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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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Review: Breaking History for No Good Reason

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Breaking History for No Good Reason

On middle east politics, jared kushner is not the disruptor he says he is..

• U.S. Foreign Policy
• Middle East and North Africa
• Steven A. Cook

My first inclination upon receiving Jared Kushner’s book, Breaking History: A White House Memoir , was to review it like most everyone else, heavy on the derision and snark. Yet after reading it, I thought better of it for two reasons. First, life is not Twitter. And second, Kushner was a real player in a presidential administration of consequence. He deserves to be taken seriously, especially when it comes to the part of the world where I have expertise and where the former president’s son-in-law focused considerable attention during his four years at the White House: the Middle East.

There was never any question that the New York Times , the Washington Post , and others were going to gut Breaking History based more on who Kushner is—or the caricature of him—than his record while in government, his worldview, or the assumptions that underpinned his efforts in the Middle East. He may be everything his critics say he is, but he was also the Trump administration’s point man on serious issues such as Saudi Arabia and Israel’s relations with the Arab world, and he was central to the Trump White House’s efforts to forge peace between Israelis and Palestinians. That’s a big deal and reason enough to consider Breaking History on the merits.

Breaking History: A White House Memoir , Jared Kushner, Broadside Books, 512 pp., $35, August 2022.

Unfortunately, the book offers neither a thoughtful reflection on the Trump team’s encounter with the Middle East nor an explication of the intellectual underpinnings of the “disruption” it claimed to bring to bear on the region’s thorniest problems. Instead, Kushner recreates his calendar, resulting in a tedious 512-page tick-tock of his White House years. In this replay, the careful reader will notice a contradiction at the heart of the book: Despite a title and narrative meant to reinforce the notion that Kushner was boldly shattering long-held, sclerotic, and ineffective policies in the Middle East, he did nothing of the sort.

The Trump administration’s efforts in the Middle East bore a striking resemblance to the bipartisan U.S. approach to the region that existed on Sept. 10, 2001: support for Israel and Washington’s Arab partners—regardless of the character of their regimes—and sustained pressure on Iran using mostly, but not exclusively, economic sanctions.

The gap between what Kushner imagined he was doing and what he was actually doing is not the only weakness of Breaking History . Virtually all former officials emphasize certain policies or events over others to show themselves and the administrations in which they served in the best possible light. Kushner is no different, but he is oddly silent or barely audible on a number of critical issues. U.S. President Donald Trump’s lead interlocutor with Saudi Arabia and its Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman mentions the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi only in passing. Kushner expresses regret over the dismemberment of the Washington Post columnist but judges that Mohammed bin Salman’s top-down reforms are far more important than censuring the crown prince for a crime everyone understands was done at his behest.

Others have also drawn this pragmatic but morally questionable conclusion, but Kushner does not even pause to offer any insight into Mohammed bin Salman or the contradictions between the brutality of the crown prince’s approach and the positive changes he has wrought in the kingdom. And although Kushner wants to break from history, he accepts the parameters of the U.S.-Saudi relationship as they are and have long been: oil and security. He never considers the possibility that there might be risks for Washington by being so tightly bound to the crown prince.

One of those risks lies in Yemen and its civil war. In 2015, Mohammad bin Salman deployed Saudi forces to intervene on behalf of the Yemeni government that had just lost control of its capital. In the ensuing years, Saudi Arabia’s intervention has contributed to the instability of the Arabian Peninsula and a terrible humanitarian crisis. It has also aligned Saudi Arabia’s adversaries in Yemen, the Houthis, more closely with Iran and its regional proxy, Hezbollah, than they had been before the intervention, placing Iranian agents in a strategic location adjacent to critical shipping lanes and within striking distance of U.S. partners. On these issues, Kushner is silent.

Looking back, Kushner cannot provide a single insight about how the Abraham Accords could or should affect the U.S. approach to the region.

The decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—which was a major break from the past—gets a total of six pages. Yet there seemed little point in being this bold. Kushner recounts his father-in-law asking him what he will get in return from Israel. In response, Kushner can only muster the “goodwill of Israelis” so they will make concessions down the road. Kushner clearly had little grasp of Israel’s political dynamics.

When it comes to forging peace between Israelis and Palestinians, Kushner, like many in the Washington foreign policy community he so clearly disdains, does not even bother to ask, “Why do we do this?” That would have been truly disruptive. Instead, like the peace processors before him, Kushner wades into a conflict that is unresolvable. He never considers what U.S. interests taking on this task serves and at what cost.

His peace processing turns out to be more of the same, with the one wrinkle that, instead of leaving everything to negotiation, Kushner’s plans spell out the endgame in detail. He apparently did not understand that there was a reason that all the smart and accomplished people who came before him did not elaborate the details of a conflict-ending agreement. Isn’t that where the devil dwells? Anyway, Kushner’s results were the same as those of his predecessors Dennis Ross, George Mitchell, and Martin Indyk.

Kushner blames the failure of his plan called, “Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Israeli and Palestinian People”—which seems to be cribbed from a 1979 proposal that the World Zionist Organization developed—on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. That is an easy play. Abbas is corrupt, fearful of his own people, and content with the status quo.

Ilhan Omar and Jared Kushner’s Latest Accuser Has Shady Saudi Ties

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Trump’s son-in-law has become known as a deal-maker. But with the Palestinians, his approach appears to be take it or leave it.

Throughout, Kushner takes every opportunity to excoriate Abbas and cast him in the worst possible light. In one passage he writes of the Palestinian leader, “He smoked constantly, so every few minutes he would pull a cigarette from the table, put it in his mouth, and wait for an attendant to light it. I thought Abbas seemed more like a king than the representative of an historically downtrodden refugee population.” This all may be true, but the passage reveals something quite odd about Kushner’s book. He expended significant energy to clinch a peace deal, but he has little to say about the Palestinians, and he evinced no interest in understanding their version of history or their view of what is just.

Yet unlike other peace envoys who came before him, Kushner never bothers to consider where he and his plan may have gone wrong. Setting aside the fact that it left the Palestinians with a narrow archipelago of quasi-sovereignty along the spine of the West Bank, Kushner and his team seemed to believe that if the Palestinians could be convinced of their total defeat, they would give up. They did not and will not. Steadfastness and resistance are by now critical components of Palestinian identity. Swap out Abbas for another Palestinian leader and the outcome would have been the same.

The Trump administration did have a major achievement in the Middle East: the Abraham Accords . By many measures, including the reporting at the time and the recollections of those involved on all sides, Kushner played an instrumental role in the agreements. Well after the fact, Arab and Israeli officials praise Kushner for his efforts, arguing that the Abraham Accords could not have happened under any other administration.

Much criticism has been written about the normalization of relations between Israel and four Arab countries—the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Bahrain, and Sudan—including that it proceeded despite Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank and blockade of the Gaza Strip, the copious amounts of weaponry the Trump administration promised the UAE, and the quid of U.S. recognition of Morocco’s sovereignty over the Western Sahara for the pro quo of normalization with Israel. These are valid criticisms of the Abraham Accords, but the peace agreements have also produced economic benefits, scientific collaboration, security cooperation, and, importantly, increased people-to-people contacts.

