Jared kushner

Award the Nobel Peace Prize to Jared Kushner. Seriously!

In these pages last year, I suggested that while the President’s son-in-law may not be a great geo-strategic mind, we should give Jared Kushner a chance to give peace in the Middle East a chance. After all, to paraphrase President Trump’s message to African American voters, what do those suffering Middle Easterners have to lose after close to two decades of failed US military interventions in the area that brought about chaos and bloodshed? Needless to say that I was bombarded with dismissive messages from pals who are proud members of Washington’s ‘foreign policy community’. They thought I was out of my mind and/or trying to land a job in the Trump administration.

jared kushner

Karlie Kloss, renaissance woman

Is there nothing Karlie Kloss can't do? The Midwest-born supermodel and minor member of the Trump Expanded Cinematic Universe has proven herself to be something of a polymath since hanging up her Victoria's Secret Angel wings in 2015. The 29-year-old heads up a coding program to get more young women involved in STEM, hosts the Bravo show Project Runway and, as The Spectator revealed earlier this year, helps craft government healthcare policy through her father Kurt and brother-in-law Jared Kushner. But besides fashion, Kloss's true passion is investing. It's something she must have picked up from her husband, Josh Kushner. Clearly Kloss has an eye for a canny deal, as she's set to splash the cash in the famously lucrative world of legacy print media.

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The UAE-Israel deal is a triumph

The American-brokered opening of full relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel is a rare outbreak of peace and hope in a region short of both, and a significant vindication of the Trump administration’s diplomacy. Above all, it is a testimony to the strategic courage and fresh thinking of Mohammed bin Zayed (MbZ) of Abu Dhabi in particular, but also of Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump and — whether you like it or not — Jared Kushner.Thursday’s announcement is nothing less than groundbreaking. The complete and instant opening of full relations with Israel by an Arab leader is a crossing of the diplomatic Rubicon. MbZ has created an opening for further normalization by his fellow Arab and Muslim leaders.

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Stepien the right direction?

Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he is demoting his current campaign manager Brad Parscale to the role of senior adviser and will be putting Bill Stepien in charge of the campaign. The shakeup comes less than four months before Election Day and follows a series of polls showing former vice president Joe Biden with a formidable lead over Trump. The move is not altogether shocking — rumors swirled around DC weeks ago that Trump was growing increasingly unhappy with Parscale's ability to run the campaign amid the coronavirus shutdown and the nationwide riots. The failed rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma only soured the President's view of Parscale further.

Trumpism vs Trump

Politicos have spent years asking what would happen to the Republican party post-Trump. Establishment types prayed that he was an anomaly and that the party would return to ‘normal’ after his reign. Slightly more savvy observers worried that the Trump base would slip back toward the Democrats once they lost their champion and the GOP would have to rebuild a winning coalition. Both relied on an assumption that Trumpism cannot exist without Trump. That was wrong. Elitist politicians and the mainstream media have been so obsessed with denouncing Trump’s egregious character that his voters developed a reflexive tendency to defend the man rather than his policies. But nearly four years later, many Trump voters feel unsatisfied with his list of accomplishments.

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jared kushner

Prodigal son-in-law

A friend in Washington saw Jared and Ivanka at a couple of smart DC dinner parties in the first year of the Trump administration. Ivanka seemed to want to depict them both as the internal opposition to her father, restraining his worst instincts, nudging him along on climate change or women’s issues. You might have assumed as much from ‘Javanka’s’ public image as a couple of rich young New Yorkers of conventional Manhattan liberal opinions who ended up in the White House by accidents of birth and marriage. (As Amber Athey writes, they haven’t changed.) But my friend was most impressed with Jared Kushner. Kushner had already been questioned in the Mueller investigation.

The Kushner conundrum

After a string of broken promises, policy disappointments and sinking poll numbers, the populist wing of the Republican party knows who is to blame. It’s the President’s son-in-law, the prince of the administration, Jared Kushner. ‘Trump has a Jared problem,’ is how one conservative activist who works with the White House on immigration puts it. ‘Jared is a total fuck-up. Everything he touches turns to lead.’ Others groan about ‘four more years of Jared’ should the President be re-elected in November. Various sources in, or connected to, the administration are stunned by the amount of power Kushner wields.

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Jared and the Jews

For most Jewish Americans, Jared Kushner is the son-in-law and counselor of a president they didn’t vote for in 2016. He prays with a punctiliousness they romanticize but prefer not to emulate. Jared’s grandparents learned about history the hard way: they survived the Holocaust and immigrated with no money and little English. The typical Jewish American grandparents are boomers who vote Democratic all the way down the card. They believe America is different for the Jews, even if they were raised to believe that difference was un-American and bad for their careers. And here comes Jared, a frum Jew who married the boss’s blonde daughter. It could be a romance from Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra. Less romantically, it is a tale from history.

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War footing: can Trump turn left-wing protests into victory?

Don’t cross Donald Trump. Trump originally ran for the presidency because Barack Obama mocked him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. He has devoted himself to tearing up every accomplishment, every treaty that Obama signed. Yesterday he was mocked for the revelation that he was conducted into the White House bunker by the Secret Service. Now he has had his revenge. Speaking in the Rose Garden today, Trump declared, 'If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for there.' He indicated that he is prepared to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to quash to the protests.This isn’t rodomontade.

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Where is the law and order President?

Donald Trump announced on Twitter this morning that the National Guard is standing by in Minneapolis. The Guard is ready to be deployed to quell the riots stemming from righteous anger over the death of George Floyd. The only sensible question is: why has it taken so long? President Trump ought to be the tough but moral leader the city needs right now, but his initial response was just as spineless as the rest. When the protests first started, Trump was busy tweeting about Joe Scarborough’s dead intern. As the city burned, he whined about Twitter fact-checking him on voter fraud and had his administration quickly draft an executive order on social media.

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Doctor rebuts NYT hit piece about Kushner’s coronavirus efforts

The doctor at the center of a New York Times story alleging Jared Kushner bungled the administration's attempts to procure medical supplies is pushing back on the negative tone of the piece, indicating that the Times’s reporting 'did not fully reflect my experience.' Dr Jeffrey Hendricks is quoted in a Times article from May 5 expressing frustration with Kushner's assembled team of coronavirus volunteers, whose job it was to identify potential sources of medical equipment. 'When I offered them viable leads at viable prices from an approved vendor, they kept passing me down the line and made terrible deals instead,' Hendricks said of dealing with the volunteer team, adding that getting responses at all was difficult.

Jared Kushner

Jared Kushner pushes back on Trump’s immigration ban

The White House is currently facing an internal battle over President Trump’s announcement Monday night that he will sign an executive order temporarily halting immigration amid the coronavirus outbreak. The details of the order had not been finalized as of Tuesday morning, causing frantic debate over which groups of immigrants will be exempt from the ban. Immigration restrictionists have been trying to sell the president on the idea of a ban for at least a week, pointing to various polling that shows it is popular among voters due to fears of the spread of COVID-19 and the high unemployment numbers in the US. Twenty-two million people thus far have filed for unemployment as the economy has practically shut down because of social distancing measures.

President Donald Trump immigration

EXCLUSIVE: Karlie Kloss’s dad helps Jared with coronavirus ‘research’

Jared Kushner has a lot on his plate. The White House senior adviser was tasked this week with conducting research into the coronavirus to help Trump decide whether to declare a national emergency. According to Politico, Kushner is talking to 'relevant parties' and will 'present his findings to the president'. It appears that one of these 'relevant parties' is an emergency room doctor called Kurt Kloss, father of Jared's sister-in-law Karlie. And Dr Kloss sought the advice of other medical professionals on Kushner's behalf...in a Facebook group with almost 22,000 members. 'If you were in charge of Federal response to the Pandemic what would your recommendation be,' Kloss wrote in the private group Wednesday, according to screenshots passed to The Spectator.

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Hold the Nobel

As we know, President Trump often governs by tweet – he literally can’t help himself – but from time to time he also loves to have a secret plan. During the 2016 campaign, there was a secret ‘absolutely foolproof’ plan to defeat Isis. Much to his surprise, he ended up in the Oval Office and was pressed to say what was in this secret plan. He revealed that it was a plan to come up with a plan. He gave the US military 30 days to provide a ‘comprehensive strategy’ against the so-called Islamic State. This turned out to be to ‘bomb the shit out of Isis…just bomb those suckers’ – Trump’s words – something that both he and the generals could heartily agree upon. It worked, eventually, though they are still digging the bodies of civilians out of the rubble in Raqqa.

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What Jared Kushner doesn’t get

Jared Kushner’s two-day ‘Peace to Prosperity’ workshop in Bahrain, the administration claims, was the first step in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians sent delegations. The roll-out of the strategy paper that preceded it was met with near silence. America’s regional partners provided only lukewarm support to Kushner’s efforts and, not least, the workshop was amateurishly misnamed. Kushner believes it’s actually ‘prosperity to peace’ — not the other way around. The workshop’s results, or lack of them, were predictable. But criticism among those who have been down this road before has been muted, partly because of Kushner’s quiet but focused effort to solicit their views.

jared kushner

The baffling oratory of Jared Kushner

The problem of resolving the tangle of conflict in the Middle East is one that has defeated generations of the world’s most experienced statesmen, and resisted the blandishments of its greatest orators. So who better now to step in than a well-groomed thirtysomething New York property developer, offering the 'deal of the century'? There were some hiccups to start with, sure. Jared Kushner launched his 'Peace to Prosperity' workshop in Bahrain with a cocktail party – alcohol not being traditionally the thing with Muslims. And it was boycotted from the off by the Palestinian Authority. Still, he had a bash.

jared kushner rhetoric

Pompeo summons up fresh Iran sanctions from the Gulf

'First, I think it’s really important to understand that the Iranians are sowing disinformation,' Mike Pompeo told reporters Sunday en route to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates  ('two great allies in the challenge that Iran presents.')'You’ll see too,' the secretary of state continued, 'that our campaign that began when President Trump took office will continue. On Monday, there’ll be a significant set of new sanctions.' Sure enough, this afternoon Trump announced intensified sanctions on Iran’s Supreme Leader.With that, the secretary was off, jetting from Joint Base Andrews to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.

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The art of the bad deal

On the late afternoon of September 29, 2000 (nearly 20 years ago now), I took a cab from Jerusalem into Bethlehem to visit with an old friend and his family, the owners of a well-known Bethlehem hotel. The streets were bustling; buses filled with tourists roared up the main Jerusalem-to-Bethlehem road towards the Church of the Nativity (the reputed birthplace of Jesus), and the city’s gift shops were jammed. My plan was to stay the night, but my friend (a Palestinian Christian who’d moved to Bethlehem from Philadelphia), shook his head: ‘No room at the inn,’ he said, and smiled at his joke. ‘In fact, you won’t find a room anywhere in the city.’ I was surprised. In all of my years traveling to the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, I’d never had trouble finding a place to stay.

jared kushner time gaza

The security clearances scandal makes it hard to believe Trump is in the clear

Is someone in the Deep State finally blowing the whistle on the Trump presidency? Meet Tricia Newbold, the 18-year veteran of the White House Personnel Security Office, who is alleging that Trump’s camarilla received 25 security clearances that should never have been cleared. Blackmail, drug abuse, criminal conduct, financial peculation — you name it and Newbold says it raised nary an eyebrow among the Trump crowd. Instead, national security clearances were handed out like jellybeans to Trump acolytes, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.In the case of ‘Senior White House Official No. 1’, most likely Kushner, Newbold explained to congressional investigators that concerns she highlighted were swept aside like so much useless ballast.

jared kushner security clearances

Kushner may not be Kissinger, but at least he’s not Kerry

Imagine a long list of leaders that liberal pundits love to hate. It starts with Donald Trump, followed by Vladimir Putin and a series of nationalist and populist politicians, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (‘Bibi’) Netanyahu stuck in between Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and the Polish and Czech leaders. One of the reasons for the deep animosity towards the Israeli Likud Party chief, especially among many liberal American Jews and European lefties, has been the perceived love affair between the Donald and Bibi and the belief that if these two BFFs would only disappear from the political universe, we will finally have peace in our time in the Holy Land.

jared kushner