In the previous installments of this multipart review of Kushner, Inc. by Vicky Ward, we looked at the history of the Kushner Crime Family. We are now caught up to 2015, when Donald Trump announced he was running for president.
Initially, the Kushners didn’t believe there was any chance Trump was going to win, and were simply using the spotlight he was achieving as a candidate to promote themselves. Jared Kushner looked at it as an incredible “networking opportunity.”
During the early days of the campaign, the Kushners attempted to secure funding for 666 Fifth Avenue from a Qatari billionaire friend of Trump based on the premise that Trump would not win (the Qatari rightly understood that it would be bad optics to be involved with Kushner if Trump did win).
Furthermore, Charlie Kushner continually told people he didn’t have a chance to win, even while he was donating money to the campaign.
Ward gives the impression that Charlie genuinely did not think there was any chance Trump would win. This was of course the general thinking of everyone at the time.
From the beginning of the Trump campaign, Charlie brushed aside the possibility of a Trump victory with a standard joke. “I’ve already told Donald I will not be running as his VP,” was his line at meetings. But he and Seryl donated one hundred thousand dollars to a super PAC supporting Trump. In the summer of 2015, he and Seryl hosted an event for Trump at their house on the Jersey Shore, which was viewed by Kushner friends as mere lip service. Said one family friend, “What’s a hundred thousand dollars? What’s whatever he paid for the party?… Nothing. What’s the benefit of Donald owing him a favor? It’s like Avi Lebor once said: ‘Never miss a shiva call, because that’s when you get the most business done.’” Charlie’s true political loyalty, a former colleague felt, was to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Charlie would say, wistfully, “Hillary used to call me.” He would note fondly that, unlike Senator Chuck Schumer, Clinton had not returned or given away his donations when he was indicted.
However, as Trump’s chances seemed to increase as the campaign marched on, Jared took much more interest, and was always all up close with him going forward
Just so, as things began to become more serious, Jared and Ivanka’s New York City social circle began to become more judgmental of the couple for supporting this racist, sexist, homophobe who was seen likely to start marching the Jews off to death camps as soon as he achieved power.
As Trump’s rhetoric grew more and more divisive, and he kept pushing the notion that a wall should be built at the U.S.-Mexico border to keep Americans safe, the New York real estate community, which is largely Jewish, was aghast. One guest at Kushner’s thirty-fifth-birthday party told me, “We’re Jews.… It’s just as easy to say the Muslims can’t come to the United States because they’re gonna blow you up and the Mexicans are gonna rape you [as it is to say] the Jews are gonna steal all your money. And so, we’re not on the side of this sort of craziness, because we’re always the one being blamed for everything.” Trump, who has called a former female colleague “a fat elephant” and has allegedly used the N-word, has also been accused of condoning anti-Semitism. Multiple members of Trump’s social circle noted his reluctant acceptance of Ivanka’s conversion.
No one thought Kushner or Ivanka believed in Trump’s populist platform. “The two of them see this as a networking opportunity,” said a close associate.
The couple did not fully get on board with the campaign until Trump was the presumptive nominee of the GOP, at which point they went full in.
Ivanka successfully nagged her father into making Jared head of the campaign’s finances, which would serve as Jared’s first major role in what would become the Trump presidency.
Tom Barrack, a Middle Eastern money man who was involved with Jared Kushner, is the one who proposed the appointment of Paul Manafort to the campaign. Jared wanted someone to replace Corey Lewandowski, who he hated for constantly sidelining him (and probably also because he was a masculine white Polack and Jared has racial memories of being Holocausted by such individuals).
After Manafort took Corey’s position as head of the campaign, Corey stayed around for a while before Ivanka discovered he was leaking negative information on Jared to the press. Ward suggests that Ivanka took this information to Trump, and used it to ultimately force Corey off of the campaign.
In hindsight, the removal of Lewandowski may be the point at which everything went wrong. If he had stayed on and become Trump’s White House chief of staff, it is hard to imagine we’d be where we are now.
Kushner and the three eldest Trump children went to Trump and delivered an ultimatum. “It’s Corey or us.” According to Lewandowski, Trump phoned him three times on Father’s Day, June 19, 2016. He told Lewandowski: “Corey, [Kushner and the children] hate me because they hate you.” Lewandowski replied: “No, sir. They hate you all on your own, and I am just part of it.” The next morning, Lewandowski took the 5 A.M. shuttle from Boston to New York and prepared as usual for the Monday “family” meeting at 9:30 A.M. But a few minutes before it started, he was asked to come into a conference room, where he was confronted by Trump Organization attorney Michael Cohen, Trump Organization Chief Operating Officer Matthew Calamari, and Don Jr. Cohen did most of the talking, with Don Jr. chiming in. Lewandowski said he was fired without any explanation. While the meeting was happening and before Lewandowski had left the building, Manafort put out a press release announcing the news.
So, on June 20, Manafort was now nominally the campaign chief, but everyone knew Kushner was the one with budgetary power. He had asked for, and received, his own pot of money—and the candidate’s trust. Everyone knew Kushner was in charge.
There you have it.
Corey made the whole thing happen, and was run out at the behest of Kushner, who proceeded to basically destroy the campaign (it was later saved by Steve Bannon).
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