Jared Kushner Quotes

As Walsh saw it, Steve Bannon was running the Steve Bannon White House, Jared Kushner was running the Michael Bloomberg White House, and Reince Priebus was running the Paul Ryan White House. It was a 1970s video game, the white ball pinging back and forth in the black triangle.

President Trump put his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of constructing a new Israel-Palestine peace plan. Kushner had no experience authoring international treaties of any kind, so the announcement was met with skepticism. When Kushner released his plan at the beginning of 2020, he proudly announced that he had “read twenty-five books” on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To date, Israel and Palestine have not achieved peace.

Rudy Giuliani, William Barr, Jared Kushner, and Mike Pompeo are Trump’s new wannabe fixers, sycophants willing to distort the truth and break the law in the service of the Boss.

In the postrecession era—as young people lost opportunities, middle-aged people lost careers and homes, and elderly people lost their retirement savings—Jared Kushner built a fortune

Bannon, Kushner and Mnuchin, the former Goldman Sachs executive, presented Trump with a plan for him to give $25 million to the campaign. “No way,” Trump said. “Fuck that. I’m not doing it.” Where were the famous Republican high-donor guys? “Where the fuck’s the money? Where’s all this money from these guys? Jared, you’re supposed to be raising all this money. Not going to do it.

But Trump quickly went further. He began by elevating his son-in-law and daughter, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, to positions within the administration. As unpaid senior advisors, neither faced Senate confirmation hearings, and they got around laws against hiring family members by declaring they would not take salaries.

It had personally pained Trump not to be able to give it to him. But if the Republican establishment had not wanted Trump, they had not wanted Christie almost as much. So Christie got the job of leading the transition and the implicit promise of a central job—attorney general or chief of staff. But when he was the federal prosecutor in New Jersey, Christie had sent Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, to jail in 2005. Charlie Kushner, pursued by the feds for an income tax cheat, set up a scheme with a prostitute to blackmail his brother-in-law, who was planning to testify against him. Various accounts, mostly offered by Christie himself, make Jared the vengeful hatchet man in Christie’s aborted Trump administration career. It was a kind of perfect sweet-revenge story: the son of the wronged man (or, in this case—there’s little dispute—the guilty-as-charged man) uses his power over the man who wronged his family. But other accounts offer a subtler and in a way darker picture. Jared Kushner, like sons-in-law everywhere, tiptoes around his father-in-law, carefully displacing as little air as possible: the massive and domineering older man, the reedy and pliant younger one. In the revised death-of-Chris-Christie story, it is not the deferential Jared who strikes back, but—in some sense even more satisfying for the revenge fantasy—Charlie Kushner himself who harshly demands his due. It was his daughter-in-law who held the real influence in the Trump circle, who delivered the blow. Ivanka told her father that Christie’s appointment as chief of staff or to any other high position would be extremely difficult for her and her family, and it would be best that Christie be removed from the Trump orbit altogether.

But whereas previous U.S. administrations at least pretended to possess some degree of neutrality, Trump burst onto the scene fully embracing Israel’s right-wing policies and appointing Zionists to key positions. He tapped his bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman, as his ambassador to Israel. Friedman threatened the International Criminal Court over a war crimes investigation into Israel and declared that the illegal settlements did not violate international law. Trump’s own son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, was a personal friend of then–Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and even had financial ties to the illegal settlements. And this was the man Trump had tasked with leading the “peace process.

TRUMP HAD MADE history. He was able to do so because of his inherent irreverence. He was bound by few conventions. This is why he could brush aside the traditional thinking of the foreign policy elite on such matters as the Iran nuclear deal and recognizing Jerusalem and the Golan. Yet, paradoxically, his initial fixation on that old axiomatic truth—that an Israeli-Palestinian peace would solve the problems of the Middle East and that the key to achieving that peace was overcoming Israeli intransigence—delayed the launch of the historic peace accords between Israel and Arab states to the end of his term rather than its beginning, as I had hoped. “By that time,” as Ron Dermer told Jared Kushner, we were “running out of runway to get more peace treaties,” which could have effectively ended the Israeli-Arab conflict.

