by Doug Wead
According to the story, prominently reported in the American media, Kelly told the president that it would be difficult to fire them, “but he and the president agreed that they would make life difficult enough to force the pair to offer their resignations, which the president would then accept.”4
Jared laughed.
Peter Mirijanian, speaking for the Kushners’ lawyer, said of Ward, “It seems she has written a book of fiction rather than any serious attempt to get the facts. Correcting everything wrong would take too long and be pointless.”5
Media critics were promoting the idea that the Kushners were so powerful that Trump and General John Kelly conspired in fear and trembling in the Oval Office on ways to bring them down.
How much money does Jared Kushner make in his new White House job?
“We have both waived our salaries,” he answered. “We are volunteering for this country.”
I wanted to know what happened right after the election. What were their first reactions? What surprised them? I had learned from my own sources in the Secret Service that the agency had had few plans in place for a Trump win on Election Night. Nearly all the planning had been based on a Clinton win.
“No, no, the Secret Service was great,” Jared said. “The surprises were all political. After the election Trump reached out to Hillary Clinton. And Ivanka reached out to Chelsea. But the next day, Hillary challenged the vote and demanded a recount.”
This was a story that had never seen the light of day. The Trumps had extended an olive branch, but it had been spurned.
THE UNEXPECTED ADVANTAGES OF THE RUSSIAN WITCH HUNT
The release of the Mueller report, with its findings on the theory of a Russian collusion conspiracy, was expected any day. The tension was great. Critics were predicting that there would be multiple indictments. Don Jr. would go to prison. In fact, the Mueller report would not appear for another two months. What was it like in Trump world? Waiting for Mueller? Living with these constant accusations all over television?
“I told Trump, ‘You are as innocent as you could ever be,’” Jared Kushner joked. “So, in that sense, it is good.” Jared, like his father-in-law, always tried to see the best in any given situation.
“Because of the Russian investigation they [the members of the news media] did not cover the policy changes we were making,” he said. “The cutting of regulations could have been big stories. Instead, they were blind to what we were doing, and we were able to jump-start the economy.
“The Russian investigation made the White House team tighter,” he said.
“But it hurt, didn’t it? You couldn’t have wanted it?” I said.
“The process of the investigation is itself the punishment,” Jared said.
An exception to this trend was how the media reacted to the Trump decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. Even Russia could not distract them from this issue. Years before, well-meaning journalists and environmentalists had tried to persuade US officials to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, but that idea had been killed by the Byrd-Hagel Resolution of 1997. This resolution disapproved of agreements that forced the United States to pay for cleaning up the environment in China, India, and other nations without requiring those nations to do something significant to limit their own emissions. The argument from the developing countries was that Americans had become rich by manufacturing on a massive scale, polluting the world in the process. It was only fair for other countries to build up their own manufacturing base, even if that too meant massive pollution. America, they insisted, had an obligation to follow behind and clean up in their wake. The US Senate had soundly rejected this idea, passing the Byrd-Hagel Resolution 95–0. Even Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and an environmentalist, had voted for it.
Obama was more subtle in his approach. When the Paris accord was signed in April 2016, the American media was ready to provide him with cover. Details about the accord were reduced to one single theme: It was good for the environment. Period. Don’t ask any questions. Who could be against that?
To make sure that the discussion would go no further, Obama made it clear that America’s support for the accord required no congressional action. This was not a treaty, he insisted; it was a nonbinding “agreement.”6 With Obama’s signature, America joined.
Without any public discussion, an issue that had once led to a 95–0 vote in the Senate was now reversed. The American public hardly noticed. By the time Trump was challenging the Paris accord, a Yale survey showed that 70 percent of Americans wanted to stay with the agreement.7
Members of the national news media were outraged when Trump pulled out. They highlighted the reaction of world leaders, promoting the idea to the American people that Trump’s decision made the United States a pariah to the rest of the world. Trump was apparently unfazed. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” he said.8
I later raised this subject in an interview with the president. “Of course they don’t like me,” he said, referring to some of the nations that had signed on to the accord. “They like the idea of American citizens giving them money. This amounts to a massive redistribution of American wealth to other countries.”9
Publicly, Trump said the agreement would cost “America $3 trillion in economic activity and 6.5 million in industrial and manufacturing jobs.”10
IF IT’S IMPOSSIBLE, GIVE IT TO JARED
Donald Trump had built his fortune, established his fame as an entertainer, entered the political arena, and won the ultimate prize. He was not going to change his methods now. One of those methods was to empower people to do great things, even when others objected and other people were deemed to be better qualified.
In 1980, when Trump tapped Barbara Res to build Trump Tower, she became the first woman to oversee a major New York City construction site.