Still, when it comes to his and the Trump administration’s signature accomplishment in the Middle East, Kushner demonstrates a lack of self-awareness and depth. He makes it seem like the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates was some astonishing development—similar to former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem in 1977—rather than a logical step for two countries that had been inching toward normalization over the previous five years.

“I had underestimated how little connection there was between the two countries,” Kushner writes. More likely, he was just unaware of the extent of ties even before formal normalization. Athletes from Israel participated in international competitions in the UAE. Before Israel established an embassy there, Israel had a diplomatic office in Abu Dhabi that was officially connected to the International Renewable Energy Agency but which many observers understood acted like an unofficial embassy. Emirati-Israeli security cooperation was also an open secret. When I ran into a former Israeli minister in Dubai late in 2021, I asked him if it was his first visit to the UAE. He looked at me oddly and said, “Steven, this is my 33rd visit.”

Looking back, Kushner cannot provide a single insight about how the Abraham Accords could or should affect the U.S. approach to the region. Does it make pivoting to Asia easier? Will the agreements further entrench the United States in a region his father-in-law very much wanted to leave? What are the shortcomings of the Abraham Accords? The agreements are historically important, but Kushner can’t think of anything deeper to impart to his readers other than the who, what, and when of it all.

The Middle East occupied much of the Trump administration’s time, yet Kushner’s recounting of these events is empty. Breaking History is just words on 512 pages with no lessons, no meaning, and no new way of looking at old problems. If a book can be white noise, Kushner has produced it. If it was meant to set the record straight, it failed. It is the work of a dilettante.

Steven A. Cook is a columnist at  Foreign Policy and the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book, The End of Ambition: America ’ s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East , will be published in June 2024. Twitter:  @stevenacook

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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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Breaking History review: Jared Kushner’s dispiriting Trump book

The former president’s son-in-law has written a predictably self-serving and selective memoir of his time in the White House

T he House January 6 committee hearings depict Donald Trump as eager to storm the Capitol. He knew the rally held in his name included armed individuals. When rioters chanted “Hang Mike Pence”, Jared Kushner’s father-in-law remarked: “He deserves it.”

In response to a plea from Kevin McCarthy, the 45th president questioned the House Republican leader’s devotion. The mob invaded Congress. Trump sat back and watched.

Kushner has not fared well either. In testimony to the panel, he has derided Pat Cipollone as a “whiner” and described deigning to exit the shower to take a call from a panicked McCarthy. On the screen, Kushner drips hauteur, empathy nonexistent. It’s not a good look.

Then comes Breaking History, Kushner’s White House memoir. It sits at the intersection of spin, absolution and self-aggrandizement.

“What is clear to me is that no one at the White House expected violence that day,” Kushner writes of January 6. Cassidy Hutchinson says otherwise.

Kushner adds: “I’m confident that if my colleagues or the president had anticipated violence, they would have prevented it from happening.” DC police tell a different story .

Kushner rebuffed early entreaties from Marc Short, the vice-president’s chief of staff, to end Trump’s attempt to stop certification of Joe Biden’s win.

“You know, I’m really focused on the Middle East right now,” Kushner replied. “I haven’t really been involved in the election stuff since Rudy Giuliani came in.”

In the aftermath of January 6, White House morale was at a nadir, according to Kushner. A second impeachment loomed. Kushner told staff to stay the course.

“You took an oath to the country,” he recalls. “This is a moment when we have to do what’s right, not what’s popular. If the country is better off with you here, then stay. If it doesn’t matter, then do what you want.”

That sales pitch sounds canned. Those who had served in the military found the spiel stale and grating.

In Kushner, Inc, the author Vicky Ward described Kushner’s earlier efforts to persuade Mark Corallo to join the White House staff. Corallo was once in the army and did a stint at the Department of Justice too.

After he said no, Kushner asked: “Don’t you want to serve your country?”

Corallo replied: “Young man, my three years at the butt end of an M-16 checked that box.”

Trump dodged the draft for Vietnam. When his brother, Fred Jr, accepted a commission in the air national guard, he met with his family’s scorn. In contrast, Mike Pence’s son, the Biden boys, Steve Bannon: all wore a uniform.

In Breaking History, Kushner selectively parcels out dirt. He seeks to absolve his father for recruiting a sex worker to film her tryst with William Schulder, Charlie Kushner’s brother-in-law. At the time, Schulder, his wife, Esther, (Charlie’s sister), and Charlie were locked in battle over control of the family real estate business.

Kushner explains: “Billy’s infidelity was an open secret around the office, and to show his sister Esther what kind of man she had married, my father hired a prostitute who seduced Billy.”

Schulder and Esther were also talking to the feds.

The names of two Trump paramours, Stormy Daniels, the adult film star, and Karen McDougal, the Playboy model, do not appear in Kushner’s book. Then again, as Trump once said, “When you’re a star … you can do anything.” For Trump and Kushner, rules are meant for others.

Breaking History comes with conflicting creation stories. In June, the New York Times reported that Kushner took an online MasterClass from the thriller writer James Patterson, then “batted out” 40,000 words of his own.

The Guardian reported that Kushner received assistance from Ken Kurson, a former editor of the New York Observer who was pardoned by Trump on cyberstalking charges but then pleaded guilty after being charged with spying on his wife. Avi Berkowitz, a Kushner deputy who worked on the Abraham Accords, and Cassidy Luna, an aide married to Nick Luna, Trump’s White House “body man”, were also on board.

Breaking History says nothing about Patterson but gives shout-outs to Kurson, Luna and Berkowitz: “From the inception of this endeavor, Ken’s brutally honest feedback and inventive suggestions have made this a better book.”

Kushner rightly takes pride in the Abraham Accords, normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. In the process, he provides backstory for Trump’s frustration with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israel’s then-prime minister’s earned a “fuck him” after he hesitatingly embraced Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, seeking to garner maximum concession without grace or reciprocity. What Netanyahu craved but never received was American approval of Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Here, Breaking History adds color to Trump’s Peace by Barak Ravid.

According to Ravid, David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel, was close to Netanyahu. He sat in on Israeli government meetings until he was tossed out by cabinet members. Ravid also calls Friedman “flesh of the settlers’ flesh”.

Enter Kushner. “Friedman had assured Bibi that he would get the White House to support annexation more immediately,” he says. “He had not conveyed this to me or anyone on my team.”

Things grew heated. “You haven’t spoken to a single person from a country outside of Israel,” Kushner said. “You don’t have to deal with the Brits, you don’t have to deal with the Moroccans, and you don’t have to deal with the Saudis or the Emiratis, who are all trusting my word and putting out statements. I have to deal with the fallout of this. You don’t.”

One Trump veteran described Breaking History to the Guardian as “just 493 pages of pure boredom”. Not exactly. Kushner delivers a mixture of news and cringe. He does not extract Trump from his present morass. On Wednesday, Kushner’s father-in-law invoked the fifth amendment. Only Charlie Kushner got the pardon. A devoted child takes care of dad.

Breaking History: A White House Memoir is published in the US by HarperCollins

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

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.”

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

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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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July 22, 2024.

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New York Times Book Critic Sure Did Not Like Jared Kushner's Memoir

Reporter, HuffPost

Jared Kushner has not impressed New York Times book critic Dwight Garner with his new release, “Breaking History: A White House Memoir.”

