By Leonardo Feldman in Newsweek
The headline in New York magazine, back in January 2020, was sneering in its tone: “Jared Kushner Claims He Can Solve Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Because He’s ‘Read 25 Books on It’”.
“Jared Kushner Declares 58,000 Dead Americans ‘A Great Success Story’,” screamed Vanity Fair that April, as the Covid pandemic had shuttered the country and Kushner was dispatched to cable news to defend the White House’s early response.
Enjoy what you're reading? Subscribe for more!
Democrats called him a “slumlord” and “influence peddler” who was “in over his head.” Among the MAGA faithful, Kushner was widely seen as an apostate or, in the words of Tucker Carlson, a “liberal” in disguise, acting as a moderating force — and not in a good way — during the chaos of the first Trump administration.
Kushner was said to have made few friends in the D.C. social scene during those years, and didn’t look back when Trump’s first term ended in disorder, opting to move back to the private sector and declining to serve in the second administration after his father-in-law’s victory last year.
And yet, it is not hyperbole to say that Kushner has been instrumental in some of the most notable achievements of the Trump era, most recently the Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal between Israel and Hamas that Kushner had a significant role in hammering out even without any official title.
During the waning months of the first Trump term, it was Kushner who helped oversee — simultaneously — both a landmark Middle East peace deal, known as the Abraham Accords, as well as the creation and rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine, under Operation Warp Speed, which is credited for bringing an end to the most acute phase of the coronavirus pandemic.
In the mainstream media, he got little credit for either. Democrats largely see him as a “nepo baby” with no resume or credentials in foreign policy, whose family connections helped him get into Harvard and NYU; a son of a prominent New York City real-estate developer who married into another New York real-estate family empire when he wed Ivanka Trump in 2009. For many prominent MAGA figures like Carlson, Kushner has been seen as something of a traitor to the cause.
“No one has more contempt for Donald Trump’s voters than Jared Kushner, and no one expresses it more frequently,” Tucker Carlson said in 2020.
“The railhead of all bad decisions is the same railhead: Javanka,” Steve Bannon said in an interview three years earlier, using the portmanteau of Jared and Ivanka as the power couple was then known in Washington.
But for President Trump, the husband of his eldest daughter has always been something else entirely: a whip smart, outside voice whose ability to come at the Middle East with a businessman’s perspective on managing relationships might have been what the region needed all along .
“I put Jared there because he’s a very smart person and he knows the region, knows the people, knows a lot of the players,” Trump said last week when asked about Kushner’s role in the deal that saw Israel and Hamas lay down arms to facilitate phase one of his 20-point peace plan.
Kushner formally left the White House at the end of the first Trump term to focus on his newly established private equity firm Affinity Partners, which is backed largely by Middle East investors, including $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Democrats in Congress have slammed Affinity and its relationship with the Saudis, accusing Kushner of overlooking the kingdom’s human rights record and having a conflict-of-interest given his unofficial role as a top Trump diplomat. But it was those relationships in the region, from Riyadh to Doha, which gave Kushner the imprimatur to lead the negotiations that resulted in the ceasefire in Gaza.
“People often forget that Jared Kushner spent years building the diplomatic infrastructure that made today’s breakthroughs possible,” Rabbi Yaakov Menken, executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, told Newsweek.
“The Arab leaders knew him as both the President’s son-in-law and an Orthodox Jew, and he built trust with them all the same,” Menken added.