During his 2016 political campaign, Trump had picked his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to run his campaign in North Carolina. Many observers believed that his election chances hinged on the outcome of that one battleground state. Lara had no political experience, but she knew the people there and wanted to make it work.
North Carolina went for Trump.
In 2016, to the surprise of many seasoned political operatives, Trump appointed Kellyanne Conway as his campaign manager. She went on to become the first woman in US history to lead a presidential campaign to victory.11
Of course, it didn’t always work. One could even argue that it often failed. But the times it succeeded were instructive. If people were really passionate about something, Trump believed, they would be good at it.
Savvy Trump-watchers were not entirely surprised when the story broke that President-elect Trump had asked Kushner to lead the administration’s effort to solve the Middle East crisis.12 “I would love to be the one who made peace with Israel and the Palestinians,” Trump told the New York Times. “That would be such a great achievement.”13
Kushner’s assignment was met with disbelief, followed by outrage and ridicule. But that was not even half of the story. Eventually Kushner would be made the president’s “point of contact for over two dozen countries.”14
Kushner would eventually meet with Iraq’s prime minister to talk about the war with ISIS. He would lead the White House Office of American Innovation, working with the technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, Apple president Tim Cook, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. He would use this same platform to “modernize the Department of Veterans Affairs,” to seek solutions for the opioid epidemic, and to “develop ideas for Trump’s upcoming infrastructure proposal.”15
Perhaps most notably, Kushner would take the lead in enacting criminal justice reform, meeting with senators on both sides of the aisle and forcing activists to quit squabbling and instead funnel their solutions into a workable “first step.”
It was sometimes difficult to know when Ivanka’s work ended and Jared’s began, or the other way around. Both were involved in the planning of the president�
�s 2017 speech to the joint session of the US Congress, with Ivanka reportedly taking the bigger role.16 It was widely heralded as a positive, bipartisan speech—one that stunned Democratic leaders, who had been anticipating something altogether different.
MOVING THE AMERICAN EMBASSY TO JERUSALEM
I wanted to know how President Trump had made the decision to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. One by one, a succession of recent American presidents, including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, had made it a campaign promise. Some had chastised their predecessors for failing to take that action.17 Bush had promised he would order the move on his first day in office. But, once in power, each president had dropped the idea. How did Trump do it? Did he just grit his teeth and make the decision? Why had other presidents failed to deliver? What was it like trying to take this action?
“If you want to do something tough,” Kushner said, “you’re always going to have opposition. The question is, what kind of opposition? Is it big opposition, small opposition? Is it vocal opposition or nonvocal opposition? And I think that the president just went with his gut on a lot of these issues.
“I do think we ran a very good process to show him all of the risks of the people who are concerned about this. That includes intelligence assessments. In the end, the president believed that it was something he had promised to do and it was something that he wanted to do.
“You know, even though people said things could go badly, if it happened, he also said, ‘Look, it’s a time of relative stability in the region.’
“The key word there was ‘relative.’ He said, ‘I may never again have a chance to do this.’
“So when the waiver came up, he wanted to do it. He took the decision. He said to the peace team, ‘Look, I do want to try to take a real shot at the peace agreement. You know, how will this help us or hurt us?’
“We said, ‘Look, in the short term, it will hurt you. Because, again, we do think this will drive them away from the table. But in the long term, we think that it helps because you have to start slaying some of these sacred cows. We’re a sovereign nation with the right to recognize the capital of another sovereign nation. We shouldn’t allow people to bully us into not doing that. The more people see that you keep your word and that you show strength, the more people will believe in you. This is something that will reverberate and show people that you’re not like the other presidents who didn’t move the capital but who also didn’t make peace. They didn’t have either one. It’s almost like, sometimes, you have to break a leg to reset it.’
“The president saw that this was really something he wanted to do. Again, he wants to keep his promises. And so he kept this promise. But it was close.
“You know, in government, you have to distinguish between what’s a real headwind, what’s a real problem, and then what’s a weak whimper. Sometimes they kind of sound the same. So, he just trusted his gut to know which it was.
“He’s not afraid to make tough decisions. If it turns out badly, he can backtrack a little bit. But he’s going to try things. He trusts his gut. He trusts his instinct. He’s pretty fearless.
“Donald Trump doesn’t say, ‘Let me take decisions that will make me more popular, or they’ll get me reelected.’
“He’s saying, ‘What can I do that will help me make our country stronger and do the things I promised I would do?’
“I can look at two examples. One is tariffs. Before he did the steel tariffs, a lot of people were telling him that the market was going to crash. He was told that it was going to be a disaster. The whole world will fall apart. Gary Cohn was warning him about this. ‘You’re going to lose all of your allies.’
“The president basically said, ‘Look, I’ve been wanting to do this for thirty years. I’ve been saying that this is the right thing to do. I campaigned on it. I got elected on it. I want to see if it’s a real problem, I can always backtrack.’
