While reading the New York Times long interview with Jared Kushner this week, I felt something unfamiliar: defeat.
I don’t know how else to say this but it’s time to face the reality: Jared Kushner has won.
It seems clear to me that he’s the single biggest winner from the Trump White House, not just financially but, staggeringly, reputationally.
In the last three or more years he’s swung from being a social pariah — unwelcome in New York and in many blue-chip business circles, as well as being investigated by various committees in Congress for the appearance of conflicts of interests — to a figure of both media fascination and global influence. He’s even become someone the elites in politics and in “mainstream media” need to suck up to.
That’s because in addition to raising $3 billion-worth of foreign investments – many from foreign governments’ funds – at a scale and speed that, according to the Times, is unprecedented for a former White House Advisor, this last year has seen Kushner become an international Svengali at lightning pace.
He brokered a meeting in New York between the Prime Minister of Qatar and some of New York’s most important businessmen; he advises the Trump think tank, America First, on policies for a potential second Trump administration; he was in Israel with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and visited the site of the October 7 attacks; he sounded off on Fox News about the problems with the First Amendment on college campuses; he appeared for a three hour interview on the Lex Fridman Podcast – a calculated PR strategy, which worked, or so he told the Times, because it attracted new potential investors to his fund from the Silicon Valley crowd who listen to Fridman. He’s spoken at numerous business conferences and he makes sure to keep up regularly with his buddy, the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman.
Socially, he and his wife, Ivanka Trump, go to so many grand parties they are like Waldo in that world. They’ve popped up almost weekly at the world’s most lavish celebrations in India, California, and the Middle East, where they hobnobbed with the Prince and Princess of Wales. (Ivanka also showed up for Kim Kardashian’s birthday party. Whether that puts her up or down on the snakes and ladders board is, I guess, subjective.)
But what struck me about this latest New York Times profile of Kushner is how he’s even got the Times so obviously under his thumb.
Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates