeed façade, there hides a secret self flaming with resentment and rage, grudges held and scores to settle. Kushner, below the made-man surface, is profoundly unmade, unfinished, stuck forever in his early twenties, which was when his family unraveled. He’s an eternal son, duty-plagued, obsessed with impugned honor; a self-declared underrecognized overachiever who even after vanquishing the Beltway still sweats the minutiae of status and class like a terminal bridge-and-tunneler; a perfect mute spokesperson for his lost generation, which brought Gen X cynicism to Millennial entitlement; and ultimately an outsize baby of ambitious Boomers who will never be content with his vengeance, because the vengeance he’s been seeking was never his own.

On December 23, 2020, Kushner’s father-in-law pardoned his father, in the same winter flurry of sham mercy that reprieved Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. This meaningless, empty-gestural decree was the crowning achievement of Kushner’s savantish crusade, not the final official overseas trip he undertook a few weeks after, when he supervised the ceremony at which Saudi Arabia and Qatar officially announced their intentions to restore full diplomatic ties—a late-inning win he’d personally negotiated, and a refutation of the claim that he only went to bat for Jewish causes.

Flying back to D.C. on January 6, 2021, Kushner received word in midair that Trump’s supporters were laying siege to the US Capitol, but I can’t imagine him ever worrying that much: Pence could hang, Trump could be led away in chains, the media could deny him his glory in the Gulf and instead run coverage of Congress fleeing from hordes of cosplay Vikings and neo-Confederates, it didn’t matter. Kushner had gotten what he wanted. He’d gotten more out of his father-in-law’s administration than anyone else—more than Trump’s own children, more than Trump himself—and as far as he was concerned, the election was lost, or it just wasn’t worth the cost to contest and overturn it. He was moving his family down to Florida and embarking on an exciting new career in private equity with $2 billion in start-up capital from the Saudis. 

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Joshua Cohen’s most recent novel, The Netanyahus , won the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He is the editor of I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole: An Elias Canetti Reader , which was published in September. (June 2023)

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Jared Kushner Memoir, Breaking History , Reviewed Less Favorably Than an Anesthesia-Free Colonoscopy

By Bess Levin

Jared Kushner ’s memoir, Breaking History , will be released on August 23. If you’ve been hemming and hawing over clicking that preorder button, and wondering if it’s possible the former first son-in-law actually wrote something worth reading, The New York Times is here to tell you: HE MOST CERTAINLY DID NOT.

In a historically savage review published on Wednesday, book critic Dwight Garner writes that, essentially, Breaking History is one of the worst things he’s ever read. Of course, The New York Times isn‘t in the business of simply telling its audience, “This book sucks, don’t buy it unless you plan to use the pages to line your bird cage,” and so, Garner elaborated. Here are a few of the things he has to say about the memoir and the guy who—with the help of a ghostwriter—put it out into the world:

• “Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one”
• “This book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo”
• “The tone is college admissions essay”
• “Queasy-making”
• It includes cringeworthy praise for its subject, such as: “Jared did an amazing job,” “Jared’s a genius,” and “You deserve an award for all you’ve done”

Unsurprisingly, as Garner notes, Kushner seems to be entirely unaware that he landed the gig in the White House for one reason only—and it’s not because he’s a boy genius. Garner says that Kushner “writes as if he believes foreign dignitaries (and less-than dignitaries) prized him in the White House because he was the fresh ideas guy, the starting point guard, the dimpled go-getter,” and “betrays little cognizance that he was in demand because, as a landslide of other reporting has demonstrated, he was in over his head, unable to curb his avarice, a cocky young real estate heir who happened to unwrap a lot of Big Macs beside his father-in-law.” He appears to be totally oblivious as to why people who were actually qualified for their jobs—or, y’know, sort of qualified, with this being the Trump administration, after all—couldn’t stand him. To boot, he “almost entirely ignores the chaos, the alienation of allies, the breaking of laws and norms, the flirtations with dictators, the comprehensive loss of America’s moral leadership, and so on, ad infinitum.” And despite the fact that the former first son-in-law and Ivanka Trump are reportedly distancing themselves from the former president, Garner reports that “Kushner’s fealty to Trump remains absolute.”

According to young Kush, the matter of him being denied a top secret security clearance, until his father-in-law reportedly intervened , was no big deal. (Perhaps the concerns of the intelligence officials who reportedly didn’t think he could be trusted should be reviewed again, given recent events .) He also still apparently believes that it was totally unfair for his father, Charles Kushner, to be prosecuted so harshly by then U.S. attorney Chris Christie for (1) tax fraud and (2) hiring a prostitute to sleep with his brother-in-law, filming the encounter, and then mailing it to his sister as retaliation against his brother-in-law for cooperating with federal investigators. (Kushner the Younger previously insisted , according to Christie’s 2019 memoir, that such things were “family matter[s],” and not something for the government to stick its nose in.) And if that doesn’t upset you, in reflecting on his relationship with Mohammed bin Salman, Kushner at one point tells readers that he wasn’t willing to turn his back on the Saudi crown prince over one measly kidnapping and dismemberment .

Of that pesky little insurrection business? According to Garner, the 492-page book “ends with Kushner suggesting he was unaware of the events of January 6 until late in the day. He mostly sidesteps talking about spurious claims of election fraud,” Garner adds. “He seems to have no beliefs beyond carefully managed appearances and the art of the deal. He wants to stay on top of things, this manager, but doesn’t want to get to the bottom of anything.”

