Given the power that Jared Kushner had in this country for four years, it is amazing how little we know about him. Other than the fact that he had a real affinity for the butcherous MBS and the other Gulf states, which surely factored into him getting saved from financial ruin by a Qatari group refinancing his building, and a $2 billion start-up investment from Saudi Arabia post-administration, we don’t know much about Jared or his interests. Apparently, the little we do know, such as the fact that he sounds like Data from Star Trek and believes that anyone not striving to make $500 million a year is “stupid,” is all there is to know, according to the New York Times review of Jared’s new book, Breaking History. The review’s title notes that the book is soulless and quite selective in memory.
To be fair, it sounds like Jared’s book captures his essence. What more could he do? This is the guy whose Secret Service code name was “Mechanic.” Poor rich boy can’t win. From the review:
It’s a title [Breaking History] that, in its thoroughgoing lack of self-awareness, matches this book’s contents. Kushner writes as if he believes foreign dignitaries (and less-than dignitaries) prized him in the White House because he was the fresh ideas guy, the starting point guard, the dimpled go-getter.
He betrays little cognizance that he was in demand because, as a landslide of other reporting has demonstrated, he was in over his head, unable to curb his avarice, a cocky young real estate heir who happened to unwrap a lot of Big Macs beside his father-in-law, the erratic and misinformed and similarly mercenary leader of the free world. Jared was a soft touch.
It does sound very similar to Donald Trump. When Trump would talk about how foreign leaders would tell him that they “respect the United States again,” and “see us as strong again,” “with a real leader,” Trump wasn’t lying. Foreign leaders – at least the despots – were surely flattering Trump by telling him exactly what he wanted to hear as they then got whatever they wanted. It sounds like it was the same with Jared, and why wouldn’t it be? Jared could convince Trump of damn near anything. Jared was willing to do some work (self-interested work), and Trump was happy to let him do it. Thus, whatever Jared decided, likely got done.
Then it gets ruthless:
“Breaking History” is an earnest and soulless — Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one — and peculiarly selective appraisal of Donald J. Trump’s term in office. Kushner almost entirely ignores the chaos, the alienation of allies, the breaking of laws and norms, the flirtations with dictators, the comprehensive loss of America’s moral leadership, and so on, ad infinitum, to speak about his boyish tinkering (the “mechanic”) with issues he was interested in.
The Times is too nice to point out that most of the “tinkering with issues of interest to him” were issues with which he could make some money. It would be impossible to put an exact figure on the wealth he and Ivanka amassed simply by their presence in the White House beyond saying it was “a lot.”
In a wonderful analogy, the Times compared the book to Jared Kushner giving a tour of a grand 18th Century home, burned to the ground, celebrating the two things that made it through the fire, beautifully crafted bathtubs.
It sounds like Jared Kushner wrote a book with a level of arrogance that is only exceeded by its lack of self-awareness. As such, Jared fully captures Jared, which… is the goal of every autobiography? To be honest, it kind of makes it sound a bit interesting, if only for the wrong reasons.
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