Surprising no one, President-elect Donald Trump will reportedly name his son-in-law Jared Kushner as a senior White House adviser despite little (or no) evidence of any political experience that would qualify him for such a role. According to The New York Times, Kushner, the scion of one tri-state crime family who married into another,
is expected to play the same role in the White House, with the counselors Stephen K. Bannon and Kellyanne Conway providing the president-elect with strategic, messaging and communications advice, and Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee and the incoming chief of staff, running day-to-day operations in the West Wing.
Kushner will reportedly step down as CEO of Kushner Cos. In the run-up to the election, Tablet ran two features about Kushner, the owner of The New York Observer and the grandson of Holocaust survivors. The first, written by Jamie Kirchick, handles Kushner’s defense of his father-in-law, whom he dubbed “not an anti-Semite” in a July op-ed, which he wrote after one of his employees called out Trump for posting an anti-Semitic, anti-Hillary Clinton tweet. “Distinguishing Jared Kushner’s submission to the genre of Trump defenses from those of other Trumpkins,” wrote Kirchick, “was its exploitation of the Holocaust.” Kushner, he wrote, “shamelessly tout[ed] his status as the descendant of Holocaust survivors to vouch for the honor of someone so undeserving of it as Donald Trump.”
To understand how Jared Kushner could reach such depths, one must first understand that not only is he the son-in-law of an abusive sociopath, but the son of one as well. Charles Kushner, a child of Holocaust survivors, inherited a family real-estate development business and grew it into a billion-dollar empire with properties across six states. If one wants to rise from mere landlord to true real-estate mogul, it is necessary—given the role that the legislative and judicial systems play in determining who may use property to what end, i.e., the value of property—to become a political power broker. And so Charles took a lesson from his future in-law Donald Trump: He invested heavily in politics, becoming one of the biggest Democratic donors in the country. His greatest investment was a young New Jersey politico named Jim McGreevy, who as governor, appointed Kushner to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
This baton—about the in-depth story of Jared Kushner’s pedigree and rise as a real estate and media mogul—was passed to Chris Pomorski, who pondered what will become of Kushner, “the Trump campaign’s smooth-faced consigliere” who is his billionaire father’s eldest son and real estate protégé; who bought The New York Observer for $10 million when he was just 25-years-old while his father, Charles, was ending a prison sentence after he pleaded guilty to 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering, and illegal campaign donations; who grew up Orthodox, attending the Frisch School in New Jersey; who paid $1.8 billion for a 41-story commercial tower at 666 Fifth Avenue, the highest price ever paid for a Manhattan building at the time; who was once not comfortable in the spotlight.
Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.