But Kushner’s literary failure has unintentionally given us one truly delightful read, in the form of Garner’s review of the nearly 500-page tome.

It is a brutal summation of Kushner’s legacy as the White House’s very own Slenderman — the guy who appeared when you least wanted to see him, at the blurry edges of photos, or in a meeting on foreign relations. Dimpled yet somehow emotionless, eyes dead like a shark.

Kushner, of course, is the grossly privileged husband of former first daughter Ivanka Trump who was part of President Donald Trump ’s administration for four whole years before vanishing in a puff of fine white smoke that rematerialized in South Florida in the violent wake of the 2020 election. His father-in-law had ensured he was given a top security clearance, over the apparent objections of intelligence officials, so that Kushner could get his equal turn stirring the cookie batter.

“Breaking History” is Kushner’s attempt to reflect on that experience as an adviser to the president.

“He betrays little cognizance,” Garner writes, “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.”

In the next paragraph, Garner delivers an even spicier take: “Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one.”

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

For the full review ― including a bizarre anecdote about that time Bono hosted Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Billy Joel, and Rupert and Wendi Murdoch ― head to The New York Times .

From Our Partner

More in politics.

The most revealing part of Jared Kushner's new memoir? What it leaves out.

Since leaving the Trump White House, Jared Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, have abandoned their pre-Washington lives as socialites in Manhattan and are seeking to live in comparative isolation in Indian Creek, an island in Miami-Dade County known as “Billionaire Bunker.” Kushner’s somewhat brief period of solitude ended on Tuesday, however, with the release of a new book humbly titled “Breaking History.”

Kushner’s somewhat brief period of solitude ended on Tuesday, however, with the release of a new book humbly titled “Breaking History.”

It’s been reported that the couple’s Northeast decampment is partly because they doubt the reception they’d get — at least publicly — from many of their old New York friends. Key figures in Trump’s administration, their efforts to always appear “the good guys ” have often backfired. Kushner’s polished veneer started to wear especially thin in the context of his freewheeling approach to foreign policy and much else.

(Take for example my own reporting that he may have endorsed or at the very least failed to prevent a 2017 blockade of Qatar, home to the U.S. air-base Al-Udeid. That blockade raised questions as it occurred soon after Qatari investors reportedly rebuffed his father on a key real estate deal. Nine or so months later, that deal would be saved by Brookfield , a Canadian real estate investment trust whose largest outside shareholders are the Qatari government.)

So why would Kushner, who says repeatedly in his new memoir that he prefers to be in the background, want to write an autobiography in the first place?

As his words make clear, again and again, Kushner actually loves the limelight, the awards, the pats on the back — from world leaders and from himself. He is his own best hype man, with eternal confidence in his abilities as a negotiator extraordinaire, a disruptor who achieved peace in the Middle East where more boring, traditional mindsets failed.

The point of this book, I realized as I struggled through to the end of its 500-plus pages, is classic historical revisionism. Kushner is trying to cement his personal legacy as he sees it: An individual following in the footsteps of Churchill and Roosevelt; a figure who quietly re-shaped world history in the shadows of his more flamboyant (and, in his mind, brilliant) father-in-law. 

We, the media who covered the Trump administration, knew that Kushner “got” Trump, which gave him an advantage. But, according to the book, Trump also really “gets” Kushner, even when everyone else around them doesn’t. “Jared’s a genius,” said Trump, according to Kushner. “People complain about nepotism — I’m the one who got the steal here.”

The biggest problem (although there are many) with Kushner’s book is the way it glosses over the subtext that came to define and complicate Kushner’s wide-ranging White House portfolio.

The biggest problem (although there are many) with Kushner’s book — whether by omission, contradiction, or a self-serving recasting — is the way it glosses over the subtext that came to define and complicate Kushner’s wide-ranging White House portfolio: money. 

Were Kushner’s transactions abroad and domestically made in the interest of America or in the interest of Kushner himself? Congress has asked for all of Kushner’s correspondence with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in the wake of a $2 billion investment by the Saudi Public Investment Fund in a new Kushner fund. (Kushner has not been charged with any wrongdoing.)

When Kushner entered the Trump White House, his family business, the only place he’d ever worked, had a major problem. There was a clock ticking on a $1.8 billion mortgage on a Kushner Companies building in Manhattan that no one wanted to buy. This meant that foreigners with big checkbooks and a desire to curry favor with Kushner Jr. had a blatant (and potentially illegal) opportunity to kill two birds with one stone by coming to the rescue of his cash-strapped father.

Despite this context, Kushner failed to follow protocol and disclose the full portfolio of his investments on his White House forms correctly, requiring multiple revisions, nor did he fully divest from his real estate holdings (which is not something he discusses in the book).

Members of the intelligence community reportedly felt uneasy about Kushner’s interactions with some foreign governments — something former national security adviser H.R. McMaster discovered and then talked to him about — because his business entanglements could make him vulnerable to “foreign-influence operations.” (This is not something he discusses in the book.)

His application for top-secret security clearance was also originally rejected due to concerns about possible foreign vulnerabilities, as NBC News reported in 2019. But those concerns were ultimately overruled.

None of this — you guessed — is clarified in “Breaking History.”

So we are supposed to take at face value Kushner’s accounts of meetings with people like the Saudi Crown Prince. Are we supposed to believe they were united merely by a common interest in idealism and reform? Here’s Kushner on his burgeoning camaraderie with the prince as they planned the inaugural U.S. state visit to Saudi Arabia:

“’Everyone here is telling me that I’m a fool for trusting you,’ I said. ‘They are saying the trip is a terrible idea. If I get to Saudi Arabia, and it’s just a bunch of sand and camels, I’m a dead man.’

He laughed and assured me that he was also facing internal skepticism, but would not let us down.”

In what is perhaps the most galling passage in the book, Kushner gives MBS a pass for Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s death because he’s a “reformer” — and that’s what matters above all in Kushner’s world of political expedience.

Kushner’s book has lofty ambitions. But just like his self-imposed Florida exile, it also makes him appear further divorced from American reality than ever. Writing for The New York Times earlier this month, reviewer Dwight Garner hilariously described the book as “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.” 

Ultimately, Kushner’s selective re-casting of world events is free of self-awareness and overflowing with pomposity. It’s not a compelling combination. And it’s not even well written.

Top related THINK stories on Jared Kushner

• Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner made millions in Washington. But at what cost?
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Vicky Ward is the author of " Kushner, Inc. " and the Substack newsletter “ Vicky Ward Investigates .”

• Entertainment

‘That Is NOT My Question!’ House Dem Explodes on Secret Service Director for Dodging Question About ‘The Ubiquity of Guns’ in America

Kamala harris is not the democrats’ savior, secret service chief calls trump shooting ‘most significant operational failure’ in decades, team kamala harris drops massive slate of endorsements hours after biden nod, robert f. kennedy jr. rages at democrats for ‘rigged’ primary process, tells fox he’s banned from ‘democratic networks’, new york times posts brutal review of jared kushner’s ‘soulless’ memoir: he ‘looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one’.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

There have been numerous brutal beatdowns in history.  Muhammad Ali’s eighth round knockout of George Foreman at 1974’s “Rumble in the Jungle.” My Florida Gators trouncing our in-state rival Florida State Seminoles 52-20 in the Sugar Bowl to win the 1996 national football championship. Judge Maya Guerra Gamble stomping on  Alex Jones’  antics during his recent defamation trial in Austin.

