Wendi was one of the few members of their New York social circuit who publicly stood by them during the campaign, and an even smaller circle after they started working in the White House. As Ivanka’s father’s campaign fell apart at the seams in August 2016, she invited Jared and Ivanka to take a break with her in Croatia on billionaire business magnate David Geffen’s yacht. Before they moved to DC, she hosted a dinner for them in her penthouse, and sat beside Ivanka on the eve of her dad’s inauguration, at a ball for Republican bigwigs held in Union Station. She continued to make trips down to Washington, while the rest of their social friends wagged their tongues about how she could continue to so openly support them. In January 2108, it was reported that US counterintelligence officials had warned Kushner in early 2017 that Wendi might use her friendship with them to advance the interests of the Chinese government. The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, Rupert’s crown jewel. By this point, Rupert had been telling people for years that his ex-wife was a Chinese spy.
The relationship between Jared and Rupert was far more straightforward. They were friendly, sure, in a mentor-mentee way, with no sense that the undercurrent running between them was anything other than professional. There was never any question that it would be Jared who would soothe tensions between his father-in-law and his media godfather during the campaign. Donald and Rupert had stewed in something of a feud for years, the way two multidivorced, scandal-prone moguls do. Rupert, who actually had money, told friends that Donald was a “phony,” a bloviator who greatly exaggerated his fortune. Donald once sued Murdoch, who owns Donald’s beloved New York Post, for libel after the paper printed a story that the Trumps had been rejected from the tony Maidstone Club—a 126-year-old private golf club on the dunes of East Hampton that overlooks a twenty-seven-hole course on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other.
The campaign kicked up the heat. “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” Rupert tweeted after Donald said he didn’t like Senator John McCain because he only liked service members who hadn’t gotten captured (McCain, a decorated prisoner of war during the Vietnam War and a long-serving senator, had been a critic of the Trump bid. Donald, for his part, was repeatedly granted draft deferments because of bone spurs). The Post ran with front pages scrawled with “Don Voyage” and “Trump Is Toast,” while Rupert’s other paper, the Wall Street Journal, printed an editorial calling the candidate “a catastrophe.”
“Murdoch’s been very bad to me,” Donald told New York Magazine. On the Murdoch-owned Fox News, he was mostly spared. There were a baker’s dozen other more serious, likelier Republican candidates in the primary, but no one quite rated like the Donald. At that point, Roger Ailes was still in place atop the network, before he was ousted over sexual harassment allegations, and he advised the Trump campaign behind the scenes.
It wasn’t until Donald was pressed by Megyn Kelly in a primary debate that Jared was dispatched to do what he does so well—lick the wounds of aging titans and their outsize egos and work them in his favor. He cajoled Rupert into speaking with his father-in-law. By June 2016, when Donald was a shoo-in for the Republican nomination, Donald had Rupert’s fourth wife, supermodel Jerry Hall, beside him in a golf cart at the Trump International Golf Links in Scotland. Murdoch was behind them in the back seat.
The Megyn Kelly incident was one of two moments during the campaign that Ivanka thought the media got downright wrong. The way she saw it, had reporters known the intricacies of her father’s personality and tics the way she did, the stories wouldn’t have been stories at all.
The first was in the first Republican primary debate in August 2015, which aired on Fox News at 9:00 p.m. eastern standard time on that Thursday evening. According to Nielsen data, 24 million people tuned in to the debate, making it not only the highest-rated primary debate in television history but also the highest-rated telecast in Fox News’s twenty-year history. To put those numbers in context, the first Republican primary debate in the 2012 election on the same network drew in 3.2 million viewers.
The moderators—Chris Wallace, Megyn Kelly, and Bret Baier—methodically addressed each candidate, asking them about various policy positions and prompting them to dress their opponents down. Eventually Kelly was up, and it was her turn to put a question to Donald. She buttered him up at first, telling him that one of his most appealing aspects as a candidate was his candor, before it turned. “You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,” she said.
Donald corrected her: “Only Rosie O’Donnell.” She, in turn, corrected him, reminding him that it has not just been O’Donnell. He sniggered. “Yes, I’m sure.”
She continued: “Your Twitter account has several disparaging remarks about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who is likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?”
“I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness,” he responded, in an answer that spoke directly to his supporters. “And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either. This country is in big trouble. We don’t win anymore. We lose to China. We lose to Mexico both in trade and at the border. We lose to everybody.
“And frankly,” he continued, “what I say, and oftentimes it’s fun, it’s kidding. We have a good time. What I say is what I say. And honestly Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that.”
He did do that, of course. The next night, he called in live to Don Lemon on CNN Tonight, which aired directly opposite Kelly’s program on Fox News. Lemon mentioned that Kelly had pushed Donald, like she had pushed a lot of people onstage with him the night before. As he does, Donald took that chance to push her harder. “She gets out and starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions. She was, in my opinion, totally off base. In, by the way, not in my opinion—in the opinion of hundreds of thousands of people on Twitter. She’s been very badly criticized.”
