Jared Kushner Wife: Donald Trump got Chris Christie on the phone halfway through his presidency. According to a new memoir by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, due next month, Christie aspired to be Trump’s chief of staff. According to Kushner, Christie told the president that the Russia inquiry was the product of insufficient staffing and that he would vigorously defend him on television.
There had long been animosity between Kushner and Christie. They, as U.S. attorneys, prosecuted the father, Charles Kushner, for tax evasion, campaign finance violations, and witness tampering in the mid-2000s. This case investigated how the elder Kushner hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law and sent a compromising video to his sister. (On his way out the door, Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, who had spent 14 months of a two-year term.)
When Trump asked Kushner what he thought about putting his adversary in the White House, Kushner said he told his father-in-law he was okay with it. “I joked that Christie might be better at Homeland Security: ‘If he can block the George Washington Bridge, maybe he can close the border,'” referring to the former New Jersey governor’s Bridgegate affair.
However, Kushner claims that Christie did not get the position because he was set to publish a book that slandered the Kushner family. According to Kushner, Christie informed the president that he had called his publisher, offered to refund his advance, and requested that the presses be stopped, but it was too late.
“Ironically, Christie’s obsession with using my family to get media attention had destroyed his dream opportunity to rehabilitate his image and finish his political career.” (Christie, in his 2021 memoir, says he rejected Trump’s offer to become chief of staff, to which the former president responded: “That’s not the answer I was expecting to hear.”
Kushner’s forthcoming 500-page book, Breaking History: A White House Memoir, portions of which Vanity Fair reviewed, recounts the delicate relationship between father-in-law and son-in-law, as well as his relationship with his wife and White House colleague, Ivanka Trump. He recalls some of his first interactions with Donald Trump, dating back to his days as the editor of The New York Observer. This weekly publication chronicled Manhattan’s power elite.
In the book, Kushner recalls contacting Arthur Carter, the Observer’s then-publisher and owner, in July 2006 in the hopes of purchasing the publication. He wrote that he put a $5 million cheque on the table.
(At the time of the transaction, it was believed that Kushner paid almost $10 million for it.) “I saw a chance to bring a sophisticated daily into the digital age while also forging valuable business connections,” he writes. “I quickly realized that, especially in journalism, change is like heaven: everyone wants to go there, but no one wants to die.”
When the Observer published its annual Power List and ranked Trump at No. 38, Kushner received a letter from the mogul, who was still in his Apprentice prime, listing his Manhattan real estate assets. “Please give me a break!” “Interestingly, the name Trump is used prominently in your title…to attract people to read your piece,” the letter, a copy of which was sent to V.F., read. “Please stop sending me your paper, so I don’t have to read such nonsense!”
Remember, this was a full year after Kushner began dating Ivanka. Trump suggested his daughter meet Kushner after he purchased 666 Fifth Avenue, the most expensive sale in the city’s history—and was later bailed out by a firm Qatar had substantial ownership in a while serving in his post as White House Middle East diplomat.
He writes that the two went to lunch, talking business before bonding over “NASCAR, New Jersey diners, and other unlikely interests we had in common.” This led to a second lunch at his favorite Indian restaurant, which lasted so long that they both had to call their assistants to reschedule their other meetings.
“I was taking Ivanka to sections of the city she had never seen before, using our dates to check out neighborhoods where I was looking to purchase property,” he writes. We would take our backgammon board to a new restaurant on Sunday mornings and sit there for hours as we played games, read the papers, and sipped coffee.”
Months later, Kushner, an observant Jew, broke up with her due to religious differences (she told him it was the worst decision of his life) until Wendi Murdoch secretly invited them both on the Murdochs’ yacht for a weekend to get them back together” (he also witnessed Rupert Murdoch strike his deal to buy the Dow Jones and Company that weekend, as well as his yacht-mates Bono, Billy Joel, and Bob Geldof serenading them. Murdoch, Kushner writes, whispered that they were the two least talented people there).
He met with Ivanka’s father twice at Trump Tower after she converted to Judaism as her relationship with Kushner became more serious. According to the book, during one meal, Trump questioned Kushner why he wasn’t the one converting, explaining that most people assumed Trump was Jewish anyhow and that Ivanka should have dated Tom Brady instead.
When Kushner snuck into the office to inform Trump that he was going to propose, Trump, intercommed with Ivanka as soon as he departed to notify her that an engagement was near. (After seeing the musical “Wicked,” Kushner proposed that night in his apartment, which his brother, Josh, had decorated with rose petals and candles.)
They married at Trump’s club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and Kushner planned a safari in Africa for their honeymoon, which was derailed by weather and resulted in an unplanned stay in Amsterdam with no luggage.
View this post on Instagram
“Some brides would have melted when their perfect honeymoon was derailed,” Kushner writes. However, not his wife. They changed into bathrobes and slippers and ate supper at the hotel’s Michelin-starred restaurant. “It was a lot of fun.”
Indeed, when Kushner was in the White House and worked on behalf of Trump to finalize the Abraham Accords—the accord meant to improve relations between Israel and many Arab countries—his relationship with his father-in-law had cooled.
Kushner boasted that on the day they signed the Accords in the Oval Office, Trump told the room, “‘Jared’s a genius,'” adding,” ‘People complain about nepotism—I’m the one who got the steal here.” He joked back,” ‘Maybe in the future, more presidents will haze their son-in-law by tasking them with impossible problems.”
Leave a Reply