The Voice in His Ear

Kushner’s been called Trump’s “secret weapon,” his “secretary of everything,” the “super secretary of state,” and, during the campaign, the “de facto campaign manager.” To Forbes writer Steven Bertoni, Kushner was the Trump campaign’s “savior.” To Trump’s chief strategist and alt-right operator Steve Bannon, Kushner is a “globalist” and a “cuck.” To Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counselor and former campaign manager, Kushner is an essential part of the team. “Without Jared, Donald Trump would not be president,” she tells me. “And with Jared, Donald Trump will be a more successful and transformative president.”

To elites repelled by the president, Kushner is either a reasonable figure doing his best to moderate Trump’s most odious characteristics or a conspirator (who should know better) complicit in the neo-fascist Trumpian project. To certain elements of Trump’s base, Kushner is a suspect operator who has installed a gang of like-minded Goldman Sachs Democrats in the administration. And if the swamp isn’t drained, it will be their fault.

He may be all or none of those things, but what nobody in the White House or in the president’s orbit would deny is that Trump trusts Jared Kushner above all. He is Trump’s well-heeled, respectable avatar, the better angel of the president’s nature. As the husband of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, Kushner is practically unfireable. But his role isn’t a case of reflexive nepotism—from Trump’s perspective, Kushner’s advice is valuable precisely because he’s not going anywhere. Even the most steadfast of aides have their personal biases and agendas, but to Trump, Kushner has just one loyalty: to his father-in-law’s and his family’s legacy. More cynically, Kushner and his wife have more at stake—professionally, financially, socially, and perhaps even politically—in the success or failure of the Donald Trump administration than just about anyone besides the president himself.

So far, the White House has Kushner’s fingerprints all over it. He introduced Trump to Gary Cohn, the COO of Goldman Sachs, and encouraged the incoming president to tap Cohn as the director of the National Economic Council—which Trump did. He cultivated speechwriter and nationalist ideologue Stephen Miller, working closely with Miller throughout the campaign and now in the White House to find Trump’s voice. He elevated veteran White House aide Dina Powell, a friend of his and Ivanka’s, to a high-ranking position on the National Security Council staff.

Perhaps most consequentially, Kushner was instrumental in sidelining the strongest rival to his own influence, the economic nationalist Steve Bannon. Both Bannon and Kushner think of themselves as the true representative of Trump’s vision for the country—and of the other as the prime threat to the Trump presidency’s chances of success. For Bannon, Kushner and his crowd of Democrats are the sort of cosmopolitan establishmentarians that Trump the populist decried in his winning campaign. Bannon talks about the “deconstruction” of the administrative state, while Kushner’s view, according to White House officials, is that his office’s goal is to transform government to work more efficiently. Bannon did not respond to multiple interview requests.

Their disagreements split the two men on everything from health care to foreign policy. There were both open and private clashes between Bannon and Kushner reported in the press anonymously throughout the spring, including the aforementioned name-calling from Bannon, until Trump himself ordered his two top advisers to cut it out. But the president signaled his preference clearly enough when he downplayed the significance of Bannon’s role in winning the election to the New York Post in April. “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” said Trump. The message? Don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family—and that means Jared Kushner.

At first glance, Kushner seems to be everything his father-in-law isn’t. He’s thin and spindly, but with good posture and practiced poise. His dimpled cheeks and soft facial features give him a boyish look. He looks as if he were born in a blazer, though he prefers narrow tailoring that lends a degree of Manhattan style to his wardrobe. Kushner’s voice is quiet and even, sometimes trailing off into a masculine vocal fry. He speaks carefully and deliberately, which makes him come across as thoughtful and engaged.

He’s tactful, too, with a rather un-Trumpian sense for putting others around him at ease. In March, a member of the Saudi royal family and his entourage visited the White House, holding a meeting with administration officials in the Roosevelt Room. Several water bottles had been placed on a small table in the corner of the room, out of the way and forgotten. As the Americans and Saudis talked, Kushner silently stood up, walked over to the table, and gave each of the Saudis a bottle of water. According to someone in the room, the Saudis noticed the small gesture as a symbol of respect and hospitality.

