Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, America's Most Powerful Couple
Ambitious, stubborn, greedy and manipulative. A new book puts the magnifying glass on the lives of the Kushners, who have become quite powerful during the Donald Trump administration. This is his story.
Donald Trump was never convinced to bring his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner to the White House.
He weighed the decision for several weeks, doubted until the last moment and even wondered, in meetings with several of his advisers, why she would have to give up the great life she led in glamorous New York to move to Washington: a city much more gray, boring and full of people obsessed with politics.
Most of his advisers were against the decision, but Steve Bannon supported it. Trump's closest adviser, and the man in the populist narrative on which he based his campaign, believed that husbands were some kind of ground pole; the only ones who could control the president in times of crisis and high tension.
His opinion was final: Jared was hired as a senior adviser to the presidency and Ivanka as a counselor.
But contrary to what Bannon thought, the Kushners did not bring calm in the middle of the storm. On the contrary: they became another cause for concern in the White House, a source of tension with other officials and one of the most powerful couples in Washington, who even put their personal interests many times above those of their own. country.
Or so, at least, says Kushner Inc., the book by British journalist Vicky Ward, which came out this month in the United States. After interviewing more than 200 sources, many of them anonymous, the writer sketches a portrait that shows her struggles for power and her limitless ambition.
In the White House they refer to Ivanka as Habi for “Home of all bad ideas”, which in Spanish would be something like “The house of all bad ideas”.
According to her, the Kushners have earned so much animosity in the White House that those who work in the Presidency refer to Ivanka as Habi for “Home of all bad ideas”, which in Spanish would be something like “The house of all bad ideas ”. And they call Jared "The secretary of everything" because he tends to get into a lot of topics.
Former White House chief of staff John Kelly would even have said that they were like a couple of children "playing to govern." And Trump himself would have considered the idea of removing them, believing they were bringing him bad press. Something that, finally, he never did.
But beyond the enemies they have won with their rise to power, Ward paints them as an ambitious, hypocritical and more dangerous couple than Trump, as they are less impulsive and more calculating. Not surprisingly, several of his opponents, such as Kelly himself, have already left the Government, while they remain firm.
Ambition and love
Jared, the grandson of a couple of Holocaust survivors who fled the Soviet Union, is the heir to the Kushner Companies, a real estate company founded by her father, Charlie Kushner, in 1985.
In 2005, when Jared was 25 years old, his dad was arrested for various crimes, including illegally contributing to political campaigns, tax evasion, and witness tampering. This last case was quite serious, as she hired a prostitute to seduce her brother-in-law, recorded the encounter and intended to send it to her sister during a family party.
Trump would not have been very convinced, as he always said that he would have preferred his daughter to marry Tom Brady, a football star.
Justice sent him to spend 14 years in jail and Jared was left in charge of the business. He began buying property in Manhattan and even acquired The New York Observer, a weekly newspaper.
But in 2006 he made one of the worst investments of his life: He bought a 41-story skyscraper on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan that cost him $ 1.8 billion. When the housing bubble burst a couple of years later, it became a white elephant and the family business was left with a debt that threatened to bankrupt it. This issue would haunt him ever since.
He met Ivanka in 2007, when they were introduced to a real estate agent who believed they could do business together. They were both 26 years old and fell in love.
They married in 2009, in a wedding with 500 guests, for which she converted to Judaism. And although Trump supported them, he would not have been very convinced, as he always said, half seriously and half jokingly, that he would have preferred his daughter to marry Tom Brady, the American football star.
Still, they formed a prosperous family: Jared ran the family business and Ivanka started her own clothing company. In addition, they had three children - Arabella, Joseph and Theodore - and they became characters in the social life of New York. Until Trump became president and they made the leap to Washington, fully into politics.
There they got a lot of power. Jared, for example, was in charge of issues as diverse as peace in the Middle East, the plan to address the opioid epidemic that is hitting the United States and the renegotiation of Nafta, the free trade agreement with Mexico and Canada.
Being on so many fronts brought him tensions with other powerful members of the White House, such as Gary Cohn, Trump's economic adviser, and Rex Tillerson, then secretary of state. The fight was won by him, since both are outside the Government.
The most serious accusation, however, has to do with the way in which Jared has used his position to further his own business.
The young Kushner convinced Trump to join a proposed blockade by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates against that country. A decision that almost caused a war.
In 2017, for example, the Qatari government denied a $ 1 billion loan to his family's business to pay off old debt for the Manhattan building. Undeterred, the young Kushner convinced Trump to join a proposed blockade by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates against that country.
That decision not only stunned the media, members of the cabinet and other advisers to the president, but it almost caused a war in the Middle East. Tillerson himself would have blamed Jared, who is also a great friend of Prince Mohamed bin Salmán, heir to the Saudi throne. "Your interference put the United States in danger," he would have said, rather annoyed.
But it has not only gotten the president into that problem. Jared also met with Russian emissaries during the election, making him a target of the investigation by prosecutor Robert Mueller, who last week cleared the Trump campaign.
And last month, several congressmen accused the president of intervening to give his son-in-law access to security information without meeting the requirements.
Ivanka, for his part, has also been under suspicion. She caught up with Tillerson several times because he objected to her using Air Force planes unnecessarily for her trips.
And last year, in the midst of the trade dispute between the United States and China, Xi Jinping's government authorized him to expand his clothing brand in that country, which brought the issue of conflicts of interest to the table. The controversy grew so much that months later Ivanka announced that she was closing the brand and that she would focus on her work in the Government.
Again, many, including her father, wondered why she was leaving her successful life as a businesswoman for a government job that makes her an easy target for criticism.
Ward's book ventures an answer: she and her husband dream of following in their father's footsteps, becoming a dynasty like the Kennedys or the Bushes, and eventually reaching the presidency of the United States. But that remains to be seen.