We can now add New York Times  book critic Dwight Garner’s review of Jared Kushner’s new book, Breaking History: A White House Memoir , to that list.

Kushner, pictured above somehow appearing less lifelike than the table lamp in the foreground, has penned an “earnest and soulless” memoir, writes Garner, and that’s actually one of the kinder comments to be found in the absolutely savage review.

The ex-president’s son-in-law “looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one,” presenting a bizarro-world interpretation of the “chaos” of the Trump presidency in order to tout his “boyish tinkering” with various policy issues, which Garner mocks along with Kushner’s Secret Service code name of “mechanic.”

Then there’s this paragraph, which is best quoted and read in its unfiltered entirety:

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.

Kushner embraced the tone of a “college admissions essay,” and “repeatedly beats his own drum,” Garner observes, offering a sampling of the simpering accolades Kushner claims he received from other White House denizens. “A therapist might call these cries for help.”

Unsurprisingly, Kushner acquits himself of any culpability in his father-in-law’s baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election and incitement of the attack on the Capitol, ending the book implying he “was unaware of the events of Jan. 6 until late in the day.”

Breaking History is a book without any clear audience, Garner notes, “not enough red meat for the MAGA crowd” and the subject matter “more thoroughly and reliably covered elsewhere” for the political wonks; its author is “a pair of dimples without a demographic.”

Make some popcorn and check out Garner’s full schadenfreudelicious review here .

Have a tip we should know? [email protected]

Sarah Rumpf joined Mediaite in 2020 and is a Contributing Editor focusing on politics, law, and the media. A native Floridian, Sarah attended the University of Florida, graduating with a double major in Political Science and German, and earned her Juris Doctor, cum laude, from the UF College of Law. Sarah's writing has been featured at National Review, The Daily Beast, Reason, Law & Crime, Independent Journal Review, Texas Monthly, The Capitolist, Breitbart Texas, Townhall, RedState, The Orlando Sentinel, and the Austin-American Statesman, and her political commentary has led to appearances on the BBC, MSNBC, NewsNation, Fox 35 Orlando, Fox 7 Austin, The Young Turks, The Dean Obeidallah Show, and other television, radio, and podcast programs across the globe.

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All the Juicy Gossip From Jared Kushner’s Book

Ivanka Trump married a man who, in many ways, appears to be the total opposite of her father, though they are both scions of wealthy real-estate families. Donald Trump’s life has been full of marital drama and sexual-misconduct allegations ; Jared Kushner has been married to Ivanka for nearly 13 years and seems like he’d blanch at “locker-room talk.” Trump is best known for fumbling a biblical citation and awkwardly using a Bible a photo prop ; Kushner is a devout Orthodox Jew . Trump is a larger-than-life celebrity who thrives on public attention; Kushner is so press-shy that most Americans don’t know what his voice sounds like .

When it was reported that Kushner had scored a seven-figure deal to write a memoir of his time as a White House adviser, many assumed it would be a dry affair that mainly just talked up his work on the Abraham Accords . But it turns out Kushner is more similar to his father-in-law than we realized: Breaking History is like the more respectable, Javanka version of Trump’s $75 burn book Our Journey Together . Excerpts and early reporting show that Kushner does plenty of score settling in the 512-page memoir, dropping surprising allegations and stirring up new drama with former colleagues in the Trump administration, where he served as senior adviser to the president. Here’s a running list of all the hot Breaking History gossip ahead of the book’s August 23 release.

. Jared & Ivanka had a star-studded reunion.

We’ve known for years that Jared initially broke up with Ivanka over religious differences, but a few months later their mutual friend, Wendi Murdoch, arranged a reunion. In Breaking History , he shares some glamorous details about that fateful weekend, per the New York Times :

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.

. Trump warned him that Tom Brady was after Ivanka (but he wasn’t).

Kushner got off on the wrong foot with his future father-in-law. He writes that his first interaction with Trump came in 2007, when he was publisher of the New York Observer . According to Forward , Kushner says he received a letter from Trump expressing annoyance about his low placement on the paper’s annual power list. “Please stop sending me your paper, so I don’t have to read bullshit like this anymore!” Trump wrote to Kushner.

Two years later, Kushner had started dating Ivanka and their relationship was getting serious. At her urging, he scheduled a lunch with her father and broke the news that Ivanka was converting to Judaism. Per Forward :

“Well, let me ask you a question,” Trump asked Kushner. “Why does she have to convert? Why can’t you convert?” Kushner replied that she had made the decision on her own and was comfortable with it. “That’s great,” Trump then remarked. “Most people think I’m Jewish anyway. Most of my friends are Jewish. I have all these awards from the synagogues. They love me in Israel.” He added that he hoped Kushner was serious because Tom Brady, the iconic NFL quarterback, was also courting his daughter

Though Trump has been publicly talking up a potential Tom Brady–Ivanka pairing for years, it appears neither Brady nor Ivanka ever expressed any interest in dating each other. And upon further investigation, Brady was newly married to Gisele Bündchen when Trump issued this warning to Kushner.

. Trump spoiled his engagement surprise.

A few months later, Kushner snuck into Trump Tower again without telling Ivanka to ask Donald Trump for his blessing. He let his future father-in-law know that he was planning to surprise Ivanka, but quickly learned Trump isn’t very good at keeping secrets. Vanity Fair reports :

On the second meeting, when Kushner snuck into the office to secretly tell Trump that he was going to propose, Trump intercommed with Ivanka as soon as he left to alert her that an engagement was imminent. (Kushner ended up proposing that night in his apartment, which his brother, Josh, covered in rose petals and candles, after taking her to see the musical Wicked .) 

. The Secret Service actually loved him.

Though you may have heard that Jared and Ivanka would not let the Secret Service agents on their protection detail use the bathroom in their swanky D.C. home, Kushner says that’s untrue. He claims they offered to let the agents use their bathroom but they declined, saying they wanted a larger space they could use as a command post.

Kushner also says the Secret Service assigned him the code name “mechanic” because they thought he was amazing at his job. “They had observed me quietly and methodically fixing problems behind the scenes during the presidential campaign,” he says, per the Washington Examiner .

. Bannon threatened to break him “in half.”

Kushner says that he had many clashes with fellow Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and found himself “woefully unprepared” when Bannon, “a black belt in the dark arts of media manipulation,” finally declared war on him. Kushner writes that Bannon threatened him in the White House Cabinet Room when he told him that he had to stop leaking negative information about Gary Cohn, a senior economic adviser, to the press. Per CNN:

Kushner writes that Bannon responded: “‘Cohn’s the one leaking on me … Jared, right now, you’re the one undermining the President’s agenda,’ he continued, his eyes intense and voice escalating into a yell. ‘And if you go against me, I will break you in half. Don’t f— with me.’”

Kushner says Bannon threatened him again when he called Maggie Haberman of the New York Times , at the urging of the White House chief of staff, in an attempt to clean up a story about Trump’s disappointment with his senior staff. “How f—ing dare you leak on me? If you leak out on me, I can leak out on you 28 ways from Sunday,” Bannon said, according to Kushner.