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So yeah, we’d say the *Times…*was not that entirely jazzed about the book!

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'Soulless': NYT publishes scathing Jared Kushner book review

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The New York Times on Wednesday published a scathing review of Jared Kushner ’s upcoming memoir.

“Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo,” Dwight Garner , a Times book critic, writes in his review of “ Breaking History ,” due out next week.

Garner describes Kushner’s writing as “soulless” and compares it to a “college admissions essay.”

Kushner, former President Donald Trump ’s son-in-law, served as his senior adviser in the White House.

In the memoir, Garner writes, Kushner appears to be unaware that “he was in over his head, unable to curb his avarice, a cocky young real estate heir who happened to unwrap a lot of Big Macs beside his father-in-law, the erratic and misinformed and similarly mercenary leader of the free world.”

“‘Breaking History’ is an earnest and soulless — Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one — and peculiarly selective appraisal of Donald J. Trump’s term in office,” Garner writes. “Kushner almost entirely ignores the chaos, the alienation of allies, the breaking of laws and norms, the flirtations with dictators, the comprehensive loss of America’s moral leadership, and so on, ad infinitum, to speak about his boyish tinkering … with issues he was interested in.

“This book is like a tour of a once majestic 18th-century wooden house, now burned to its foundations, that focuses solely on, and rejoices in, what’s left amid the ashes: the two singed bathtubs, the gravel driveway and the mailbox,” Garner continues.

The Times review mocks Kushner for including in his memoir “every drop of praise he’s ever received” for his work in the West Wing.

“A therapist might call these cries for help,” Garner writes.

The Times review also mocks Kushner for his recollection of wooing Ivanka Trump while he was in Europe on Rupert Murdoch’s yacht:

We were having lunch at Bono’s house in the town of Eze on the French Riviera, when Rupert stepped out to take a call. He came back and whispered in my ear, “They blinked, they agreed to our terms, we have The Wall Street Journal.” After lunch, Billy Joel, who had also been with us on the boat, played the piano while Bono sang with the Irish singer-songwriter Bob Geldof.

“You finish ‘Breaking History’ wondering: Who is this book for? There’s not enough red meat for the MAGA crowd, and Kushner has never appealed to them anyway,” Garner concludes. “He’s a pair of dimples without a demographic. What a queasy-making book to have in your hands.”

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Here are the meanest lines from the Times review of Jared Kushner’s book.

The first major review for Breaking History —odious lickspittle Jared Kushner’s memoir about his tenure at the Trump White House—has dropped, and it is a doozy.

Published by Broadside Books (a lamentable neocon imprint of Harper Collins which boasts a stable full of prize grievance ponies like Charlie Kirk, Tomi Lahren, Ben Shapiro, and Dinesh D’Souza),  Breaking History is billed as providing, “the most honest, nuanced, and definitive understanding of a presidency that will be studied for generations.” (Just imagine pressing ‘Send’ on that publicity copy and then going home to hug your children…)

Anyway, Dwight Garner of the New York Times took a slightly dimmer view than the Broadside marketing team of Kushner’s first foray into the literary world.

Here are my favorite lines from Garner’s review:

“He betrays little cognizance that he was in demand because, as a landslide of other reporting has demonstrated, he was in over his head, unable to curb his avarice, a cocky young real estate heir who happened to unwrap a lot of Big Macs beside his father-in-law, the erratic and misinformed and similarly mercenary leader of the free world.”

“This book is like a tour of a once majestic 18th-century wooden house, now burned to its foundations, that focuses solely on, and rejoices in, what’s left amid the ashes.”

“Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo.”

“Kushner, poignantly, repeatedly beats his own drum. He recalls every drop of praise he’s ever received; he brings these home and he leaves them on the doorstep.”

“Once in the White House, Kushner became Little Jack Horner, placing a thumb in everyone else’s pie, and he wonders why he was disliked.”

“What a queasy-making book to have in your hands.”

“Once someone has happily worked alongside one of the most flagrant and systematic and powerful liars in this country’s history, how can anyone be expected to believe a word they say?”

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The New York Times' Review Of Jared Kushner's Book Has Twitter In Hysterics

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The New York Times Book Review is considered " one of the most influential, if not most august, institutions in American letters," as The Nation put it. Millions of readers rely on the reviews to determine their next summer read or deep-think purchase. The Times' opinions can send a new release flying off bookstore shelves and into carts on Amazon or sink it down to the bottom of the remainder heap. 

That's why social media is all over the Times' review of Jared Kushner's new book, " Breaking History: A White House Memoir ." Kushner, a real estate executive, rose to public attention first by meeting and marrying Ivanka Trump . He then became a senior adviser to president Donald Trump despite having no political experience. Nonetheless, Kushner has nothing but good memories of his time there, including his hand in negotiating the Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. His book quotes colleagues who call him "a genius" and "one of the best lobbyists I've ever seen." 

Times columnist Dwight Garner begs to differ. His scathing  review  calls the book "earnest and soulless," adding that Kushner "looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one." And that's just the beginning of a slam job that is sending Twitter into a frenzy of laughter. 

Ivanka Trump had a kinder view of Jared Kushner's book

The New York Times' review of Jared Kushner's "Breaking History: A White House Memoir" pulled no punches. Reviewer Dwight Garner called the book  "a slog" and "a queasy-making book," comparing it to a tour of a demolished mansion that "focuses solely on, and rejoices in, what's left amid the ashes." He adds that the writing is akin to "a college admissions essay."