How’s the kid?” asked Ailes, referring to Trump’s son-in-law and paramount political adviser, thirty-six-year-old Jared Kushner. “He’s my partner,” said Bannon, his tone suggesting that if he felt otherwise, he was nevertheless determined to stay on message. “Really?” said a dubious Ailes. “He’s on the team.” “He’s had lot of lunches with Rupert.” “In fact,” said Bannon, “I could use your help here.” Bannon then spent several minutes trying to recruit Ailes to help kneecap Murdoch. Ailes, since his ouster from Fox, had become only more bitter towards Murdoch. Now Murdoch was frequently jawboning the president-elect and encouraging him toward establishment moderation—all a strange inversion in the ever-stranger currents of American conservatism. Bannon wanted Ailes to suggest to Trump, a man whose many neuroses included a horror of forgetfulness or senility, that Murdoch might be losing it.

During the 2016 election, the Trump campaign employed overt information-warfare tactics through intelligence firms like PsyGroup and Cambridge Analytica.16 PsyGroup’s proposal called Project Rome was presented to Rick Gates, who represented the Trump campaign; it offered “intelligence & influence services” for $3,210,000.17 It also proposed recruiting online influencers to disseminate Trump’s message to fringe “deep web” locations. Parscale was a man who knew the power of the internet. He was linked to Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner and the infamous Cambridge Analytica company.18 Cambridge was a data-mining and message-amplification firm that ran a program that analyzed social media users and crafted highly specific messaging that would appeal to each individual user’s biases, likes, and hobbies. They mastered how to weaponize a person’s inner racism or bigotry. For example, they could identify a white, rural, conservative gun enthusiast who drove a Ford truck based on Facebook posts and buying preferences. That user would then be flooded with messages on illegal immigrants and white families murdered by “urban” Blacks and photos of Ford trucks flying Trump flags. Cambridge also took and amplified Russian-intelligence-crafted themes extolling the glory of Trump. Through the firm’s effort to read social media down to each person’s tastes, it made every Republican in America consume highly targeted Russian memes and themes as nothing less than God’s honest truth.

It is acceptable and mainstream to hate Africans in Israel. In March 2018, one of Israel’s two chief rabbis, Yitzhak Yosef, called black people “monkeys” and the Hebrew version of the word “nigger” during his weekly sermon.3 Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, both advisors to then US President Donald Trump, were blessed by the rabbi when they visited Israel in May 2018. The rabbi paid no professional price for his racism because it was shared by so many others.

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Just remember,” Lighthizer said, “no one gets smarter by talking.

Rule number one of negotiation is to always let the other side go first. “By all means,” I said.

I saw firsthand the wisdom in President Harry Truman’s adage: “It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.

Jared Kushner at your door was sort of like a visit by the Grim Reaper—he always brought trouble and escaped without a scratch.

In business meetings, observers would be nonplussed that Charlie and Jared Kushner invariably greeted each other with a kiss and that the adult Jared called his father Daddy.

Jared Kushner in quite a short period of time—rather less than a year—had crossed over from the standard Democratic view in which he was raised, to an acolyte of Trumpism, bewildering many friends and, as well, his own brother, whose insurance company, Oscar, funded with Kushner-family money, was destined to be shattered by a repeal of Obamacare.

But when he was the federal prosecutor in New Jersey, Christie had sent Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, to jail in 2005. Charlie Kushner, pursued by the feds for an income tax cheat, set up a scheme with a prostitute to blackmail his brother-in-law, who was planning to testify against him.

Christie had sent Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, to jail in 2005. Charlie Kushner, pursued by the feds for an income tax cheat, set up a scheme with a prostitute to blackmail his brother-in-law, who was planning to testify against him. Various accounts, mostly offered by Christie himself, make Jared the vengeful hatchet man in Christie’s aborted Trump administration career. It was a kind of perfect sweet-revenge story: the son of the wronged man (or, in this case—there’s little dispute—the guilty-as-charged man) uses his power over the man who wronged his family.