. He “joked” that getting Bannon fired was one of his greatest accomplishments.

After Trump finally got tired of Bannon’s antics and fired him in August 2017, Kushner joked to a (not particularly supportive) friend that he was proud of himself. Per CNN:

“Admitting that I didn’t yet have any major policy successes to show for my seven months in government, I joked, ‘At least I was able to get Steve Bannon fired. That partially saves the world from immediate disaster,’” Kushner writes, noting that his friend told him, “You don’t get credit for that … you’re supposed to do that.”

. Then he generously encouraged Trump to pardon Bannon.

In the end, Kushner proved himself the bigger man (according to Kushner). He writes that despite all the threats and lies, he didn’t object when Trump pardoned Bannon , who was facing a federal trial for allegedly defrauding Trump donors out of $1 million. CNN reports :

“Seriously?” Trump said to Kushner, according to the book. “You would really be for that? After everything he did to you?” “Bannon single-handedly caused more problems for me than anyone else in my time in Washington. He probably leaked and lied about me more than everyone else combined. He played dirty and dragged me into the mud of the Russia investigation. But now that he was in trouble, I felt like helping him was the right thing to do,” Kushner writes.

. He indirectly ruined Christie’s shot at chief of staff.

Kushner claims he also responded magnanimously when Trump considered making Chris Christie his chief of staff about halfway through his presidency, though the former New Jersey governor put his father in prison as a federal prosecutor. (Trump eventually pardoned Charles Kushner, too.) Vanity Fair reports :

When Trump asked Kushner what he thought of bringing his adversary into a top spot in the White House, Kushner recalled telling his father-in-law that he was fine with it. “I joked that Christie might be better at Homeland Security: ‘If he can close the George Washington Bridge, maybe he could close the border,’” a reference to the Bridgegate scandal that embroiled the former New Jersey governor.

But Kushner suggests karma came for Christie anyway: He didn’t get the job because he was about to release a book in which he trashed the Kushner family, and he couldn’t stop its publication. “Ironically, Christie’s petty obsession with using my family to get media attention had destroyed his dream opportunity to rehabilitate his image and finish his political career,” Kushner writes.

Christie has claimed he rejected Trump’s offer to be secretary of State, and he gave Vanity Fair this zinger: “I look forward to seeing Jared’s book end up where it belongs: in the fiction section at Barnes & Noble.”

. John Kelly shoved Ivanka.

With internal Trump White House drama spinning out of control in the summer of 2017, retired Marine Corps general John Kelly was promoted to chief of staff and tasked with imposing some military discipline on the White House. He promptly put an end to the 11-day reign of Anthony Scaramucci , but Kushner alleges that he became a West Wing bully himself. Kushner says Kelly had a “Jekyll-and-Hyde” demeanor, was “consistently duplicitous,” and once “let his mask fully slip” when he shoved Ivanka. Per the Washington Post :

“One day he had just marched out of a contentious meeting in the Oval Office,” Kushner writes. “Ivanka was walking down the main hallway in the West Wing when she passed him. Unaware of his heated state of mind, she said, ‘Hello, chief.’ Kelly shoved her out of the way and stormed by. She wasn’t hurt, and didn’t make a big deal about the altercation, but in his rage Kelly had shown his true character.” In his recounting, Kushner writes that, about an hour later, Kelly visited Ivanka’s second-floor West Wing office to offer what he describes as “a meek apology, which she accepted.”

When asked about the incident, Kelly told the Post , “I don’t recall anything like you describe.”

“It is inconceivable that I would EVER shove a woman. Inconceivable. Never happen,” Kelly told the paper in an email. “Would never intentionally do something like that. Also, don’t remember ever apologizing to her for something I didn’t do. I’d remember that.”

Ivanka told the Post that her husband’s account is accurate, and Julia Radford, her chief of staff, said she witnessed Kelly’s apology.

. Kelly secretly listened to Trump’s calls.

Kushner says that Kelly routinely listened in on Trump’s phone calls and the president only found out about it days before the chief of staff’s departure on January 2, 2019. According to the New York Post , Kushner says Kelly’s successor, Mick Mulvaney, raised the issue during a dinner at Vice-President Mike Pence’s residence:

“Before we departed, Mulvaney and I met with the president to discuss his upcoming schedule. Then Mulvaney handed Trump a document to sign,” Kushner recounted. Mulvaney told Trump, “This will end the practice Kelly started of listening to all of your phone calls.” Mulvaney “explain[ed] that Kelly had given himself the ability to listen surreptitiously to the president’s calls,” according to the account.

The president was “stunned at the invasion of privacy” and ordered aides to “end that immediately.”

. Trump said he hoped Alice Johnson wouldn’t “kill anyone” after he commuted her sentence.

In an excerpt provided to People , Kushner describes how he helped Kim Kardashian with her effort to have Alice Johnson ’s prison sentence commuted. “In an Oval Office meeting in May [2018] , after working closely with Kim Kardashian to vet the file, I presented Alice’s case to the president,” Kushner writes. White House counsel Don McGahn offered some pushback, accusing Johnson of being a drug “kingpin.” But Trump was open to the idea, so Kushner arranged for the fellow reality-TV star to come to the Oval Office.

“She gracefully presented Alice’s case to the president,” Kushner says of Kardashian. “She knew the details backward and forward.” McGahn went easy in his counterarguments because he was “starstruck.” Kushner recalls, “Two days later, [Trump] called me early in the morning and said, ‘Let’s do the pardon. Let’s hope Alice doesn’t go out and kill anyone!’”

. Kushner was secretly treated for thyroid cancer and didn’t tell Trump.

While heading to Texas on Air Force One in October 2019, White House physician Sean Conley pulled Kushner aside and told him he had thyroid cancer, according to a book excerpt provided to the New York Times .

“Your test results came back from Walter Reed,” Conley told Kushner. “It looks like you have cancer. We need to schedule a surgery right away.”

Kushner says he asked the doctor to hold off one day, adding, “Please don’t tell anyone — especially my wife or my father-in-law.”

The cancer was caught “early,” but required removing a “substantial part of my thyroid,” Kushner wrote. He purposely scheduled the surgery for the Friday before Thanksgiving so his absence might go unnoticed.

Kushner doesn’t offer much explanation as to why he wanted to keep his illness from his colleagues, according to the Times , but Mulvaney’s comment to the paper underscores that they weren’t a terribly sensitive team:

“This was a personal problem and not for public consumption,” he wrote. “With the exception of Ivanka, Avi, Cassidy and Mulvaney, I didn’t tell anyone at the White House — including the president,” he wrote, referring to his wife, Ivanka Trump; two of his aides; and Mick Mulvaney, then the White House chief of staff. A person close to Mr. Mulvaney, after learning of the book’s reference to him, said he did not recall being told about Mr. Kushner’s condition.

Trump found out anyway, and he asked Kushner if he was nervous the day before the surgery. Kushner asked his father-in-law how he learned about his illness. “I’m the president. I know everything,” Trump said . “I understand that you want to keep these things quiet. I like to keep things like this to myself as well. You’ll be just fine.”

. Rupert Murdoch told him that Trump’s 2020 Arizona loss was “ironclad.”