Garner's critique called the author "a pair of dimples without a demographic" and noted  Kushner's devoted loyalty to Donald Trump : "Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog's eye goo." 

The review is getting more attention than the book itself. Iconic talk show host Dick Cavett urged Twitter users, "Don't let anyone or anything cause you to miss reading Dwight Garner's priceless review of Jared Kushner's new book, 'Breaking History' (sic) ... You'll see what I mean." Commenters agreed; one said , "The review should get a Pulitzer Prize! The book itself can be tossed." Another  agreed : "Truly a thing of beauty." One took the time to retitle the book cover "A Kushy Gig: A White House Memoir by a Mediocre White Guy."

On the bright side, Kushner's book has gotten a rave from his wife. "I love my husband's amazing new book and I know that you will too!" Ivanka Trump  tweeted . "Order your advance copy of Breaking History now and join us for the journey!"

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KUSHNER, INC.

Greed. ambition. corruption. the extraordinary story of jared kushner and ivanka trump.

by Vicky Ward ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2019

A handy primer on a troublesome Trump in-law, even setting its gossipy parts aside.

A dishy, skeptical portrait of Jared Kushner, the naive, overleveraged, and conflict-mired developer’s son who has Donald Trump’s ear.

Intermittently, anyway. A running theme of investigative reporter Ward’s ( The Liar's Ball: The Extraordinary Saga of How One Building Broke the World's Toughest Tycoons , 2014, etc.) book is that the husband of Trump’s daughter Ivanka is so clumsily meddling that the president keeps him at arm’s length. “Get rid of my kids, get them back to New York,” Trump reportedly said of “Javanka” six months into his administration, after their presence became like sticky tar in the West Wing. How did Kushner, with no political or foreign policy experience, become the White House’s point person on corporate innovation and peace in the Middle East? Thereon hangs a tail of greed, incompetence, desperation, and felonious behavior. Jared’s father, Charlie, was a mercurial New Jersey developer who wasn’t above tax fraud and blackmail to get ahead. (He was sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005.) Jared was key to restoring the family’s good name, which entailed a role in the family real estate business, though he “was hardly ever in the office”; a job as publisher of the  New York Observer , though journalism baffled him; and his marrying Ivanka, another scion of a developer with a dodgy history. When Jared doesn’t seem out of his depth, he seems corrupt; much of Ward’s story turns on his disreputable dealings with Saudi and Qatari leaders, perhaps pursued in hopes of covering the $1.2 billion mortgage on a Manhattan Kushner property. Many details here have been previously reported, and the author’s efforts to elevate the book above a clip job rest mainly on a raft of juicy quotes delivered by anonymous sources. (“Jared is as sinister as Donald Trump,” intones a “business associate.”) As a portrait of Jared’s character, the book’s fiendish aura is hard to trust, but given the factual record, it’s not out of bounds.

Pub Date: March 19, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-18594-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: March 25, 2019

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | U.S. GOVERNMENT | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

More by Elie Wiesel

BOOK REVIEW

by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

From mean streets to wall street.

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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Book Reviews

'kushner, inc.' adds little to the canon on jared and ivanka.

Annalisa Quinn

Kushner, Inc.

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Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were once seen as moderating influences within the White House. A new book by longtime Vanity Fair journalist Vicky Ward, Kushner, Inc. , portrays them instead as coiffed agents of chaos — lying, scamming and backstabbing their way through Donald Trump's Washington.

Kushner, Inc. is a burn book with page numbers. We hear how Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn mocked Ivanka ("She thinks she's going to be president of the United States") and Trump strategist Steve Bannon told her to "[g]o f*** yourself ... you are nothing," how Jared's father is possibly bisexual, how Trump wished Ivanka had married Patriots quarterback Tom Brady instead ("Jared is half the size of Tom Brady's forearm"), and how he considered sending the two back to New York because they were causing him so much trouble in the press.

But Ward seems to forget the original tenet of White House reporting: Everyone has an agenda. She has said she interviewed 220 people for the book but is vague on who they are. Some claims seem to originate with the pair's rivals, including Bannon. Kushner, Inc. is populated by "close associates," "family friends" and, occasionally, a "person." Sometimes no one is cited at all. At one point, the anonymous person who gave Ivanka a tour of her high school pops up to say she seemed like a lonely teenager.

There is a form of fact laundering that takes place through books like these. Imagine a sketchy claim with a single, biased source. Good news outlets wouldn't run it. But since publishing houses lack the editorial standards (fact checking, requiring multiple sources, etc.) that those outlets have, the claim can appear in a news book. And from there, through outlets covering the book like news, the claim gets into the news outlets that would never have printed it in the first place.

But let's get back to the book. Other journalists have previously reported many of the serious claims presented in Kushner, Inc. , including the pair's sway over the president, their various conflicts of interest and the strife they create with White House staff. Ward also repeats details of Charles Kushner's shady dealings (including setting up his brother-in-law with a prostitute and sending the sex tape to his sister). Ward adds a few new claims, including an alleged profit-sharing arrangement by the Kushner brothers, Jared and Josh, which could create incentives for Jared to promote his brother's businesses at the White House. Ward cites "a former business associate," while Josh Kushner denies it happened.

