Jared Kushner is trying, in vain, to rewrite history

“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,” argued the New York Times’ Dwight Garner in an equally brutal evisceration of the book.

Mr Kusher’s musings are part of a continuing effort at rehabilitating his shattered reputation and that of his wife, Ivanka.

The couple, who clearly long for their lives in liberal New York prior to Mr Trump’s upset victory in 2016, should not be allowed to get away with this spray job – at least, not until they can summon a little honesty about his time in the White House and their role in it.

That, however, seems highly unlikely.

Take, for instance, Mr Kushner’s recent attempt to persuade Sky News’ Kay Burley that Mr Trump’s ferreting away of top-secret documents at Mar-a-Lago was nothing more than a “paperwork issue” and likely the result of the fact that the former president was “under constant attack”.

Similarly, after Mr Trump’s failed coup d’etat and departure from office in January last year, Mr Kushner reportedly let it be known that he wanted no more to do with his father-in-law’s lies about Joe Biden’s “theft” of the election.

Mr Kushner, a former Democrat, has, however, refused to make that break publicly. “I believe it was a very sloppy election,” he told Fox News last month. “I think that there’s a lot of issues that I think if litigated differently may have had different insights into them,” he added somewhat incomprehensibly.

Perhaps more significantly, Mr Kushner – who, together with his wife, liked to peddle the myth that he mitigated some of the worst excesses of Mr Trump and his coterie of far-right advisers – doesn’t appear to have strained a sinew to stop the effort to steal the election from Mr Biden, the rightful winner.

As Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reveal in their newly published book “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021”, Mr Kushner and his wife essentially washed their hands of the entire affair.

“Mr Kushner’s decision to withdraw from the most consequential moment of the Trump presidency left few effective counterweights to the plotters seeking to subvert the will of the voters to hang on to power,” Mr Baker wrote in a preview of the book earlier this summer. “It was the final act in the myth that Mr Kushner would be the moderating force on a president who resisted moderation.”

Mr Kushner’s actions, or lack thereof, continue a pattern evident throughout Mr Trump’s presidency in which he displayed a Macavity-like ability to depart the scene at difficult moments and shift the responsibility and blame on to others. Mr Kushner’s response to events in Trump world when they “ran chaotically away from him” was, in the words of author Michael Wolff, “to see, hear or speak no evil, in fact to nearly dematerialise”.

Mr Kushner’s real attitude to the former president’s plot to overturn the election was perhaps best captured by his videotaped testimony to the House of Representatives committee investigating the 6 January assault on the US Capitol. Asked whether he was aware that Mr Trump’s counsel, Pat Cipollone, was threatening to resign, Mr Kushner dismissively said he took it to “just be whining”. “Whining,” an incredulous Representative Liz Cheney responded. “There’s a reason why people serving in our government take an oath to the constitution. As our founding fathers recognised, democracy is fragile.”

Indeed, according to Mr Baker, Mr Kushner even failed to intervene when Mike Pence’s staff appealed to him to try and persuade the president that his loyal deputy had no power to stop Mr Biden being formally recognised as the winner when the Electoral College vote was counted on 6 January. The vice-president was a “big boy”, Mr Kushner apparently responded and should bring his lawyers if he felt he was being asked to do something illegal. “I’m too busy working on Middle East peace right now,” he grandly proclaimed.

His role in helping to broker the Abraham Accords is, of course, exhibit one in Mr Kushner’s defence of his time in the Trump White House. But, as Stephen Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations has argued, his supposed triumph is not as momentous as Mr Kushner paints it. Demonstrating a “lack of self-awareness and depth”, Mr Trump’s son-in law “makes it seem like the normalisation of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates was some astonishing development—similar to former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem in 1977—rather than a logical step for two countries that had been inching toward normalisation over the previous five years”.

Bringing peace to the Middle East was, however, just one part of Mr Kushner’s ever-expanding White House portfolio, which came to cover US-China relations, government innovation, criminal justice reform, and overseeing Mr Trump’s re-election campaign. In the president’s final year in office, he also assumed a key role in the US response to the pandemic. Mr Kushner – who characteristically did not allow his lack of public health expertise to interfere with his meddling in all aspects of the crisis – proved totally out of his depth. In May 2020, for instance, he took to the airwaves to declare that, thanks to the federal government’s “great success”, much of America would be “back to normal” within a month.

Six months later, by which time the US death toll had climbed from 67,000 to 226,000, audiotapes of conversations he was having at the time with the veteran journalist Bob Woodward revealed Mr Kushner’s preoccupation at the time: ensuring that the president won a manufactured fight with governors to ensure that he would “own” the reopening from state-imposed lockdowns because “the opening is going to be very popular”.

Unlike the 400,000 Americans who would ultimately lose their lives during the pandemic on Mr Trump’s watch, the former president’s son-in-law has led a charmed life since departing Washington.

Exiled from New York, he and Ivanka are safely ensconced on a Florida island known as “Billionaire’s Bunker”, where they have bought a $24 million mansion and a $32 million plot of land next door. In April, it was reported that, six months after he left the White House, Mr Kushner’s newly formed private equity firm received a $2bn investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. The investment was ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman over the objections of the fund’s experts who believed the American was too inexperienced and his business plan risky. “MBS’” generosity is unsurprising. Mr Kushner was the White House’s chief cheerleader for the crown prince even after the grisly murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. “The crown prince’s financial backing despite contrary business considerations looks to all the world like a lucrative reward to Mr Kushner,” the Washington Post argued in an editorial.

However, his father-in-law was less generous than MBS in reciprocating Mr Kushner’s loyalty. Peter Navarro, Mr Trump’s former trade adviser, reveals in his new memoir that in June 2020 the president authorised a plan to depose Mr Kushner from his role at the re-election campaign and replace him with the far-right firebrand Steve Bannon. Mr Trump’s only stipulation was that he wouldn’t deliver the bad news to “the father of his grandchildren”.

Mr Kushner easily swatted away the anointed messenger, Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus, saying that “things were fine with the campaign”.

But that prediction proved as flawed as his happy talk about covid – and as convincing as Mr Kushner’s current attempt to turn back the clock to the days before he decided to ride Mr Trump’s shonky populist bandwagon to the White House.