“It turned out that he did it. And it really wasn’t that big of a deal. He was able to accomplish a lot of what he wanted to accomplish. The market price is correcting now, and it has been an investment for America. It has added productivity and a lot of jobs.
“The president saw that through.”
Kushner said the same thing occurred when it came to dealing with China. “I had a friend come to me. He said, ‘You know, what he’s doing is very brave. Because the true benefits of fixing our trading relationship with China will probably not be felt in his presidency. But the detriments and the cost of trying to rebalance things for America will be totally incurred now, during his administration.’
“The president’s view is, ‘Look, I promised I was going to do it. I want to fix this thing. If I get it right, then it’s good. Hopefully, the people will recognize that and they’ll reelect me. If not, I’ll go and I’ll live my life.’
“His view is, while he’s here, he’s going to do everything possible to make as much progress as he can on the issues he thinks are critical to our country’s long-term viability and strength.”
WARS AND RUMORS OF WARS
Though many columnists in the mainstream media predicted war would break out in the Middle East if the US embassy were moved to Jerusalem, they were proven wrong.
French president Emmanuel Macron and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made an effort to try to get Trump to back down.18 “Were you surprised by the reaction?” I asked Kushner. “There was much less of an uproar than anyone expected.”
“It showed that, on this issue, a lot of people had moved on,” Jared said. “A lot of these Arab leaders used their hatred of Israel and the demonization of Israel for the last seventy years. They could blame all of their problems on Israel. But it was really about deflection, because they had a lot of domestic issues at home.”
The fact was that citizens in many countries in the region had limited property rights. The people’s lives were not getting better. Some of this was due to mismanagement of the national economies. Some of it was because of the overemphasis on radicalization, and the perversion of a great religion.
“What would happen if they focused on how to make people’s lives better?” Jared asked. “How can you help your people? How can they live better lives as opposed to blaming Israel for everything?”
When Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, massive demonstrations ensued; more than fifty-eight Palestinians were killed. But “the war” never materialized.
“So, yes, people do care about the Palestinian cause,” Jared said. “People want to see it going in the right direction. But people have been lied to on that issue for so long. These issues have become bigger in the public eye than they actually are. We need to find a way to resolve them and get through them.”
As a writer and speaker, I have traveled internationally for thirty years. I wanted to know if Jared and Ivanka ever got away together on any of their foreign trips. Especially during any of their Middle Eastern trips. Did they have any fond memories of a café somewhere? How did they travel?
“Ivanka really only joined me on the trip for the opening of the new embassy in Jerusalem,” Jared said. “My trips are usually last minute. You’re just on the plane going from place to place.”
Do you sleep on the plane?
“Either on the plane, or I’ll catch a couple hours wherever I am. But my trips are pretty intense. Most of the pilots are military, and they say they’ve never seen trips like this. The people they carry come in and do their meeting and see the sights. The teams I’m with come in and do meetings all day long. They actually need to put on an extra pair of pilots for us sometimes because we’re on the move, trying to get things done.”
One advantage for Kushner was that he had no counterpart to meet with on foreign trips. There was less protocol. Things moved quicker.
Another advantage was the fact that he was family. Many governments understand the concept of family. They trust it. They know that people come and go in the world of politics, but
family endures.
“They know that I have the president’s interests at heart,” Jared said. “They realize that I was there before and I’ll be there after.”
LUNCH AT THE KING DAVID HOTEL
We talked about historic comparisons. There is a long list of presidential children who have become ambassadors. They tend to make longlasting friendships. Many become ambassadors long after their fathers have left the White House. John Eisenhower and Caroline Kennedy are modern-day examples.
Kushner was dispatched to the Middle East soon after President Trump came to power. He paved the way for the president’s first successful trip to Saudi Arabia and Israel.
“It’s interesting, I’m able to meet at a very high level,” Jared said. “And in a way where there’s not a ton of protocol. We don’t have to take pictures or read talking points. We can just sit down on the same side of the table and say, ‘Okay, this is our problem. Let’s brainstorm together on how we should go about solving it.’ It allows us to be much more honest.
“There’s another thing: They’ve seen that nothing’s ever leaked from the discussions we’ve had. So they’re able to be more open and trusting. These are issues where the leaders know what they want to accomplish, but the foreign ministers are just afraid to get yelled at. So they just stick to the party line that they know will never be accomplished.
“The informality of these meetings [has] allowed us to discuss different viewpoints,” Kushner said. “People also appreciate being brought in at the front end and having their opinions solicited. We are able to really develop solutions based on this feedback.”
“There are a lot of very thoughtful, smart people who are the rulers in a lot of these countries who want to see an issue finally resolved. They see their region moving forward. They think there’s a lot of potential if we can get through the most intractable issues.”