Ward's own yields generally feel meager, and she wraps even the smallest scoops in a fog of insinuation and menace. For instance, she writes that behind the first daughter's charm, "there was another side Ivanka hid from public view. No one on the outside knew, for example, that in discussions with [a real estate firm that wanted to kill a Trump licensing deal], she would lose the softness in her voice and talk coldly and menacingly, according to someone who was told about the conversations." Two degrees of separation and we find out that Ivanka has a secret cold voice.

Another anonymous source attests that Ivanka throws dull parties: "One guest joked that the median age was seventy: 'It wasn't a fun party.' " This feels a little like an assassination attempt with Nerf pellets.

More troubling is the fact that the thoughts and feelings of Bannon, one of the couple's main rivals, are woven through the book, though Ward is not explicit about whether these come from direct interviews with him. Generally, interviews are indicated in the endnotes or in the text of the book ("X told me"), but Bannon's ideas quietly permeate the book without attribution. Surely she could only write phrases like "Bannon thought to himself" because he talked to her. But she remains coy. One of the other effects of writing from inside of Bannon's head is that he comes off as a sort of protagonist, the only person with real interiority in Kushner, Inc .

A further wrong note is Ward's treatment of Judaism. The way Judaism frequently crops up in the context of power brokering, greedy cabals and string-pulling feels, at very best, tone-deaf. Consider this passage about Charles Kushner: "They just knew that Charlie was insatiable, and that money and its trappings were not enough. 'I want to be the most powerful Jew in America,' Charlie once told a business associate." It is, of course, possible to be both greedy and Jewish, but Ward seems to include those things in the same place too often for comfort. Regardless of intent, Ward's treatment of Judaism is certainly a missed opportunity to ask how Jewish identity actually plays into Jared and Ivanka's lives. Do they, for instance, believe it comes with ethical obligations?

But Ward seems to lack curiosity about her subjects' inner lives in general. We never find out whether the family's loyalty to each other is expedient or real, what their values are or how they justify their choices. "One day, when Jared and Ivanka are gone, I will tell you the real story," one of Ward's "most important sources" tells her on the final page of the book. Ward means to end on an ominous note, but it is an unintentionally apt choice. It implies what readers will have realized already: Ward still hasn't found the real story.

• White House
• Donald Trump
• ivanka trump
• jared kushner
• Charles Kushner

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Kushner, Inc review: Jared, Ivanka Trump and the rise of the American kakistocracy

Vicky Ward has produced a damning depiction, a lethal amalgam of Page Six-like dish and firsthand investigative reporting

L ike Donald Trump, Americans are displeased with Jared Kushner, the president’s squeaky sounding son-in-law. As the reality that Kushner received his White House security clearance the same way he got into Harvard sinks in – “Daddy” pulled some very expensive strings – his popularity will not be rebounding anytime soon.

Vicky Ward’s book is subtitled: “Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.” It is a damning depiction of the Kushner clan and “Javanka”.

Kushner, Inc is an amalgam of Page Six-like dish, post-Holocaust social history, firsthand investigative reporting and recapitulation of Javanka & Co’s contempt for rules, at least those that directly affect them. In Ward’s telling, Charlie Kushner, Jared Kushner’s father, dreamed of becoming America’s Jewish Joe Kennedy, Ivanka Trump fantasizes about being president and Donald Trump almost wishes Ivanka could have been his first lady. Ward puts it all out there, waiting for the reader to inhale, gasp and possibly heave in disgust.

Surprisingly, there has been little concerted pushback. Charlie Kushner’s recent op-ed in the Washington Post only reinforces the book’s central contention that Jared Kushner eviscerated the line between the public good and his own interests. From the looks of things, the Kushners treated the notions of national interest and service as punchlines.

On that note, Ward describes Kushner’s efforts to corral Mark Corallo, an army veteran and one-time Department of Justice official who had been critical of Javanka, to join the White House as communications director. Corallo demurred and Kushner asked: “Don’t you want to serve your country?” Corallo tartly replied: “Young man, my three years at the butt end of an M-16 checked that box.” If nothing else, Kushner, Inc reinforces the well-founded conviction that we are governed by a kakistocracy , from the president on down.

By way of introduction, Charlie Kushner is a New Jersey real estate developer and tempestuously tempered convicted felon . Even as he was running afoul of Chris Christie, then a federal prosecutor, Charlie Kushner was being hit with an eight-figure fine by the Federal Reserve and the FDIC, in connection with the operation of NorCrown Trust, an unregistered bank holding company, a factoid recounted by Ward.

Also involved in the NorCrown Affair was Murray Huberfeld . In May 2018, Huberfeld pleaded guilty in connection with defrauding Platinum Investors, his hedge fund. Ironically, among those burned were Richard Stadtmauer and his wife Marisa, Jared’s aunt and uncle on his mother’s side. Back in the day, Richard was Charlie’s lieutenant, and was sentenced to 38 months in prison for crimes related to Charlie’s stay at Club Fed. Life is a circle.

Kushner, Inc meticulously examines Charlie’s rise and fall, how Jared got to where he arrived, and where he may yet wind up. We catch glimpses of a Runyonesque supporting cast – Seryl Kushner, Charlie’s accommodating wife, a randy brother-in-law and a cadre of crooked accountants – together with Charlie’s accusations of ingratitude thundered at siblings and relatives.

The Holocaust and Judaism shape much of the Kushner family’s history like sepia that bleeds on to canvas. Charlie’s parents survived the war and made it to America. They also imbued him with an embrace of religion as tribal endeavor.

