President Trump said that his son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner “looks like a little boy, like a child,” a new book claims.
Author Ronald Kessler interviewed Trump, members of the president’s family, and many current and former White House officials for The Trump White House: Changing the Rules of the Game, which was released Monday.
Kessler wrote that Trump made the demeaning reference to Kushner while watching him on television in the company of other aides.
“‘Look at Jared, he looks like a little boy, like a child,’ Trump remarked to aides as he watched Kushner on TV speaking to the press,” Kessler wrote.
Kessler, a former Washington Post reporter, did not respond to a request for comment on the date of the remark.
Kushner rarely makes televised remarks, with the notable exception of a July 2017 speech regarding his congressional testimony on possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia. That speech was carried live by many TV outlets.
He also spoke last year in a lower-profile address on government innovation.
Kessler wrote that Trump did not want Kushner or Ivanka Trump to join him in Washington and that “Trump even admitted to aides that Jared and Ivanka had screwed up and that he understands that they are a problem.”
White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, with whom Kushner feuded before Bannon was fired in August 2017, offered several derisive remarks about Kushner and Ivanka Trump.
“They’re nice people, but they don’t know anything,” Bannon said. “If their name wasn’t Trump, they would be midlevel marketing managers somewhere.”
Bannon said the couple is “so opposed to [Trump’s] program that they’re there to destroy him.”
The book said Kushner believed incorrectly that Democrats would welcome the firing of FBI Director James Comey, and quotes Bannon saying, “Jared represented a lethal combination of arrogance and incompetence that ends administrations.”
Ivanka Trump, Kessler wrote, urged her father to hire Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director, a job he held 10 days before being fired over an obscene interview.
She allegedly said Scaramucci should be hired because, “We need good press coverage for Jared. Nobody in the press office is supporting Jared.'”
Kessler told the Washington Examiner that he interviewed Bannon before publication of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which he called a novel.
Bannon’s remarks to Wolff about members of Trump’s family led the president to harshly denounce Bannon.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