Murdoch and his former wife Wendi Deng are so close with Jared and Ivanka that they arranged to reunite the young couple after they split for a few months early in their courtship. This tie worked to Donald Trump’s advantage early in the 2016 campaign; in excerpts of Breaking History obtained by The Guardian , Kushner says he convinced his father-in-law not to attack the owner of Fox News on Twitter:

“Please, you’re in a Republican primary,” I said, hoping he wasn’t about to post a negative tweet aimed at the most powerful man in conservative media. “You don’t need to get on the wrong side of Rupert. Give me a couple of hours to fix it.”

Kushner says he did just that, calling up Murdoch and convincing him that his interests aligned with Trump’s, and the reality-TV host actually had a shot at winning.

But that alliance couldn’t save Trump four years later. Kushner called Murdoch to protest Fox News’ decision to call Arizona for Biden on Election Night, and Murdoch said he’d look into it. A few minutes later he called back and said, “Sorry, Jared, there is nothing I can do … The Fox News data authority says the numbers are ironclad — he says it won’t be close.”

. Kushner claims January 6 violence was unexpected.

Cassidy Hutchinson told the House committee investigating January 6 that she was “scared and nervous” in the lead up to January 6 because she kept hearing people talk about the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys attending Trump’s rally. She recalled that even her boss Mark Meadows remarked, “things might get real, real bad on January 6.”

But Kushner writes that he’s sure none of his White House colleagues were concerned about the event. He writes, per The Hill :

The violent storming of the Capitol was wrong and unlawful. It did not represent the hundreds of thousands of peaceful protesters, or the tens of millions of Trump voters, who were good, decent, and law- abiding citizens. What is clear to me is that no one at the White House expected violence that day. I’m confident that if my colleagues or the president had anticipated violence, they would have prevented it from happening. After more than six hundred peaceful Trump rallies, these rioters gave Trump’s critics the fodder they had wanted for more than five years. It allowed them to say that Trump’s supporters were crazed and violent thugs. The claim was as false as the narrative that the violent Antifa rioters who desecrated American cities that summer were representative of the millions of peaceful demonstrators who had marched for equality under the law.

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• Entertainment

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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Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner's Relationship: A Look at Their 15-Year Marriage

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Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have been married for 15 years and share three children

Dimitrios Kambouris/VF15/WireImage

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have been together for over a decade.

The daughter of former President Donald Trump and his former senior advisor first met in 2007 and got married in 2009. Since then, the couple have welcomed three children together: Arabella, Joseph and Theodore.

Before they both became involved in politics during Donald's presidency, Ivanka and Jared had entrepreneurial pursuits of their own. Ivanka started her career as a model before she attended the University of Pennsylvania and joined her father's company. She also starred in her dad's show, The Apprentice , and led her own design brand.

Jared, a New Jersey native, became a real estate mogul and publisher of the New York Observer after graduating from Harvard University. Both were advisors to Donald during his presidency but have since relocated to a small town south of Miami.

Although her father is a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, Ivanka and Jared have kept a greater distance from Donald's campaign than in previous election cycles.

"She told him when he said he was going to run again that she didn't want to be involved ," a source told PEOPLE in March 2024

From how they were set up to their quieter life in Florida today, here’s everything to know about Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s relationship.

They were set up through mutual friends

Grant Lamos IV/Getty

Ivanka and Jared were both 25 years old when their friends set them up for a business lunch to talk real estate, thinking they could do deals together, Ivanka told Vogue in 2015.

“They very innocently set us up thinking that our only interest in one another would be transactional,” she said. “Whenever we see them we’re like, ‘The best deal we ever made!’ ”

She converted to Judaism before they got engaged

John Parra/Getty

Before the two got engaged, Ivanka converted from Presbyterian to Judaism, as Jared comes from an Orthodox family.

Ivanka told Vogue that they are “pretty observant” of the religion, keeping kosher and following the Sabbath, meaning disconnecting from technology after Friday sundown until Saturday sundown. She called her conversion a “very intimate thing for us.”

“It’s been such a great life decision for me,” she said. “I am very modern, but I’m also a very traditional person, and I think that’s an interesting juxtaposition in how I was raised as well. I really find that with Judaism, it creates an amazing blueprint for family connectivity.”

They got married in 2009

Brian Marcus/Fred Marcus Photography/Getty

Ivanka and Jared officially wed on Oct. 25, 2009, in front of 500 guests at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J. She wore a Vera Wang gown and was joined by her father and Regis Philbin , who performed at the reception.

They share three children

Ivanka Trump Instagram

On July 17, 2011, Ivanka and Jared welcomed their first child, Arabella Rose. Two years later, on Oct. 14, 2013, the couple expanded their family with the birth of their son, Joseph Frederick. Their youngest son, Theodore James, was born on March 27, 2016.

After Theodore was born, Ivanka spoke to PEOPLE in April 2016 about how she approached motherhood differently with the birth of each child.

"With Arabella I was so nervous all the time, I was nervous about breaking her, I was nervous about dropping her, I was nervous about all the basic elements of being a first-time parent,” she said.

She continued, “With Joseph, I was materially less nervous and now with Theodore I’m so busy chasing the other ones I don’t have time to be nervous!”

When her father became president, Ivanka moved her family to Washington D.C. However, they have since settled in Florida.

They were both involved in Donald Trump’s presidency

Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

Ivanka and Jared were senior advisors to Donald during his presidency. Both joined him throughout his campaign in 2016, traveling with him across the country and promoting his campaign at the Republican National Convention.

In February 2023, Ivanka and Jared were subpoenaed by a special counsel as part of its federal investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots . Both were previously questioned about the day by a House investigative committee, which advised that the Department of Justice charge the former president .

They are living in Florida as Donald Trump campaigns for the 2024 election

Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty

After President Joe Biden took over the presidency in January 2021, Ivanka and Jared took a step back from their political careers and chose to settle in Surfside, Fla., a quiet town south of Miami. They've largely avoided the spotlight since and have cultivated their own private social circle in the town with a population of 6,000.

" They're really just settling into normal life and really enjoying it," a Kushner friend told PEOPLE in April 2022.

Ivanka took up more athletic activities like surfing, golfing and playing tennis, while Jared focused on a new entrepreneurial venture .

"Jared's spending a lot more time with his family because over the last four years that was something neither of them could do as much as they wanted to," the source said, adding that "Jared will say, 'The nice thing about Miami is the moment you stop working, you're on vacation.' ”

The couple also saw Donald less often, the source added, only making trips to his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, every few weeks.

"It's definitely less than in their time in the White House, where they would see him every single day," the source said.

For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!

Read the original article on People .

Melania Trump and Ivanka Trump Will Appear at the RNC on This Day

After being noticeably absent from the campaign trail, Melania Trump will reportedly be joined by Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner at the Republican National Convention.

Politics Reporter

NICHOLAS KAMM

After barely being seen in public for the entirety of her husband’s 2024 presidential bid, former First Lady Melania Trump will reportedly appear at the Republican National Convention on Thursday.

She will also be joined by two other Trump family members who have been absent from the campaign: Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner , according to CNN’s Trump correspondent Kristen Holmes.

The power couple who enjoyed significant influence in the Trump administration have been nowhere near the trail this cycle.

At a press briefing on Tuesday, a Trump campaign official could not confirm whether Melania, Jared and Ivanka would be making an appearance at the convention in Milwaukee.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast  here .