From Ward’s tale, few leave with reputations intact. Only Josh Kushner, Jared’s brother, emerges as a sympathetic figure. Ward details the Kushners’ post-election efforts to attract capital from China, whether it be touting EB-5 visas in exchange for investments or looking for Anbang, a Chinese conglomerate, to bail them out of their untenable position over 666 Fifth Avenue .

Unlike Jared, Josh comes across as possessing a light touch, talented and ready to defy his parents.

To Seryl and Charlie’s chagrin, Josh married Karlie Kloss , a Victoria’s Secret model, computer geek and sponsor of Kode with Klossy, a scholarship program for girls and younger women. Like Ivanka Trump, Kloss converted to Judaism. Unlike her sister-in-law, Kloss’s father is a physician, unhaunted by the specter of Robert Mueller, SDNY subpoenas or the ghost of John McCain.

Ward directly links Jared Kushner’s tortured relationship with the truth to his father’s tropism toward transgressive behavior. Despite commanding a battery of Washington’s most expensive legal talent, Kushner never deigned to come clean on his SF-86, his federal disclosure form , a prerequisite for obtaining a security clearance, until he was squeezed by external events, the drip of incessant leaks, headlines and hearings.

Kushner, Inc does not entertain. It is not Fire and Fury 2.0. Rather, it traces how we arrived at this point, where Javanka plays an outsized role in driving national decisions and our nightly news.

Taking a trip down memory lane, Ward recalls how Kushner became the prime mover of the special counsel’s investigation. She writes that Steve Bannon, Trump’s final campaign chief, a one-time navy officer, attempted to impress upon the president the need to dismiss James Comey as FBI director early on, or be prepared to keep him for the long haul. Trump and Kushner were having none of that.

Kushner only began urging Trump to dump Comey after things started to unravel. As he saw it, career FBI agents, Democrats and Trump’s base would applaud the dismissal.

Wrong. The “ rid me of this meddlesome priest ” thing didn’t work so well the first time. Ask Henry II. In death, Thomas Becket was venerated .

Bannon resisted, and noted that if Trump fired Comey the director would come to look like J Edgar Hoover, a legend. Democrats and the bureau would rally round him, Trump’s base would shrug. Like Corallo, Bannon once wore a uniform. Reality mattered.

The Book of Genesis tells the story of Isaac and Rebekah’s sons, Esau and Jacob. Isaac preferred Esau, his oldest. Jacob, however, prevailed. Fathers can get things wrong. He doesn’t always know best. Josh and Kloss must be smirking.

• Jared Kushner
• Ivanka Trump
• Donald Trump
• Trump administration
• US politics
• Republicans
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The Biggest Controversies Surrounding Jared Kushner

J ared Kushner is best known as the  husband of Ivanka Trump and the son-in-law of the former President of the United States Donald Trump . While Kushner's reputation isn't shrouded in nearly as much controversy as that of his famous father-in-law, he's not exactly squeaky clean, either. Kushner has a shady side , too. As the old saying goes, birds of a feather flock together.

During his short time at the White House, Kushner managed to tick off quite a few people, including former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Chris Christie, who served as the head of Trump's transition team, and Trump's former Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon. "The grift from this family is breathtaking," Christie once said about Kushner and his wife, Ivanka, while speaking at a New Hampshire town hall event. Alas, a purported grifter lifestyle is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the controversies surrounding Kushner.

Read more: Ivanka Trump's Most Inappropriate Outfits Ever

Jared Kushner's Harvard Admission Seemed Sketchy

Even before marrying into the Trump family, Jared Kushner was no stranger to the finer things in life including prestigious private schools and, yes, even Harvard. While most aspiring Harvardians need pristine grades and stellar SAT scores, Jared seemingly just needed a donation from his dear old dad, affluent real estate tycoon Charles Kushner.

The story goes that in 1998, Charles doled out a whopping $2.5 million to the school. Soon after, Jared received his acceptance letter. "There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard," a former administrator at Jared's private high school told author Daniel Golden in preparation for his book, "The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges -- and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates," (via ProPublica ). The administrator added, "His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it."

As for the Kushner family, they have always denied that they paid Jared's way into the Ivy League school. In an email to ProPublica, a spokesperson for Jared's parents vehemently denied the allegations surrounding their son's supposed improper acceptance. The spokesperson was also adamant that Jared was "was an excellent student in high school and graduated from Harvard with honors."

Jared Kushner Got Tangled Up In An Unfair Trade Practice Lawsuit

It's all in the family! As the heir of a real estate titan, Jared Kushner was quickly ushered into the family biz. However, the Kushner family's business practices regularly included scooping up apartment complexes in desperate need of repair and allegedly renting to tenants without fixing the buildings.

In 2019, the state of Maryland launched a lawsuit against 26 of the Kushner family's limited liability corporations, alleging that they were guilty of engaging in unfair or deceptive trade practices. "This is a case in which landlords deceived and cheated tenants and subjected them to miserable living conditions," Attorney General Brian Frosh said about the lawsuit (via  ProPublica ). "These were not wealthy people. Many struggled to pay the rent, to put food on the table, to take care of their kids, to keep everybody healthy, and Westminster used its vastly superior economic power to take advantage of them."

In 2022, the Kushner family  and attorneys for the state of Maryland reached a settlement. While the Kushners agreed to shell out $3.25 million to the state, the family was careful to not admit guilt. "Westminster is pleased to have settled this litigation with no admission of liability or wrongdoing. We look forward to moving past this matter so that we can focus on our ever-expanding real estate portfolio," the Kushners said in a statement to the Baltimore Banner .