He went on to very badly criticize her himself. “I just don’t respect her as a journalist. I have no respect for her. I don’t think she’s very good. I think she’s highly overrated. . . . She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions. You know, you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” Before the producers could even catch on to what had happened, the moment was picked up and clipped and tweeted and GIFed and aggregated thousands upon thousands of times over. The majority opinion was that Donald had insinuated that Megyn Kelly, who had asked him a question about how he speaks to and about women, had to have been menstruating. Donald denied this the next morning, tweeting that by “wherever,” he meant her nose. The campaign followed up with a statement, claiming that he had said “whatever,” not “wherever,” but even so, it really was in reference to her nose.
This moment got to Ivanka. Not for the reasons it vexed everyone else, but because she knew her father well enough to know that he would never, not in a million years, talk about a woman’s period. He was a germophobe who had never in her life made a scatological joke. She and her brothers didn’t mind that kind of talk. She said they would watch Tommy Boy over and over again, laughing their heads off, but their father found nothing funny about those jokes. It was preposterous, then, to think that he could be referring, so publicly, to a woman menstruating. It wasn’t that it was blatantly wrong. He finds that stuff icky.
The other moment that irked her was after a rally in South Carolina a few months later, in November 2015. At the time Donald faced backlash over his support for creating a database of Muslims in the United States. To defend his posit
ion, he doubled down on an assertion that he had watched “thousands and thousands of people” cheering in Jersey City as they watched the Twin Towers topple on September 11, 2001.
The fact checkers who furiously checked what candidates said on the trail throughout the campaign could find no evidence supporting Donald’s recollection. So the candidate propped up a Washington Post article written on September 18 of that year by Serge Kovaleski as proof. The article, though, did not back up his claim. Kovaleski had reported that “within hours of two jetliners’ plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.” In a statement, Kovaleski said that his reporting didn’t even show there were “hundreds” of people there, let alone thousands. And the Washington Post said that an extensive examination of news clips from that period turned up nothing backing up Kovaleski’s claim.
A day before the South Carolina rally, Kovaleski had said as much in an interview on MSNBC, which Donald must have watched. Onstage at the rally, he mocked the reporter. “Now, the poor guy—you ought to see the guy: Uh, I don’t know what I said. I don’t remember,’” Trump said, contorting his arms and flailing them about in a way that many believed mirrored a physical disability that Kovaleski has.
The controversy lingered through the primaries and into the next summer. What bugged Ivanka about all of this was that the media and the outraged voters likely had it all wrong. Had they known her father as well as she did, they would have known that he wasn’t mocking the reporter’s disability with his hand gesture. That was the exact gesture he always used to imitate someone who was groveling, she’d explain to people. She’d seen him use it time and time again. And, as her father tweeted after the rally, he was simply “showing a person groveling to take back a statement made long ago!”
Rupert Murdoch was hardly the only media macher to get the Jared treatment during his father-in-law’s run. As one Trump adviser explained, “Your media relationships are an asset to Trump.” It was one of the many ways in which Jared was rich. Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski got it, too. The Morning Joe hosts had a long history with Donald, and a short-lived live-TV love affair with him in his early candidacy. He repeatedly called in to the MSNBC morning show, in exchanges that felt like breakfast-table chatter between old friends. Trump referred to them on air as “supporters,” and if they weren’t quite that, you could call them “believers.” That changed once the summer of 2016 rolled around, when the duo began questioning on air whether Donald had what it took to win the election, let alone govern.
That didn’t sit well with the candidate, an early riser who watched cable news for hours on end, propped up on pillows on his Trump Tower bed. He tweeted that Brzezinski was “off the wall, a neurotic and not very bright mess.” He threatened that “when things calmed down,” he would “tell the real story” about his friend Joe and “his very insecure long-time girlfriend, Mika. Two clowns!” Brzezinski had recently finalized her divorce, and for the sakes of both of their families they were still keeping their relationship as private as they could, though it was by that point a poorly kept secret.
The cohosts were livid. Her daughters, both in college, were bombarded with a news cycle about her mother’s love life. The swipes and the fallout further entrenched Scarborough, a protective, hot-tempered colleague who’d served in Congress and understood the magnitude of the job, in his belief that Donald wasn’t up for the job.
It wasn’t long before Jared called, as he frequently did. Typically, he would ask for advice, or pass along bits of information from the campaign, or give a status report and ask for one in return. But this go-around, he knew he had to do damage control. He pleaded with Scarborough and Brzezinski just to meet with his father-in-law to see if they could patch things up. Initially, they resisted. What was the point? For one, they thought his behavior was growing more and more erratic and inappropriate. And second, this was becoming something of a pattern. He would insult them, time would go by, and then he would once again try to cozy up and sweep the bad stuff under the rug. If they sat down and talked, Donald would walk away thinking they were going to be buddy-buddy once more, and then be shocked and stung all over again next time he heard them say something critical of him on their show. The mean tweets would follow, and the whole cycle would repeat itself, as it always did.