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Breaking History: A White House Memoir Kindle Edition

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Jared Kushner was one of the most consequential presidential advisers in modern history. For the first time, he recounts what happened behind closed doors during the Trump presidency.

Few White House advisors have had such an expansive portfolio or constant access to the president. From his office next to Trump, senior adviser Jared Kushner operated quietly behind the scenes, preferring to leave the turf wars and television sparring to others.

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.

Breaking History takes readers inside debates in the Oval Office, double-crosses at the United Nations, tense meetings in Arab palaces, high-stakes negotiations, and the daily barrage of leaks, false allegations, investigations, and West Wing infighting.

A true historical thriller, this book is not your typical political memoir. Kushner details Washington’s intense resistance to change and reveals how he broke through the stalemates of the past. An outsider among outsiders, Kushner was a results-driven executive among beltway power brokers. He questioned old assumptions and delivered unprecedented results on trade, criminal justice reform, production of COVID-19 vaccines, and Middle East peace. His successful negotiation of the Abraham Accords, the most significant diplomatic breakthrough in 50 years, earned him a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Written by one of the few people by Trump’s side from his trip down the golden escalator to his final departure from Andrews Air Force Base, Breaking History provides the most honest, nuanced, and definitive understanding of a presidency that will be studied for generations.

• Print length 512 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Broadside e-books
• Publication date August 23, 2022
• File size 35086 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
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Editorial Reviews

About the author.

Jared Kushner  is the founder of Affinity Partners, a global investment firm. Previously, he served as Senior Advisor to President Donald J. Trump, and before that, as CEO of Kushner Companies. He also co-founded two technology companies, Cadre and WiredScore. In 2015, he was named to  Fortune's  40 under 40, and in 2017 was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People. In 2018, Jared received the Aztec Eagle Award, Mexico’s highest honor, for his work on the USMCA trade agreement. He was given a presidential citation for helping to architect Operation Warp Speed, which produced COVID vaccines in record time. In recognition of his success negotiating the Abraham Accords, Jared received the National Security Medal, the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the Grand Cordon of the Order of Ouissam Alaouite from King Mohammed VI of Morocco, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He lives in Florida with his wife Ivanka and three children.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09PBTMH89
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Broadside e-books (August 23, 2022)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 23, 2022
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 35086 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
• #13 in International Diplomacy (Kindle Store)
• #36 in International Diplomacy (Books)
• #126 in Biographies of Political Leaders

About the author

Jared kushner.

Jared Kushner is the founder of Affinity Partners, a global investment firm. Previously, he served as senior adviser to President Donald J. Trump, and before that, as CEO of Kushner Companies. He also cofounded two technology companies, Cadre and WiredScore. In 2015, he was named to Fortune’s 40 under 40, and in 2017 was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People. In 2018, Jared received the Aztec Eagle Award, Mexico’s highest honor, for his work on the USMCA trade agreement. He was given a presidential citation for helping to architect and manage Operation Warp Speed, which produced COVID-19 vaccines in record time. In recognition of Jared's success negotiating the Abraham Accords, Israel planted the Kushner Garden of Peace in the Grove of Nations outside Jerusalem. He also received the National Security Medal, the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the Grand Cordon of the Order of Ouissam Alaouite from King Mohammed VI of Morocco, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He lives in Florida with his wife, Ivanka, and three children.

“Now 41, Kushner was involved in brokering Trump’s US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement and drafting and passing the 2018 First Step Act that included prison and criminal sentencing reforms. He helped lead the White House COVID-19 response in 2020 and led efforts to broker diplomatic relations between Israel and four Arab countries during the final months of Trump’s term.”—New York Post

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To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Customers say

Customers find the book has interesting facets and heartwarming portraits of Jared Kushner and his family. They also describe the writing style as very well written and realistic. Readers appreciate the honesty, depth, and trustworthiness of the relationships and challenges. They describe the author as brilliant and hard to put down.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the book interesting and insightful, weaving together themes of personal dedication and profound love. They also appreciate the author's objective point of view and say it's a great book of super historical value about the Trump Presidency.

"...quality of the writing, the pacing of the action, and the very objective point of view by the author...." Read more

"...Breaking History” was very interesting , if only for its account of the back and forth that resulted in the Abraham Accords that was accomplished by..." Read more

"A great book of super historical value about the Trump Presidency! Jared should be proud of his accomplishments for our country," Read more

"...There are valuable insights here , and I hope that people can overcome the modern political tribalism and try to absorb the information provided by..." Read more

Customers find the writing style very well written, clear, and easy to read. They also say the dialogue feels real and the book is long but worth the read. Readers also mention that the author is laid back and humble.

"...of the best overall in addition to the aforementioned, is the quality of the writing , the pacing of the action, and the very objective point of view..." Read more

"...someone like Kushner, who is young, bright, successful, tall, good looking (even has a full head of hair), and now very experienced, someone who has..." Read more

"...The conversations that he recalls seem very realistic , as you can almost hear Trump’s voice saying these things...." Read more

"...He did an incredible job of expressing his views and what he has endured throughout his life so far...." Read more

Customers find the book very well written, with honesty and depth. They also say the events are ignored, but what is told rings true. Readers describe Kushner as authentic and sharply focuses on achieving. They say the book is an incredible read for patriots who love America and a true hero.

"... I admire the truthfulness , the passion that he has for his family & climbing to the top doing it his way.* Incredible read. *..." Read more

"...In sum, we’re asked to believe that all three were merely unselfish, patriotic , rational all-Americans committed to fighting a cruel and corrupt..." Read more

"...It's backed up by research and fact checking which is cited in the back of the book...." Read more

"...supporter but I firmly believe Mr. Kushner's account to be truthful and accurate ...." Read more

Customers find the writing quality brilliant, suspenseful, and gifted. They also say it's a rare look into the life of a brilliant man.

"...Wow, I was wrong! In a highly professional and compelling manner, he walks the reader through not only the events themselves, but the emotions and..." Read more

"...his work in the White House with President Trump, though, I’m amazed at his brilliance and all he was able to accomplish...." Read more

"...But most of all he shows himself to be a pragmatic, skilled statesman . Yep. Statesman...." Read more

"...Heartwarming, suspenseful, gifted , nuanced and a rare look into a behind the scenes peek at the many riveting factors that taken into play, create..." Read more

Customers find the pacing of the book fast, surprising, and fascinating. They also say it's filled with action and suspense that makes it far more interesting than typical political memoirs.

"...to the aforementioned, is the quality of the writing, the pacing of the action , and the very objective point of view by the author...." Read more

"...Overall, I found this book to be informative, but also at times surprising and fascinating...." Read more

"...of this gifted book liked the overall book and thought it was a good and quick read ." Read more

"...Heartwarming, suspenseful , gifted, nuanced and a rare look into a behind the scenes peek at the many riveting factors that taken into play, create..." Read more

Customers find the book engaging, hard to put down, and an inside look at the White House.

"...A book that is hard to put down !" Read more

"Loved the entire book. Easy to read and hard to put down ...." Read more

"...The only negative was that it was difficult to put down . I" Read more

"...Thank you for the way you wrote making it easy to step into your shoes , live your life...." Read more

Customers find the book's account of the Trump presidency detailed, clear, and concise. They also appreciate the rich detail and behind-the-scenes look.