Jared Kushner Was Accused Of Colluding With Russia

In 2015, Jared Kushner eagerly hopped on board his father-in-law's presidential campaign that surprisingly landed Donald Trump in the White House. Kushner made quite a name for himself in the process. "It's hard to overstate and hard to summarize Jared's role in the campaign," Peter Thiel, the ultra-wealthy former C.E.O. of PayPal, told Forbes in 2016. "If Trump was the C.E.O., Jared was effectively the chief operating officer."

According to Kushner, the key was to run the campaign like a Silicon Valley tech startup. "I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley, some of the best digital marketers in the world, and asked how you scale this stuff. They gave me their subcontractors," he told Forbes.

Alas, it wasn't too long until his role in the campaign came under serious scrutiny. In May 2017, The Washington Post reported that three anonymous sources alleged that Kushner conspired with Russia's United States ambassador to create a covert channel for Trump and Moscow to talk about Syria and various other issues. These allegations proved to be particularly damning given that the FBI was already in the midst of investigating Russia's role in interfering with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Kushner, however, was adamant that all of his actions were proper. "I did not collude with Russia, nor do I know of anyone else in the campaign who did so," he maintained during a public statement  at the White House.

Jared Kushner Was Accused Of Being A White House Nepo Baby

On January 9, 2017, in a rather bold and unprecedented move, then-president-elect Donald J. Trump tapped none other than his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a senior White House adviser. Trump noted that his son-in-law was "a tremendous asset and trusted adviser throughout the campaign and transition." The former president seemed to allude that Kushner was one of the few  celeb nepotism babies who actually deserve the fame . Others, however, cried foul.

Critics of Kushner's ascension to White House advisor accused Trump of violating federal anti-nepotism laws. The Justice Department didn't agree with that assessment and argued that executive privilege allowed Trump to hire Jared. "We believe that the President's special hiring authority in 3 U.S.C. § 105(a) permits him to make appointments to the White House Office that the anti-nepotism statute might otherwise forbid," the department declared in a memorandum .

Kushner's attorney, Jamie S. Gorelick, later went on "Today" and staunchly defended her client. "I mean, I'm a Democrat. I think the president should be able to get advice from whomever he or she wants," she declared.  

Jared Kushner's Business Dealings With Saudi Arabia Are Questionable

Perhaps Jared Kushner's biggest controversial move to date is his business dealings with Saudi Arabia. In June 2022, the House committee announced it was opening an investigation into whether or not Kushner used his government position to secure a $2 billion investment for his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, merely six months after exiting his role at the White House. A spokesperson for Kushner denied any wrongdoing. "While achieving six peace deals in the Middle East, Mr. Kushner fully abided by all legal and ethical guidelines both during and after his government service," the statement read (via the New York Times ).

The denial did little to shield Kushner from public criticism. "What was he doing galavanting all over the Middle East?" former federal prosecutor and governor of New Jersey Chris Christie wondered during an interview with conservative commentator Margaret Hoover. "We had the president's son-in-law being authorized by the president to undercut secretaries of state and to be dealing directly -- and we know he dealt directly -- with the leader of Saudi Arabia on a number of issues in addition to other foreign leaders in the Middle East. We're supposed to expect that it's just coincidence that Jared Kushner gets two billion dollars six months after he leaves office from the Saudi Sovereign wealth fund?" We'll let you be the judge.

Read the original article on Nicki Swift

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Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump Hardcover – March 19, 2019

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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The first explosive book about Javanka and their infamous rise to power Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are the self-styled Prince and Princess of America. Their swift, gilded rise to extraordinary power in Donald Trump’s White House is unprecedented and dangerous. In Kushner, Inc. , investigative journalist Vicky Ward digs beneath the myth the couple has created, depicting themselves as the voices of reason in an otherwise crazy presidency, and reveals that Jared and Ivanka are not just the President’s chief enablers: they, like him, appear disdainful of rules, of laws, and of ethics. They are entitled inheritors of the worst kind; their combination of ignorance, arrogance, and an insatiable lust for power has caused havoc all over the world, and may threaten the democracy of the United States. Ward follows their trajectory from New Jersey and New York City to the White House, where the couple’s many forays into policy-making and national security have mocked long-standing U.S. policy and protocol. They have pursued an agenda that could increase their wealth while their actions have mostly gone unchecked. In Kushner, Inc. , Ward holds Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump accountable: she unveils the couple’s self-serving transactional motivations and how those have propelled them into the highest levels of the US government where no one, the President included, has been able to stop them.

• Print length 304 pages
• Language English
• Publisher St. Martin's Press
• Publication date March 19, 2019
• Dimensions 6.41 x 1.06 x 9.46 inches
• ISBN-10 1250185947
• ISBN-13 978-1250185945
• See all details

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About the author.