But Jared continued to ask, maybe four or five times, and eventually they relented. They agreed to sit down, the four of them, in Trump Tower. The meeting started off with Donald telling Scarborough that he was tough on him, but that Brzezinski “makes you look like a little baby, Joe,” with how hard she could be. “Mika, why are you so tough on me?” he asked her.
She deflected. Instead, she explained the damage the tweets had done to her and her children and the hurt they caused to her family. In a most uncharacteristic move, Donald said he was sorry.
Jared, who was behind him, looked as though he was going to fall off his chair. “He very quickly said, ‘Okay, let’s end the meeting right now, because I have never heard him say that before,’” Scarborough recalled. It was a moment of levity before it got much worse between the longtime friends.
Jared didn’t just clean up after her father’s media messes during the campaign. He got into some skirmishes of his own. Around the time when his relationship soured with the Morning Joe crew, Donald’s distaste for CNN deepened. One day in June 2016, Donald, in a dark mood, barked for his son-in-law to call CNN president Jeff Zucker and complain about what he thought was a barrage of biased and unfair coverage. Zucker was in the South of France, at the annual Cannes Lions festival with dozens of other network and studio heads and entertainment bigwigs, when he got Kushner’s call delivering Donald’s message. Zucker had put The Apprentice on the air when he ran NBC. But, as many of Donald’s relationships do, theirs had since soured, as CNN remained critical of his campaign and Donald took credit for landing Zucker his job at CNN.
“You have to be kidding me,” Zucker told Jared. “Go fuck yourself.” He hung up on Donald’s son-in-law.
The hard feelings brewed through the early days of summer, but lessened as the weeks went on. No one thought Donald was going to win, and Jared started talking about using the wide swaths of data collected during the campaign to start some sort of media venture targeted at the throngs of people clearly enraptured by the Trump message. The campaign was still somewhat boycotting the network, so Zucker had some incentive to smooth things over as best he could.
Plus, Jared doesn’t like being in fights. He reached out to say, Let’s clear the air. On the day before Donald officially nominated Mike Pence as his running mate, in mid-July, Jared crossed Central Park to CNN’s offices at the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle. Behind closed doors, in an executive office, Zucker and Jared both apologized for their tough language. They recognized that CNN needed the Trump campaign, and the Trump campaign needed CNN. Neither CNN’s coverage nor the Trump campaign’s opinion of it softened as a result. They would never really like each other. But Jared knew how to kiss the ring, and executives knew that Jared was willing to play reasonable—if not good—cop, when need be.
The relationship between Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump began as a business arrangement. Moshe Lax, whose family diamond business had partnered with Ivanka to start her fine jewelry collection, was also putting together a real estate deal in the mid-2000s. He invited them both to lunch at Prime Grill, a high-end kosher steakhouse on Madison Avenue in the fifties with sushi on the menu and Andy Warhol–style prints of rabbis against primary colors on its walls. “I wasn’t playing shadchan [Hebrew for matchmaker],” Lax said in an interview. “It was a business opportunity.” For Jared and Ivanka, as most things are, perhaps it was a bit of both. Ivanka emailed one of her closest friends after the lunch saying that she knew it was a work thing, but that she really
kind of liked him. The friend, who had not much cared for most of the guys Ivanka had dated before, immediately bought in.
Jared had been dating Laura Englander, the daughter of billionaire hedge fund manager Israel Englander, and Ivanka’s dating life became tabloid fodder. There was Bingo Gubelmann, Topher Grace, Lance Armstrong, and—in a rumor propagated by her father, who told reporters it was true—Tom Brady. Her father, she told reporters, would be happy if she dated an athlete “because he’s always wanted to be an athlete.” She contended she wanted someone more intellectual, smart, hardworking. “My friends always joke that I’m going to marry a 90-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner,” she told an interviewer before she started dating Jared.
Jared was not exactly an intellectual. He attended Harvard as an undergraduate and New York University to get a dual law and business degree. His admission to both schools, documented by Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Daniel Golden in The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, drew some attention. The Kushners pledged $2.5 million to the university in 1998, a year before Jared started school in Cambridge. According to the book, Charlie Kushner asked Frank Lautenberg to lean on his Senate colleague Ted Kennedy to put in a good word with the school’s dean of admissions. In 2001 Charlie pledged $3 million to NYU, and later he took a seat on its the board of trustees. The year Jared graduated from Harvard and looked toward graduate school, Charlie leased the university a few floors of the Puck Building, a building he’d bought four years earlier, at below-market rates.
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