"...The content of a book is of primary importance and the level of granular detail for so many delicate negotiations, historical influences on the..." Read more

"...The book also gives great detail of Kushner’s major policy accomplishments such as USMCA, Abraham Accords, Criminal Justice Reform, and Operation..." Read more

"...The writing style is clear and concise, but also gives rich detail and a behind-the-scenes look into the most important events of the Trump..." Read more

"Amazing book - must read for every American! Historic achievements of President Trump , despite all the efforts by Fake News, Swamp and RINOs...." Read more

Customers appreciate the author's modesty. They say he did not unfairly disparage anyone.

"...Mr. Kushner wrote a thoughtful, respectful and insightful history of his accomplishments, not for self, but to clarify what has been a collusion of..." Read more

"...Above all, it is a human story. Jared comes off as refreshingly real, humble and relatable...." Read more

"...Kushner was blown apart by his down-to-earth communication style and humble , but strong leadership behind the scenes...." Read more

"...Your unique tenacity, creativity, resourcefulness, humility , tureless work, and loyalty - should be an inspiration for all...." Read more

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Melania and Ivanka Trump Fill Out the Family Portrait, but Not Barron

After staying largely out of sight, the former president’s wife and his eldest daughter joined him as he accepted the Republican nomination. But his youngest son did not.

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By Rebecca Davis O’Brien and Michael Gold

Reporting from Milwaukee

• July 18, 2024

The tableau of Trump family unity was nearly complete.

Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, followed former President Donald J. Trump into FiServ Forum on Thursday night. Melania Trump entered later, alone, to Beethoven’s Ninth and rapturous applause. And when his 90-minute speech came to an end, the two most visible women in Mr. Trump’s life — who have avoided the campaign trail this time — joined him onstage.

Missing from the celebratory scene at the Republican National Convention: the youngest Trump son, 18-year-old Barron.

Barron Trump has always been somewhat removed from his father’s political life: Melania Trump has fiercely protected her son’s privacy. He graduated in May from a private school in South Florida, an event Mr. Trump attended during his criminal trial in Manhattan.

A week before that, Barron was chosen as a Florida delegate to the convention. For a moment, it seemed Barron might wade into politics — but just two days later, his mother “regretfully” declined on his behalf, citing other commitments.

On July 9, he showed up in the crowd at a rally in Doral, Fla., where Mr. Trump called to him from the stage .

Though Barron did not appear in the audience Thursday, Mr. Trump gave him a shout-out anyway, as he heaped praise on his family. In a baritone growl, he said: “Everybody loves Barron!” The other Trump children, and the audience, laughed.

The former president’s other relatives were fixtures of the convention. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump each spoke in prime time, as did Lara Trump, Eric’s wife, who is the co-chair of the Republican Party. Donald Jr.’s teenage daughter, Kai, spoke Wednesday night , after her father’s longtime fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle. And Tiffany Trump, Mr. Trump’s youngest daughter, was in the audience on Monday.

Mr. Trump’s wife and his eldest daughter did not appear until Thursday night.

Ivanka Trump, 42, introduced Mr. Trump at the Republican conventions in 2016 and 2020. She was a senior adviser to her father in the White House. But she said at the outset of his current campaign that she would not be involved.

Ms. Trump, a mother of three, has focused on family life and has not appeared on the campaign trail. She sat and held hands with Mr. Kushner, who was also an adviser in the Trump White House. But their children were not among the youngest generation of Trumps who had cameos throughout the week.

Melania Trump, whose politics and relationship with her husband have long drawn considerable interest, has largely opted out of this campaign. Her last known political appearance with him was when they went together to cast their primary ballots on Super Tuesday in March. The next week, he clinched the nomination.

Rebecca Davis O’Brien covers campaign finance and money in U.S. elections. She previously covered federal law enforcement, courts and criminal justice. More about Rebecca Davis O’Brien

Michael Gold is a political correspondent for The Times covering the campaigns of Donald J. Trump and other candidates in the 2024 presidential elections. More about Michael Gold

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Kai Trump delivered a short but personal testament to her grandfather at the RNC

Elena Moore

Joe Hernandez

Kai Trump, 17, stands with her dad Donald Trump Jr., son of former U.S. President Donald Trump on stage on the third day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 17, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Joe Raedle/Getty Images hide caption

For more updates from the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, head to the  NPR Network's live updates page .

Former President Trump’s oldest granddaughter, Kai Trump, delivered a short but personal testament to her grandfather on the RNC stage Wednesday night.

"I'm speaking today to share the side of my grandpa that people don't often see," she said. "To me, he's just a normal grandpa. He gives us candy and soda when our parents aren't looking. He always wants to know how we're doing in school."

Trump beamed throughout his granddaughter's speech. The appearance adds to a growing list of individuals, mostly women, who have shown viewers a more personal side of the former president.

"Even when he's going through all these court cases, he always asks me how I'm doing. He always encourages me to push myself to be the most successful person I can be," she said. "Obviously, he sets the bar pretty high, but who knows, maybe one day I'll catch him."

It was a notable first moment for the next generation of Trumps.

In an introduction by her father, Donald Trump Jr., the oldest son of the former president, he said it was her "first time ever on a stage" and "first time ever giving a speech."

Who is Kai Trump?

Kai is the eldest daughter of Donald Trump Jr. and his ex-wife, Vanessa Trump. She just turned 17 and will not be old enough to vote this year.

An avid golfer, she recently posted a photo on Instagram of her standing beside her grandfather after winning a tournament at the Trump International Palm Beach golf course.

She offered words of support for Trump in a post after the assassination attempt against him on Saturday. Alongside a photo of a bloodied Trump raising his fist in the air moments after the shooting, she wrote: “We love you Grandpa. Never stop fighting!”

Trump family members at the RNC this year

U.S. former President and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump Monday night. Behind him (L-R) Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Lara Trump. ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

So far, three of Trump's five children — Donald Jr., Tiffany and Eric — have been seen at the 2024 Republican National Convention. And Eric’s wife, Lara (who is also the co-chair of the RNC this year,) gave the keynote speech Tuesday night . Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr.'s fiancée, is expected to speak tonight and Kai's mom Vanessa Trump has been seen in at the RNC Wednesday supporting her daughter.

Ivanka and Jared Kushner

Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner have yet to make an appearance at the RNC this year, despite them both serving as senior advisers during Trump’s presidency.

Ivanka released a statement on social media in 2022 explaining her departure from politics.

“I do not plan to be involved in politics,” she said on Instagram Stories. “While I will always love and support my father, going forward I will do so outside the political arena.”

Melania and Barron

Trump has been married to his wife Melania since 2005. She has also been absent from her husband’s current presidential campaign. Her office did release a statement in May, a day after her son Barron's name appeared on a list of Florida delegates, that he would not be a delegate after all due to “prior commitments.” Barron was seen in Miami last week at a campaign rally for his father.

When asked about Ivanka and Melania in an interview with CBS earlier today, Eric said they "will be coming in." One possibility is for when Trump formally accepts the GOP nomination on Thursday night.

This reporting originally appeared as part of the NPR Network's  live coverage of the RNC .

With reporting from NPR's Bria Suggs.