Vicky Ward is a New York Times bestselling author, a magazine columnist and investigative reporter. The author of the bestselling books, The Liar’s Ball: The Extraordinary Saga of How one Building Broke the World’s Toughest Tycoons (Wiley) and The Devil’s Casino: Friendship, Betrayal and the High Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers (Wiley), currently she is the editor at large at HuffPost and HuffPost’s long-form magazine, Highline . Additionally, she was a contributor to Esquire and editor at large at Town & Country magazine. Previously, she was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair for eleven years where her articles covered politics, finance, arts and culture, and society.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ St. Martin's Press; First Edition (March 19, 2019)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250185947
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250185945
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.41 x 1.06 x 9.46 inches
• #377 in Political Corruption & Misconduct
• #503 in United States Executive Government
• #928 in US Presidents

About the author

Vicky Ward is a New York Times bestselling author, investigative reporter, and magazine columnist. She is the author of the bestselling books "The Liar’s Ball: The Extraordinary Saga of How One Building Broke the World’s Toughest Tycoons" and "The Devil’s Casino: Friendship, Betrayal and the High Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers." Her latest book is "Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump." She is an editor at large at HuffPost and HuffPost’s long-form magazine, Highline, as well as at Town & Country magazine. She was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair for eleven years, where she covered politics, finance, art, and culture.

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Inside the relationship of billionaire venture capitalist Josh Kushner and model Karlie Kloss, the power couple with unconventional ties to Trump

• Billionaire entrepreneur Josh Kushner is married to supermodel and coding advocate Karlie Kloss.
• Kushner's brother is Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law and a former White House advisor.
• Kushner and Kloss have each revealed they didn't vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

Model Karlie Kloss and venture capitalist Josh Kushner may seem like an odd pairing on the surface, but they've been together since 2012 and have become partners in both life and business.

The couple has kept their relationship under the radar since they first started dating. Kloss and Kushner got married in October 2018 and held a second Western-themed wedding eight months later.

Kushner also happens to be the younger brother of former White House advisor Jared Kushner, whose father-in-law is former President Donald Trump. Josh and Jared Kushner's father, real estate developer Charles Kushner, was also pardoned by Trump in 2020.

Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to tax evasion, retaliating against a federal witness, and one count of lying to the FEC in 2005 and served two years in prison. As chairman of Kushner Companies, Charles Kushner admitted to filing false tax returns and recruiting a prostitute to seduce the husband of his sister, who cooperated with authorities, and film the encounter.

Although Kushner and Kloss haven't publicly spoken out against Trump, they have said they didn't vote for him in the 2016 election.

Here's a look at the relationship between Josh Kushner and Karlie Kloss, including their ties to former president Donald Trump.

This story was originally published in March 2018. It was updated in 2020 and 2024.

Josh Kushner, 38, founded a venture capital firm called Thrive Capital in 2009 that helped make him a billionaire.

Thrive Capital has made some of its biggest investments in tech startups like grocery delivery service Instacart, stock-trading app Robinhood, and insurance company Lemonade, according to PitchBook .

Because of his investments, Kushner sits on the boards for shaving product maker Harry's and wedding planning platform Zola.

The firm has also invested in companies like Instagram, Stripe, and ClassPass.

Kushner's savvy investments have made him a billionaire with a net worth of $3.6 billion, Forbes reported. Thrive Capital is valued at $5.3 billion.

Kushner has also helped start two companies: He cofounded health-insurance startup Oscar in 2012 and real-estate investment company Cadre in 2014.

Oscar, which aims to use tech to provide a more consumer-friendly insurance option, secured $375 million from Alphabet , Google's parent company, in 2018. It is now the third-largest for-profit health insurance company in the US, Forbes reported.

Meanwhile, Cadre was valued at $800 million in 2019, according to Forbes. Kushner founded it with his brother, Jared Kushner.

Meanwhile, 31-year-old Karlie Kloss began working as a model in her teenage years and went on to become a coding advocate.

Kloss skyrocketed to prominence as a Victoria's Secret Angel and became one of the highest-paid supermodels in the industry, Forbes reported.

She also runs a free coding camp for girls. In 2015, Kloss started Kode With Klossy, a charity that encourages girls to get involved in coding and tech.

Kloss and Kushner met and began dating in 2012.

On June 8, 2016, Kloss shared a photo on X, formerly known as Twitter, of her and Kushner revealing that she had met Kushner exactly four years before, placing their first encounter on June 8, 2012, although it's not known exactly how they met.

Their relationship became public when Kushner was spotted on Kloss' arm at a Victoria's Secret Fashion Show after-party in November 2012, Us Weekly reported.

They have tried to keep their relationship relatively private since then.

In 2013, Kloss said she appreciates Kushner is "so not in fashion" in an interview with People.

"It's really refreshing to leave all the fashion shows and shoots and chaos totally behind," Kloss told People magazine .

Kloss deflected questions about her relationship in a 2016 interview with Elle.

Elle magazine's Lotte Jeffs asked Kloss if she and Kushner have a "no phones in the bedroom" rule. Kloss answered by shaking her head and saying, "I keep my phone pretty close to me." She added that she tries to digitally detox once a week.

When asked if technology ever causes arguments in their relationship, Kloss "deftly deflects the question," Jeffs wrote.

The couple has largely avoided talking about politics, which is notable given their ties to the Trump family.

Kushner is the younger brother of Jared Kushner, son-in-law to former president Donald Trump and former senior White House advisor.

Josh Kushner told Forbes in April 2017 that he and Jared Kushner spoke every day, but refused to comment for an Esquire article about his brother in 2016 because he "did not want to say anything that might embarrass him."

However, the couple has publicly stated they didn't vote for Trump in 2016.

Kloss posted a photo of herself on Instagram in November 2016 filling out an absentee ballot. She included the hashtag #ImWithHer in support of Clinton.

Kushner's spokesperson told Esquire he's a lifelong Democrat and that he didn't vote for Trump.