Unlike the president, Kushner does not seek to be the center of attention—he’s often seen out of focus in photos of Oval Office meetings, hanging back against the wall. Perhaps it’s convenient that he seems uncomfortable under the spotlight; between his larger-than-life father-in-law and his glamorous wife, there’s not much space left. Unaccustomed to press attention during his career in the family real-estate business, Kushner has granted fewer interviews than most high-level aides in Trump’s orbit, both before and after the election. He declined to speak on the record for this article.

But despite those differences, Kushner shares a lot with Trump. They are both sons of suburban New York real-estate barons—Trump from Queens, Kushner from New Jersey. They both spent most of their adult lives before the 2016 election as casual Democrats with little interest in politics (Kushner is currently not registered with any party). While Trump’s public image is that of an agitator, in private he’s more inclined to seek reconciliation and agreement, a trait Kushner helps elicit from the president. Rather than getting in fights, Kushner prefers to “make a difference,” as one White House official puts it. That’s the angel on Trump’s shoulder talking.

Jared Corey Kushner was born on January 10, 1981, to wealthy, Jewish parents in wealthy, Jewish Livingston, New Jersey. His father, Charles Kushner, is a real-estate developer, as is Charles’s brother Murray. Much like Donald Trump, the Kushner brothers inherited their line of work from their father Joseph, an immigrant to the United States after World War II who began buying apartments in New Jersey in the early 1950s. A Polish Jew, Joseph and his wife Rae were both Holocaust survivors. Jared keeps a black-and-white photograph of his grandparents on his desk, the only decoration in his sparse West Wing office.

Charles did very well expanding the Kushner property business—well enough for Charles to provide his children with an elite education. Jared attended the Frisch School, a yeshiva high school in New Jersey, and then went on to Harvard. According to the New Yorker, the young Kushner began buying and selling real estate in the Boston area during his undergraduate years. He graduated in 2003 with a degree in government, even as a future in the family business looked likely. Four years later, he earned law and business degrees at New York University.

But in between, the Kushner family faced a great disruption. Charles was convicted in 2005 on several federal charges, including illegal campaign contributions and tax evasion. He served more than a year in the federal prison system, while Jared took the helm at the company. By the time he became CEO of Kushner Companies in 2008, the younger Kushner had already purchased the New York Observer and had begun to make a name for himself in the real-estate world. In 2009, he married Ivanka Trump, who converted to Judaism. Their devout family of five—one girl and two boys—observes the Sabbath and keeps kosher.

Politics for the Kushners was a part of doing business, not a way of life. Before his conviction, Charles Kushner had been a significant Democratic donor, giving millions of dollars to congressional candidates and campaign committees. He donated several thousand dollars to Hillary Clinton between 2000 and 2003, and in 2002 he gave the Democratic party $1 million. He also gave to a handful of Republicans, including New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Jared’s political spending mirrored that of his father—almost entirely to Democrats but to Giuliani as well, and in smaller amounts. He even gave money to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaigns, more than a decade before he would help his future father-in-law defeat her in the presidential election.

As late as the 2014 campaign cycle, Jared was writing checks to Democratic candidates Cory Booker and Sean Eldridge, as well as giving $10,000 each to the state Democratic parties in New Jersey and New York. It’s no wonder some in the Trump campaign and administration have their doubts about Kushner’s commitment to the Republican party. But Newt Gingrich, the former GOP House speaker and a frequent outside adviser to Trump, tells me Kushner was an integral part of the Trump campaign for his organizational skills, not his politics.

“I worked with Jared through the campaign, and then through the transition,” Gingrich says. “And my experience is that he’s very focused, he’s a very good manager, he is very cautious about tackling projects that he thinks won’t work, and that Trump relies on him in large part because he gets things done.”

Ken Kurson, the editor of the Observer, says his former boss (Kushner stepped down as publisher in December) “gets things done,” in part by expecting a lot from his employees. “He’s constantly described as soft-spoken, well-liked,” Kurson says. “And he is those things. But he’s tough as hell, too. And if you’ve worked for him, as I have, you know that he’s a very demanding boss.”

