The Surprisingly Insightful Jared Kushner Book.

You have to make it beyond his Bannon beef before the book is bearable.

For as much as President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner likes to talk about how magnanimous and forgiving he is, he sure seeks to settle some scores in his new book, ‘Breaking History’. You really do have to make it beyond his beef with Bannon before the book becomes bearable.

But as much as this is an onanography (this is the best Jared Kushner book that Jared Kushner could have written about Jared Kushner) it is surprisingly interesting, and I dare say an important part of an increasingly murky historical record as far as the 2016 Trump administration is concerned.

With prolific haters like the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman relentlessly tugging at the udders of their long-time cash cow “OMG TRUMP"!”, Mr. Kushner’s self-tugging seems like relief.

Perhaps both for himself and the reader. 

Throughout Breaking History – I suspect intentionally – the author flips back and forth between performing a farewell or victory lap, and auditioning for the role of Chief of Staff in a future Trump administration. What becomes abundantly uncomfortable to long-standing MAGA stalwarts through the book is that Mr. Kushner may in fact be correct in his between-the-lines assertions that President Trump really did need him throughout his time in office.

While staffers and friends came and went, Kushner stayed the course. Though his consistent assertion that this was purely to “do good” and for love of his country begins to sound like the lady doth protest too much throughout the 470-odd pages published by Broadside Books this summer. 

The stand-out themes are almost clichéd. Jared really, really wants you to know how important he was to the Abraham Accords and the Middle East peace process. He discusses Israel and the Arab World more than anything else in the book. And it’s clear his efforts deserve much credit. Perhaps you already knew, but Ivanka Trump’s husband had a “Kushner Garden of Peace” planted for him in Jerusalem by the Israeli government.

The second most discussed topic is “liberal Jared” shit to the extreme, as he admits even President Trump called him. At one point, when promoting the idea of planting one trillion trees by 2050, Trump riposted, “Are you trying to push more liberal shit on me?” My ears certainly pricked up at this point in the audiobook. MORE liberal shit, eh? That’s one heck of an admission for Kushner – who admits to being maligned by Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Ann Coulter as a “liberal New Yorker.” 

But the trees weren’t the aforementioned most liberal shit. That was the Criminal Justice Reform policy that at one point Trump seemed to prioritize over some of his key campaign promises – taking meetings with Kim Kardashian and eating up useful legislative time. Liberal New York Jared definitely did a number on him, conceding critical ground to the left because it was “the right thing to do.” Still, it’s not like he acted alone in this endeavor, and frankly it did help Trump – albeit negligibly – with minority Americans. To wider MAGA world however, the opportunity costs mattered. At one point in the book even Mitch McConnell seems heroic in opposing Jared’s fast-tracking of Sentencing Reform. Predictably, McConnell buckled. Kushner’s bipartisan lobbying power was certainly immense, especially considering how fractured Washington was at the time. 

Which raises questions as to why POTUS’s son-in-law scarcely put his left and right shoulders to the wheel when it really mattered. The Russia investigation seems nought more than an inconvenience to Kushner. Same with the multiple impeachments. And he glosses over the 2020 election and January 6th in perhaps the most inelegant part of the book. While on balance coming across as a good operative for Trump to have on his team, Jared Kushner comes across more as a great operative to have on Jared Kushner’s team. If he is to have a role a future Trump administration, it should be something like Ambassador to the United Nations, where he can be in New York and not especially close to the Oval Office.

I would be lying, however, if I said the book didn’t further endear me to Kushner. Having been the target of so many rightist allegations of leading the President astray, Kushner is open about his liberalism, his impact upon the President, and what he sought to do while in the employ of the American taxpayer. 

He is incredulous at his family’s treatment by the media. He has almost nothing negative to say about his father-in-law, and he seems happy to provide insights into deeper state operatives than I might have expected. At one point in the book he recalls how the curiously increasingly wealthy Anthony Fauci was just obviously playing for a different team when the pandemic hit: 

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“Early in the pandemic, Fauci was sitting in my office when his phone rang. We both glanced down and saw the caller’s name: Jim Acosta, the president’s chief antagonist on the generally hostile news network CNN. Neither of us acknowledged the awkward moment, but it stuck in my mind. Members of our task force resented that Fauci would participate in these meetings, and then criticize the federal government’s response as if he was not involved with it. 

“That very week he told the Associated Press that “we’re not there yet” on testing, and that “we have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on.” The comments demoralized staffers who were working twenty­ hour days while Fauci was chatting with his friends in the media. His statement also struck me as odd. It came at the end of a seven ­day period in which we’d conducted a million tests. We were rapidly scaling, and we finally had a reliable system in place. Rather than highlighting this progress to build confidence, he focused on the nega­tive. As a full member of the task force, Fauci attended all the meetings and knew what we were doing. Yet he continually distanced himself from the White House when discussing the effort publicly.

“Is he a sportscaster or is he a member of the team?” asked one task force member. “He knows the challenges we face and everything we are doing to solve them. If he has recommendations, he should give them to us!” 

One day, after Fauci gave another doom ­and ­gloom interview, Trump tried to convince him to change his approach: “Anthony, you’ve got to be more positive. We need to give people hope.”

Fauci pushed back: “My advice in situations like this is that we should make people feel as bad as possible. We want to explain the worst possible scenario. If it comes true, we were right. If it doesn’t, then we did a better job than people expected.” 

“I’m not like that,” Trump said. “I take the opposite approach. I am like a coach who believes in the team even if they are down to give them a reason to keep fighting. We can’t let people give up. People are losing their jobs. They are drinking and doing drugs; they are depressed, sui­ cides are going up. That is not America. We will get through this, but we have to stay positive; we have to give people a reason to keep their businesses open so that our country can bounce back.” 

“Fine, I’ll be a little more positive,” Fauci said, but he never made good on this commitment. 

Still, knowing some of the players in the book better than I sometimes care to admit, it’s hard to take everything Kushner writes at face value. At one point he alleges that Bannon apologized to him for accusing him of leaking to Maggie Haberman. This is ludicrous for a number of reasons, the predominant one being that Steve Bannon never apologizes for anything. Even when he’s wrong. 

If you can make it past the “scout’s honor!” insistence and axe-grinding, Kushner’s book about the Trump White House is one of the few I’m actually happy to recommend you read (or listen to, as I did) in full. 

It pulls together, sometimes with humor and self-deprecation, the experiences of a number of different actors, and is a far cry away from the sensationalist, “Trump tried to hijack the Beast and drive it into the Capitol,” gibberish the corporate media expects us to believe. The problem, of course, is that so many on the left actually do.

Perhaps Kushner’s book is perfect for them. The perfect gift for your left-wing friends. Tell them “hey look this self-proclaimed liberal New Yorker who worked almost exclusively on liberal and neo-liberal policies while in the Trump White House wrote this.” Or maybe I’m just kidding myself and Jared Kushner has about as much sway with the modern left as I do.

Still, not a book I regret spending time on. Which is rare, nowadays.