After Donald Trump, one of the people who deserves the most blame for how the last four years shook out is Jared Kushner. The president’s son-in-law had absolutely no business working in the White House and yet had his hand in virtually all matters that touched American life, from shutting down the government and furloughing thousands of federal workers in a failed attempt to get Nancy Pelosi to fund the Wall to cutting medical professionals out of the government’s pandemic response and trying to scare the virus off with his MBA. Not surprisingly, very few people want to hear from Kushner ever again. Unfortunately for such people, Kushner and his toilet-hoarding wife have reputations to launder, which is why the Boy Prince of New Jersey is apparently writing a memoir about his days in Washington that is sure to be equal parts “extremely boring” and “entirely fiction.”
Reuters reports that Kushner’s book will focus on his “White House experiences,” including “his role in negotiating normalization deals between Israel and Arab states,” while also addressing trade deals, prison reform, the U.S.’s relationship with China, the Russia probe, Trump’s impeachment, the border crisis, the “events surrounding the death in police custody of George Floyd,” and, of course, the U.S. response to the coronavirus. According to a source, Kushner is “not looking to settle scores but rather to provide historical context and help readers understand what it was like to work in the Trump White House.”
In other words, the odds are high to extremely high that Kushner and/or his ghostwriter will begin by telling readers something like “no administration in history had more cards stacked against them” and then proceed to explain that “no other administration in history did more for the American people than ours.” Necessarily, Kushner is unlikely to address, among other things:
- His early involvement in the coronavirus response, which involved consulting Karlie Kloss’s father, who crowdsourced advice from a Facebook group
- Claiming COVID-19 wasn’t a “health reality”
- Insisting last April that the U.S. was at the start of its “comeback”
- Pushing for the hiring of Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with zero infectious disease or public health experience who advocated a “herd immunity” strategy to deal with the virus, which may have required an estimated 2 million people in the U.S. to die.
- Scrapping a national testing plan because “the virus had hit blue states hardest,” and they hadn’t voted for Trump
- Reportedly saying in a meeting that New Yorkers were “going to suffer and that’s their problem”
- The fact that the White House publicly declared in October that it was no longer trying to “control” the pandemic
- That Trump left office with a body count of more than 400,000 people
Elsewhere, readers can no doubt expect Kushner to exaggerate the significance of his work in the Middle East which established formal relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain but, incidentally, “fell short of full peace deals as the three countries already maintain significant informal ties and have not been at war,” per the Guardian. Also, there’s the minor matter of the agreements making “little mention of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” which might have something to do with Kushner calling Palestinian leadership “hysterical and stupid.”
All in all, it’s not clear who would want to read this book or why—though, to be fair, the fact that it will reportedly touch on the “events surrounding the death in police custody of George Floyd” promises to be unintentional hilarity given Trump’s record on race. (In September, several months after the death of Floyd, the president commented that police officers who shoot unarmed individuals are like golfers who miss shots on the fairway.) Weeks before the election, Kushner insisted on Fox News that his father-in-law, an abject racist, had done tons of positive things for the Black people, who had only themselves to blame for not being successful.
On a final note, it’s not clear if Kushner will address Toiletgate but it would be nice.
— How Will Kellyanne and George Conway Move On in a Post-Trump America?
— Mayoral Hopeful Andrew Yang on His Plans for New York City
— Inside Team Biden’s Freak-Out Over Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Trump Jokes
— Beto O’Rourke Wants to Save Texas From Ted Cruz
— What the Hell Is Going on With Bitcoin?
— Marty Baron Dishes in a Wide-Ranging Exit Interview
— On With the Show! See the 2021 Hollywood Portfolio
— Leak of Bombshell CBS Investigation Led to Multimillion-Dollar Settlement
— From the Archive: Why Do Dubai’s Princesses Keep Trying to Escape?
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.