Jared Kushner

Jared Corey Kushner (born January 10, 1981) is an American investor, real-estate developer, and newspaper publisher who served as a Senior Advisor to the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.

Quotes

Press Briefing (April 3, 2020)

Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing (April 3, 2020), whitehouse.gov

When the Vice President first asked me to help on the task force with different tasks, I asked the President what he expected from the task force and how I can best serve him and the task force. What the President asked is that all of the recommendations that we make be based on data. He wanted us to be very rigorous, to make sure that we were studying the data, collecting data. A lot of things in this country were happening very quickly, and we wanted to make sure that we were trying to keep updating our models and making sure that we were making informed decisions and informed recommendations to him based on the data that we were able to collect and put together.

The President wanted to make sure that we had the people doing the best jobs, and making sure that we had the right people focused on all the things that needed to happen to make sure that we can deliver in these unusual times for the American people.

The President also instructed me to make sure that I break down every barrier needed to make sure that the teams can succeed. This is an effort where the government is doing things that the government doesn’t normally do, where we are stretching, we’re acting very quickly. And the President wants to make sure that the White House is fully behind the different people running the different lines of effort to make sure that we get everything done in a speed that the President demands.

The President also wanted us to make sure we think outside the box, make sure we’re finding all the best thinkers in the country, making sure we’re getting all the best ideas, and that we’re doing everything possible to make sure that we can keep Americans safe, and make sure we bring a quick end to this in the best way possible, and balance all the different aspects that need to be thought of while we do this. This truly is a historic challenge. We have not seen something like this in a very, very long time. But I am very confident that, by bringing innovative solutions to these hard problems, we will make progress.

The President has been very, very hands on in this. He’s really instructed us to leave no stone unturned. Just this morning — very early this morning — I got a call from the President. He told me he was hearing from friends of his in New York that the New York public hospital system was running low on critical supply. He instructed me this morning. I called Dr. Katz, who runs the system, asked him which supply was the most supply he was nervous about. He told me it was the N95 masks. I asked what his daily burn was. And I basically got that number, called up Admiral Polowczyk, made sure we had the inventory. We went to the President today, and earlier today,the President called Mayor de Blasio to inform him that we were going to send a month of supply to the New York public hospital system, to make sure that the workers on the frontline can rest assured that they have the N95 masks that they need to get through the next month. We’ll be doing similar things with all the different public hospitals that are in the hotspot zones and making sure that we’re constantly in communications with the local communities.

One thing I will say, just based on data, is that we’ve been getting a lot of data from different governors and from different mayors and from different cities. One thing I’ve seen FEMA do very, very well, over the last week or so, is now we’re getting real-time data from a lot of cities. People who have requests for different products and supplies, a lot of them are doing it based on projections, which are not the realistic projections. The projections change every day as we see the cases, as we see the impacts of the "stop the spread" effort that this task force recommended and the President has been pushing forward. So I do think that we’ll see that. Hopefully, there’ll be impact of that. And the task force has been working very hard, through the FEMA group, with Admiral Polowczyk to make sure that we’re getting the supplies to people before they run out, and making sure that we’re doing it in a proper way.

And what they’ve done over the last 13 days has been really extraordinary. We’ve done things that the government has never done before, quicker than they’ve ever done it before. And what we’re seeing now is we found a lot of supplies in the country. We’ve been distributing them where we anticipate there will be needs, and also trying to make sure that we’re hitting places where there are needs. So I can tell you the people on the — in the task force, they’re working day and night. You’ve got a lot of people in the government. We recognize the challenge that America faces right now. We know what a lot of the people on the frontlines are facing, the fear that they have that they won’t have the supplies they need. And our goal is to work as hard as we can to make sure that we don’t let them down.

That doesn’t mean there’s not still a lot of pain and there won’t be pain for a while, but that basically was, we’ve now put out rules to get back to work. Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors.”
- In a taped interview on April 18, with Bob Woodward according to Jared Kushner an Even Bigger Idiot Than Previously Thought published October 28, 2020

Attributed

I have all this data about ICU capacity. I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.
- Attributed by Gabriel Sherman in “The Campaign Panicked”: Inside Trump’s Decision to Back Off of His Easter Coronavirus Miracle (April 1, 2020), Vanity Fair.

Quotes about Kushner

A war crimes complaint has been filed against President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump adviser Jared Kushner in the International Criminal Court (ICC).... The complaint, filed by Middlesex University law professor William Schabas on June 30 on behalf of four Palestinians who live in the West Bank, states "there is credible evidence" that Trump, Netanyahu and Kushner "are complicit in acts that may amount to war crimes relating to the transfer of populations into occupied territory and the annexation of the sovereign territory of the State of Palestine."
- Marjorie Cohn in Trump Is Trying to Hide US & Israeli War Crimes by Attacking the International Criminal Court, TruthOut, (8 July 2020)

Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Most of his other endeavors — his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians — have been failures. Undeterred, he has now arrogated to himself a major role in fighting the epochal health crisis that’s brought America to its knees.
- Michelle Goldberg, Putting Jared Kushner In Charge Is Utter Madness (April 2, 2020), The New York Times

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which this confidence is unearned. Kushner was a reportedly mediocre student whose billionaire father appears to have bought him a place at Harvard. Taking over the family real estate company after his father was sent to prison, Kushner paid $1.8 billion — a record, at the time — for a Manhattan skyscraper at the very top of the real estate market in 2007. The debt from that project became a crushing burden for the family business. (Kushner was able to restructure the debt in 2011, and in 2018 the project was bailed out by a Canadian asset management company with links to the government of Qatar.) He gutted the once-great New York Observer, then made a failed attempt to create a national network of local politics websites. His forays into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — for which he boasted of reading a whole 25 books — have left the dream of a two-state solution on life support.
- Michelle Goldberg, Putting Jared Kushner In Charge Is Utter Madness (April 2, 2020), The New York Times

Now, in our hour of existential horror, Kushner is making life-or-death decisions for all Americans, showing all the wisdom we’ve come to expect from him. [...] It was apparently at Kushner’s urging that Trump announced, falsely, that Google was about to launch a website that would link Americans with coronavirus testing. [...] The president was reportedly furious over the website debacle, but Kushner’s authority hasn’t been curbed.
- Michelle Goldberg, Putting Jared Kushner In Charge Is Utter Madness (April 2, 2020), The New York Times

Yet it’s hard not to feel that he’s making the same mistake that so many Trump voters did regarding wealth and entitlement — namely, confusing money for virtue and accomplishment — and the luck of birth for talent. If so, this might account for Mr. Kushner’s apparent confidence that he can act in whatever manner he sees fit.
- Lucinda Rosenfeld, Jared Kushner’s Entitlement Is New Jersey Born and Bred (Sept. 29, 2017) The New York Times

The idea that the Trump administration would condition its response to the pandemic based on its perception of who was bearing the brunt of it was a fevered symptom of a different affliction, Trump Derangement Syndrome. Subsequent reports vindicated my conclusions. In July, The Washington Post reported that desperate White House advisers had begun presenting Trump with maps and data showing spikes in coronavirus cases "among our people' in Republican states," as a way to convince the president to take the pandemic more seriously. That same month, Vanity Fair reported that advisers close to Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, believed that "because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically." Nonpolitical concerns, such as keeping people alive, were of negligible importance by comparison.
- Adam Serwer p 228 The Cruelty of the Point (2021)

He’s an Orthodox Jew who pretends to embody authenticity while engaging in some of the most despicable behavior, all while using his familial history to deflect charges of collusion with Nazis.
- Eli Valley Interview (2018)