How’s the kid?” asked Ailes, referring to Trump’s son-in-law and paramount political adviser, thirty-six-year-old Jared Kushner. “He’s my partner,” said Bannon, his tone suggesting that if he felt otherwise, he was nevertheless determined to stay on message. “Really?” said a dubious Ailes. “He’s on the team.” “He’s had lot of lunches with Rupert.” “In fact,” said Bannon, “I could use your help here.” Bannon then spent several minutes trying to recruit Ailes to help kneecap Murdoch. Ailes, since his ouster from Fox, had become only more bitter towards Murdoch. Now Murdoch was frequently jawboning the president-elect and encouraging him toward establishment moderation—all a strange inversion in the ever-stranger currents of American conservatism. Bannon wanted Ailes to suggest to Trump, a man whose many neuroses included a horror of forgetfulness or senility, that Murdoch might be losing it. “I’ll call him,” said Ailes. “But Trump would jump through hoops for Rupert. Like for Putin. Sucks up and shits down. I just worry about who’s jerking whose chain.

The president couldn’t stop talking. He was plaintive and self-pitying, and it was obvious to everyone that if he had a north star, it was just to be liked. He was ever uncomprehending about why everyone did not like him, or why it should be so difficult to get everyone to like him. He might be happy throughout the day as a parade of union steel workers or CEOs trooped into the White House, with the president praising his visitors and them praising him, but that good cheer would sour in the evening after several hours of cable television. Then he would get on the phone, and in unguarded ramblings to friends and others, conversations that would routinely last for thirty or forty minutes, and could go much longer, he would vent, largely at the media and his staff. In what was termed by some of the self-appointed Trump experts around him—and everyone was a Trump expert—he seemed intent on “poisoning the well,” in which he created a loop of suspicion, disgruntlement, and blame heaped on others. When the president got on the phone after dinner, it was often a rambling affair. In paranoid or sadistic fashion, he’d speculate on the flaws and weaknesses of each member of his staff. Bannon was disloyal (not to mention he always looks like shit). Priebus was weak (not to mention he was short—a midget). Kushner was a suck-up. Spicer was stupid (and looks terrible too). Conway was a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Washington. His callers, largely because they found his conversation

Steve Bannon was running the Steve Bannon White House, Jared Kushner was running the Michael Bloomberg White House, and Reince Priebus was running the Paul Ryan White House.

One of Jared Kushner’s many new patrons was Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, whom Kushner had gotten to know when, on the banks of the River Jordan in 2010, they both attended the baptism of Grace and Chloe Murdoch, the young daughters of Rupert Murdoch and his then wife, Wendi.

(The Kushner position was not helped by the fact that the president had been gleefully telling multiple people that Jared could solve the Middle East problem because the Kushners knew all the crooks in Israel.)

there were many contacts during the campaign and the transition between Trump associates and Russians—in person, on the phone, and via text and email. Many of these interactions were with Ambassador Kislyak, who was thought to help oversee Russian intelligence operations in the United States, but they included other Russian officials and agents as well. For example, Roger Stone, the longtime Trump political advisor who claimed that he was in touch with Julian Assange, suggested in August 2016 that information about John Podesta was going to come out. In October, Stone hinted Assange and WikiLeaks were going to release material that would be damaging to my campaign, and later admitted to also exchanging direct messages over Twitter with Guccifer 2.0, the front for Russian intelligence, after some of those messages were published by the website The Smoking Gun. We also know now that in December 2016, Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, met with Sergey Gorkov, the head of a Kremlin-controlled bank that is under U.S. sanctions and tied closely to Russian intelligence. The Washington Post caused a sensation with its report that Russian officials were discussing a proposal by Kushner to use Russian diplomatic facilities in America to communicate secretly with Moscow. The New York Times reported that Russian intelligence attempted to recruit Carter Page, the Trump foreign policy advisor, as a spy back in 2013 (according to the report, the FBI believed Page did not know that the man who approached him was a spy). And according to Yahoo News, U.S. officials received intelligence reports that Carter Page met with a top Putin aide involved with intelligence. Some Trump advisors failed to disclose or lied about their contacts with the Russians, including on applications for security clearances, which could be a federal crime. Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied to Congress about his contacts and later recused himself from the investigation. Michael Flynn lied about being in contact with Kislyak and then changed his story about whether they discussed dropping U.S. sanctions. Reporting since the election has made clear that Trump and his top advisors have little or no interest in learning about the Russian covert operation against American democracy.

