Trump’s “young princeling” comes unstuck
“He was supposed to be the calm one, cool and unflappable under his Ray-bans and beltless blue bespoke suits,” said David Freedlander on Politico. Jared Kushner, President Trump’s handsome son-in-law and senior advisor – a soft-spoken Manhattan liberal – was going to be the moderating influence in the White House who would temper Trump’s worst instincts. It hasn’t worked out that way. Kushner, 36, is now the focus of an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. It was Kushner who reportedly tried to set up a secret communications channel with the Kremlin while President Obama was still in office. It was he who is said to have urged Trump to fire then FBI director James Comey over the Russia probe. People who know Kushner from his real estate days say ruthless risk-taking has always been “part of the Kushner way: unfailingly polite and urbane on the surface while searching for the soft underbelly to stick the knife in”.
To understand Kushner, said Ted Sherman on Nj.com, you must look at the family drama that forged him – an epic family feud worthy of The Sopranos that brought down Kushner’s father, real estate mogul Charles Kushner. In a bid to stop his sister’s husband blabbing to federal agents probing the family’s tax affairs, Charles paid a prostitute to seduce the brother-inlaw. But the attempted blackmail backfired and Jared’s father was sent to jail after pleading guilty to 18 felony counts. His imprisonment weighed heavily on Jared, who visited him weekly in jail in Alabama. He also took over the family business, said Michael Kranish in The Washington Post. And, determined to restore the Kushner reputation, he then made an incredibly risky move that almost sank it: he paid a then-record $1.8bn for a 41-storey office building on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. Kushner has spent years searching for investors to save the over-leveraged deal – Chinese ones, and very possibly Russian ones, too. He even went out and bought a newspaper, The New York
Observer, and used its columns, so its editors have alleged, to “strike back” against business rivals. He stepped down as head of Kushner Companies when he joined the White House, but he remains a stakeholder in the firm, with trusts worth an estimated $600m.
Jared also served as a “slumlord” in another part of the Kushner empire, said Alec Macgillis in The New York Times – a subsidiary firm, JK2 Westminster, which owns some 8,000 run-down properties from Baltimore to Toledo, and which has filed hundreds of law suits against impoverished tenants for breaking leases or missing rent payments. When one former tenant was told his landlord was the president’s son-in-law, he replied, “That Jared Kushner? Oh my God. And I thought he was the good one.” As a rich kid with a glamorous wife, Kushner was bound to stir resentment, said Andrew C. Mccarthy on Nationalreview.com. But if he has erred, it is likely to be from naiveté. The “young princeling”, as West Wing rivals call him, has been given an absurdly broad policy portfolio, “the holy grail of Middle East peace” included, even though he has no experience of diplomacy or government. His worst crime is probably being completely “out of his depth”.
Even so, Kushner represents a major liability for Trump, said David Brooks in The New York Times. Our nation’s founders sought to “build a government of laws, not of hereditary blood lines”, but Kushner and Trump share a “clannish mentality” in which there is no right or wrong – just fierce loyalty to family. When your clan is under attack, you fight, and seek vengeance against the enemy. It was that clannishness which motivated Kushner to defend his father and expand his empire, and which will prompt Trump to stick by the husband of his beloved daughter Ivanka no matter what, even to the point of damaging himself. As federal and congressional investigators focus on Kushner, it could spell the Trump administration’s undoing.