Other Observer employees are less fond of Kushner. Former editor in chief Elizabeth Spiers has described his ownership of the paper as driven by indiscriminate cost-cutting and unrealistic expectations. Spiers wrote in a recent op-ed for the Washington Post that Kushner was unwilling to “recapitalize” the paper after she claims she had met growth and budget goals. She left the paper in 2012, after a year and a half as its editor.

Kurson, whom Kushner hired a few months later to replace Spiers, dismissed her characterization and said the young businessman thinks big and wants his employees to do the same. “He’s one of those guys when you do manage to knock it out of the park, you feel like you’ve really earned something when you’ve earned his affirmation,” Kurson says.

Kushner took his experience with shaking up organizations to the Trump campaign. Before the election, he advised Trump to replace members of his top-level staff when the campaign hit roadblocks. It was Kushner, says Gingrich, who saw the potential for the campaign to replace a traditional media strategy with one that focused on social media—both in grabbing attention and in raising money—even though he does not use Facebook and is not active on Twitter. Kushner also wrote Trump’s first significant speech delivered from prepared remarks via a teleprompter—at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual policy conference in March 2016. Gingrich calls that speech a “turning point” in the campaign for making the Republican candidate look relatively normal.

“I think, first of all, he really strives to understand Trump,” Gingrich says. “He thinks his job is to be an implementer of what his father-in-law wants. Second, I think it’s fair to say he is very good at the big picture and rigorously avoids getting sucked into minutiae, because he knows he doesn’t have the energy to do both.”

That’s not to say Kushner is, to coin a phrase, low energy. He’s typically at the White House for 16 hours a day, with frequent working dinners and late nights. Among Kushner’s numerous duties are heading the newly created White House Office of American Innovation, which is charged with recommending to the president new efficiencies in government operations and services. He maintains relationships on behalf of the White House with several cabinet officers, too.

He’s also played a key role in shaping Trump’s foreign policy, starting during the campaign when he began making connections with figures in other countries to lay the groundwork for a potential presidency. Kushner became an important point of contact for foreign governments during the transition, including China. When Trump, as president-elect, took a phone call in December from the president of Taiwan—suggesting the incoming commander in chief might abandon the longstanding, Beijing-preferred “One China” policy—Kushner successfully pushed for Trump to reaffirm the policy in a phone call with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Many in the administration give Kushner credit for orchestrating Xi’s April visit with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

Kushner has shown interest in other elements of foreign and national security policy. In April, he traveled to Iraq after General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, invited him over a working dinner at the White House. Kushner had made an impression on Dunford at an earlier meeting of the National Security Council’s principals committee in the White House Situation Room, when he offered the general his seat at the table. “I’m here to listen,” Kushner told Dunford as he sat back along the wall.

The president’s national security adviser, General H. R. McMaster, has nothing but positive things to say about Kushner. “He challenges conventional wisdoms, and he tends to see opportunities where others only see difficulties,” McMaster tells me.

Kushner has had a more mixed record in directing domestic policy. He was opposed to prioritizing the repeal and replacement of Obamacare—but the president decided to back the American Health Care Act anyway. (Kushner and his family just happened to be on vacation, away from Washington, during the week in March leading up to the failed first attempt to pass the AHCA in the House.)

And while the socially liberal Kushner had earlier put the brakes on a draft executive order providing for religious exemptions to federal laws and regulations, Trump signed a modified version of the order last week. Notable, however, was that the actual order, unlike the draft, was limited to making it easier for tax-exempt religious organizations to engage in political activity. The expected protections for faith-based objections to Obama-era LGBT anti-discrimination regulations, however, were absent from the order Trump signed.

More consequential than these policy effects, however, is that of Kushner’s general presence in the West Wing. He’s reassuring company for the president, whose lonely job is made all the lonelier without his wife Melania living at the White House. He tempers Trump’s worst impulses and encourages him on his better ones. But it’s a mistake to believe Kushner controls Trump, like a globalist Svengali.

“I think you don’t get Kushner trying to influence Trump, you get Trump directing Kushner,” says Gingrich. “I don’t think anybody drives the Trump system except Trump.” As one senior White House official put it, “Trump is the face of Trumpism.” That’s true. But when Trump turns to the side, more often than not it’s Jared’s face he sees.

Michael Warren is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.