Trump was effusive in his praise for Kushner. “Jared’s gotten the Arabs totally on our side. Done deal,” he assured one of his after-dinner callers before leaving on the trip. “It’s going to be beautiful.” “He believed,” said the caller, “that this trip could pull it out, like a twist in a bad movie.

When the president got on the phone after dinner, it was often a rambling affair. In paranoid or sadistic fashion, he’d speculate on the flaws and weaknesses of each member of his staff. Bannon was disloyal (not to mention he always looks like shit). Priebus was weak (not to mention he was short—a midget). Kushner was a suck-up. Spicer was stupid (and looks terrible too). Conway was a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Washington.

But, the piece de resistance is Jared Kushner securing a $2 billion investment from a fund led by the Saudi Crown prince

All these factors have made the ability to influence the deliberations within the admissions office infinitely more valuable. An annual donation to the college fund or attendance at cocktails with alumni and prominent professors is not enough. For the very, very rich, a pledge big enough to put their name on a building will do the trick, as will a seven- or eight-figure gift. Jared Kushner’s father famously donated $2.5 million to Harvard in the 1990s, and lo and behold, his son was admitted, despite middling grades in high school.

Gise had deep experience in the way the government worked and was privy to some of the most advanced and secretive technology of his day. During those summers on the ranch, Bezos says that his grandfather would tell him stories about the missile defense systems he worked on during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. That made a deep impression on the young Bezos. Today, among the Silicon Valley titans, he is one of the most pro-government CEOs. Amazon’s cloud computing business has won multibillion-dollar contracts from the Pentagon and the CIA. The significance of that business to Amazon is one reason why, in 2018, Bezos put his new second headquarters in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., and why he paid $23 million for an old textile museum in D.C.’s swish Kalorama area—his neighbors are the Obamas and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump

My main point was that we live in a culture where everyone working for President Trump is brazenly referred to as a White Supremacist or a Nazi, even Jewish advisors like Jared Kushner.

Oscar Health, the health insurance provider founded by Josh Kushner, Jared’s brother, had a brand new Powered by We office.

The coronavirus finally began to enter the consciousness of Trump’s reelection campaign. On the morning of February 28, Jared Kushner spoke by phone with Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager. “We need more visuals,” Parscale told Kushner. Trump should be “standing in front of amazing things. Put the white coat on. Look at the vaccine being made. Show America we’re doing stuff.” That day the stock market fell for the seventh day in a row, reaching its worst week since 2008. Later that day at a rally in South Carolina, Trump said, “The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that, right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it.” He called Democrats’ criticism of his handling of the virus “their new hoax,” after the Russian investigation and impeachment, and their “single talking point.

On June 9, 2016, for example, a Russian lawyer met with senior Trump Campaign officials Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and campaign chairman Paul Manafort to deliver what the email proposing the meeting had described as "official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary.

On June 9, 2016, for example, a Russian lawyer met with senior Trump Campaign officials Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and campaign chairman Paul Manafort to deliver what the email proposing the meeting had described as "official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary." The materials were offered to Trump Jr. as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." The written communications setting up the meeting showed that the Campaign anticipated receiving information from Russia that could assist candidate Trump's electoral prospects, but the Russian lawyer's presentation did not provide such information.