"It is no secret that liberal values have guided my life and that I have supported political leaders that share similar values," Kushner told Forbes in 2017. 

Neither Kushner nor Kloss were present at Trump's inauguration in 2017. Instead, Kushner was spotted at the Women's March in Washington, DC, that weekend.

Kushner told other marchers he was there to observe, The Washingtonian reported.

Kloss also posted a photo on Instagram from the same Women's March, along with an Audre Lorde quote: "Women are powerful and dangerous."

In a 2018 interview with Vogue, Kloss made it clear she doesn't agree with the Trump family's conservative political views.

"At the end of the day, I've had to make decisions based on my own moral compass — forget what the public says, forget social media," Kloss told Vogue . "I've chosen to be with the man I love despite the complications."

Kloss also pointed out the sexism in the questions she's frequently asked about her relationship with Kushner. 

"It's frustrating, to be honest, that the spotlight is always shifted away from my career toward my relationship," she said. "I don't think the same happens in conversations with men."

Kloss and Kushner have also shown their support on social media for gun control.

The couple was spotted in March 2018 at the anti-gun-violence March for Our Lives protest in Washington, DC.

Kloss and Kushner didn't hide their presence at the march: They posted photos on Instagram from the March for Our Lives rally. A few weeks earlier, Kushner made a $50,000 donation to the anti-gun-violence group, Axios reported.

While Trump's presidency was unpopular in Silicon Valley, Kushner's proximity to the White House didn't appear to slow his career as an investor.

"There is a lot of discussion in the Valley about political tests on both who you'll take money from and who you'll work with," the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen told Forbes in 2017. "Having said that, I haven't yet seen an instance of anyone hesitating to take money from Josh because of the affiliation with his brother."

In July 2018, Kloss and Kushner got engaged after six years of dating.

Kushner proposed "during a romantic weekend together in upstate New York," People magazine reported at the time.

"I love you more than I have words to express," Kloss captioned a photo on X announcing their engagement. "Josh, you're my best friend and my soulmate. I can't wait for forever together. Yes a million times over."

Kloss converted to Judaism shortly before getting engaged to Kushner, who is Jewish.

Kloss confirmed she had converted to Judaism in a March 2019 appearance on Andy Cohen's "Watch What Happened Live."

The couple got married in October 2018 in upstate New York.

The wedding was a small Jewish ceremony with fewer than 80 people in attendance, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

"So much love for you both as you begin forever together," Ivanka Trump wrote in a post on X . 

Kloss wore a custom Dior wedding gown with lace sleeves and a flowing train.

"The wedding was intimate and moving," a friend at the ceremony told People magazine . "The couple was beaming with happiness."

In June 2019, the couple held a second wedding celebration at a ranch in Wyoming.

Kushner and Kloss' second wedding celebration was held at Brush Creek Ranch, an all-inclusive ranch resort near the Wyoming-Colorado border. The weekend included activities such as horseback riding, paintball, and off-road ATVing.

Photos shared from the wedding show that guests wore Western-themed outfits instead of traditional gowns and tuxedos. Attendees included Diane Von Furstenberg, Orlando Bloom, Katy Perry, Ellie Goulding, Princess Beatrice, and Ashton Kutcher.

Kloss and Kushner's relationship was publicly flamed on a 2020 episode of "Project Runway," which Kloss hosted for two seasons.

Brandon Maxwell, a judge on the fashion design reality competition show, criticized contestant Tyler Neasloney's creation. The assignment had been to design a look for Kloss to wear to a fashion event in Paris, but Maxwell told Neasloney that he couldn't see Kloss wearing the outfit "anywhere."

"Not even to dinner with the Kushners?" Neasloney replied, eliciting gasps from other contestants.

"Keep it to the challenge," Kloss responded. "You really missed the mark here, on all accounts."

When asked about the viral moment on "Watch What Happens Live" with Andy Cohen, Kloss said "the real tragedy of this whole thing is that no one is talking about how terrible that dress was."

She added: "Andy, I'm sure I'm not the only person in this country who does not necessarily agree with their family on politics. I voted as a Democrat in 2016 and I plan to do the same in 2020."

The couple has two sons, Levi and Elijah.

Kloss and Kushner welcomed their first child, Levi, in March 2021.

Kloss revealed her second pregnancy on the red carpet of the 2023 Met Gala while wearing a black Loewe dress designed by Jonathan Anderson. Their son Elijah was born a few months later in July 2023.

Kloss occasionally shares photos of Kushner on Instagram, where she has more than 12.6 million followers, but she doesn't show her children's faces.

Kloss has posted photos of the couple traveling the world and celebrating Kushner's birthday, but she doesn't share much else about their relationship. She also keeps the faces of her young sons hidden in photos.

"I know in my life what really matters to me," Kloss said in an interview with Harper's Bazaar in 2018. "I'm not trying to hide that from the world. I just really like having a more private life."

In 2024, Kushner and Kloss bought Life magazine and announced their plans to revive the iconic photography publication.

Kushner and Kloss bought the publication rights to Life magazine through Bedford Media, their media startup that also acquired i-D Magazine. They plan to revive the brand as both a print and digital publication.

"We see Life as an uplifting and unifying voice in a chaotic media landscape," Kloss, who serves as CEO of Bedford Media , said in a statement. "While Bedford is a new media company, we are deeply inspired by Life's iconic legacy and ability to connect diverse audiences with universal narratives of humanity."

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