Jared Kushner, the husband of Ivanka Trump, defended his father-in-law from charges of anti-Semitism Wednesday, stemming mostly from this weekend’s “Star of David” tweet from the official Donald Trump account.
In an op-ed for The Observer, which Kushner publishes, he argues terms like anti-Semite and racist “are being thrown around with a carelessness that risks rendering these words meaningless.”
“It’s that simple, really. Donald Trump is not anti-Semitic and he’s not a racist,” Kushner wrote. “Despite the best efforts of his political opponents and a large swath of the media to hold Donald Trump accountable for the utterances of even the most fringe of his supporters — a standard to which no other candidate is ever held — the worst that his detractors can fairly say about him is that he has been careless in retweeting imagery that can be interpreted as offensive.”
Throughout the piece Kushner speaks glowingly of Trump, bashing his detractors and those who have attacked him for the tweet. Trump’s campaign initially pushed back against the critics of the tweet, referring to the image as a “sheriff’s star” despite deleting it.
Kushner ultimately blamed the campaign itself for the image even though he admitted that Trump himself is the one communicating with his followers directly.
“If my father in law’s fast-moving team was careless in choosing an image to retweet, well part of the reason it’s so shocking is that it’s the actual candidate communicating with the American public rather than the armies of handlers who poll-test ordinary candidates’ every move,” Kushner wrote.
“Government is built with many layers to avoid making mistakes,” he continued. “The problem with this is that it costs a lot and little gets done. In business, we empower smart people to get jobs done and give them latitude on how to get there. I prefer to move forward and endure some small mistakes to preserving a stale status quo whose sole virtue is that it offends no one.”