She’s got the biggest set of balls in the room.” In 2006, it would be Sater who took Ivanka on a scouting trip to Moscow, and it would be Sater who, while they were on a private tour of the Kremlin, pleaded with a member of Vladimir Putin’s security detail to allow her to sit, briefly, in the Russian president’s chair.

Then again, Jared Kushner once ordered The New York Observer to create a ranking website called “Socialite Slapdown,” after he bought the newspaper at the age of twenty-five, so perhaps this is the inclination of status-obsessed youth, rather than fodder for the debate over old media versus new.

General Kelly, the homeland security secretary and retired four-star Marine general, was furious when he learned that the White House was working on a compromise on immigration for “Dreamers”—a central issue in the immigration debate. Dreamers are immigrant children brought to the United States by their parents who as adults had entered illegally. Under the 2012 legislation called DACA—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—President Obama had given 800,000 Dreamers protection from deportation and made work permits available to them, hoping to bring them out of the shadow economy and give them an American identity. Kelly, a hard-liner on immigration, was supposed to be in charge of these matters now. But Jared Kushner had been working a backchannel compromise. He had been inviting Senator Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who was number two in his party’s leadership, and Lindsey Graham to his office to discuss a compromise. Graham later asked Kelly, “Didn’t Jared tell you we’ve been working on this for months? We’ve got a fix.” Kelly called Bannon. “If the son-in-law is going to run it, then have the son-in-law run it. I don’t need to run it. I need to come see the president. I’m not doing this anymore. I’m not going to be up there and be blindsided and humiliated on something that I’ve got to be in the loop on.” Bannon believed the administration owned the hard-line immigration posture—except for Trump himself. “He’s always been soft on DACA. He believes the left-wing thing. They’re all valedictorians. They’re all Rhodes Scholars. Because Ivanka over the years has told him that.” Kelly voiced his distress to Priebus, who along with Bannon feared Kelly might quit. “Get Kelly some time on the calendar,” Bannon proposed. “Let him come see the boss and light Jared up. Because this is Jared’s shit, doing stuff behind people’s back.” Priebus didn’t do it. “Get it on the fucking calendar,” Bannon insisted. Priebus continued to stall. It would expose disorganization in the White House. “What are you talking about?” Bannon asked. This was laughable! Of course Priebus didn’t have control of Jared. And people were always going behind someone’s back. So Bannon and Priebus both told Kelly, We’ll take care of it. To go to the president would cause unnecessary consternation. We’ll make sure it won’t happen again and you’re going to be in the loop. Kelly, team player for the moment, didn’t push it further. When he later mentioned it obliquely in the president’s presence, Trump didn’t respond. Lindsey Graham wandered into Bannon’s West Wing office. “Hey, here’s the deal. You want your wall?” Trump would get wall funding in exchange for the Dreamers. “Stop,” Bannon said. A deal on the Dreamers was amnesty. “We will never give amnesty for one person. I don’t care if you build 10 fucking walls. The wall ain’t good enough. It’s got to be chain migration.” Chain migration, formally called the family reunification policy, allowed a single legal immigrant to bring close family members into the United States—parents, children, a spouse and, in some cases, siblings. These family members would have a path to legal permanent residency or citizenship. They might be followed by a “chain” of their own spouses, children, parents or siblings. Two thirds (68 percent) of legal permanent residents entered under family reunification or chain migration in 2016. This was at the heart of Trump’s and Bannon’s anti-immigration stance: They wanted to stop illegal immigration and limit legal immigration. Bannon wanted a new, stricter policy. Graham and he were not able to come close to agreement.

Great. It will likely be Paul Manafort, my brother in law [Jared Kushner] and me. 725 Fifth Avenue 25th floor.

We’ve read enough books.

Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, donated $2.5 million to Harvard in 1998, the year that Jared applied, to ensure his acceptance.

Jared has not only a political conflict of interest by serving as a White House adviser on the Middle East, but a financial one.32 It is also a humanitarian conflict of interest. As Netanyahu transforms Israel into a more hard-right state, employing extreme violence against Palestinians and lobbing vitriolic rhetoric against liberal Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora, extremist rabbis have flourished—and Kushner favors them. In 2018, Ivanka and Jared were blessed by Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, who calls black people “monkeys” and believes that non-Jews exist in Israel solely to be

The Jared Kushner Security Crisis exists in a perpetual cycle of déjà news, with documentation of his lawlessness recirculating without repercussions.

After exchanging niceties, I started the meeting right where Abbas and Trump had left off during their May visit, and asked Abbas whether he had made progress on the details of an initial proposal. He said they were willing to take steps that they hadn’t made with anyone else—they would be incredibly flexible on the land. But they needed to know exactly what percentage of the disputed territory they would get, and they wanted us to get Israel to propose a detailed map. If we could get them a map, they would be flexible, and everything else would be easy, Abbas pledged. I asked him if they had an initial offer on the land issue, but as I tried to drill down, Abbas wasn’t willing to talk specifics. He delivered the same set of diplomatic platitudes he’d conveyed to Trump several weeks earlier. Our conversation circled back around to my request for him to share concrete details about a land proposal he could accept. Again, he refused. I started to see why people were so skeptical of our efforts: Abbas was a savvy diplomat who was unfailingly polite and expressed a desire to make progress, but he appeared unwilling to let our negotiation reach a starting point. He said repeatedly that he had a lot of new ideas and would be flexible, but he then just rehashed the same general demands the Palestinians had requested for decades. “I’m going to go back to the president, who’s not a very patient person,” I said. “He’s going to ask me where we are on the deal, and I’m going to tell him that the Israelis are engaged and constructive, but you guys came back and weren’t willing to be flexible at all. Is that the message you want me to relay?” Abbas insisted that he wanted to be flexible, but then it was more of the same. I wasn’t sure whether he didn’t know how to make a deal, or if he just didn’t want to. Sensing my exasperation, Abbas made what I perceived to be a factitious offer: he seemed to imply that if I didn’t like the way things were going, then he would simply give back the keys to the West Bank and let the US run things. “Sure, I’ll take the keys,” I retorted. I sensed Greenblatt shifting uncomfortably in his chair, like he was trying to tell me, telepathically, You can’t say that.

Palestinians are a force within the hallways of the United Nations, so when the General Assembly voted on the resolution, I considered the forty four countries that either abstained or voted against it to be a positive indicator that we were forging strategic partnerships, using our leverage, and slowly shifting the paradigm in the Middle East.

To my surprise, our conversation shifted to the relationship between Israel and the Arab world more broadly. We had an eye-opening discussion about the history of the region and how the conflict had reached its current state, which was far more nuanced and fair-minded than I had expected. We exchanged ideas about how we could improve the relationship between Israel and the Arab world. In the seventy years since Israel declared independence, only Egypt and Jordan had made peace and established diplomatic relations with it, in a move known in diplomatic circles as “normalization.” The remainder of the Arab League, and many other Muslim countries around the globe, had refused to recognize Israel as a sovereign nation. This meant that these countries had no diplomatic relations with Israel, including no official travel, communication, business, or commerce with the Jewish state. At one point, MBS and MBZ acknowledged that the allies of their countries were the allies of Israel, and that the enemies of their countries were the enemies of Israel. When I asked them point-blank if they would be open to normalizing, they expressed a desire to make progress on the Palestinian issue, but did not express animosity toward Israel. I sought their advice on how to approach the problem, given Abbas’s intractability. They implied that if I could get Israel to agree to a credible plan that included a Palestinian state, access to al-Aqsa Mosque, and investments to improve the lives of the Palestinian people, that could change the dynamics. They indicated that if the Palestinians rejected the plan, they would be even more open-minded.

No one had ever come close to a real solution that could be signed and implemented. Those who had gone before had made sincere efforts, but they were more focused on managing the political reaction to their negotiations than they were on producing detailed proposals that would have a practical impact. I decided to test a new approach: I wouldn’t try to dodge the details. Instead, I would embrace them. I asked my team to make a comprehensive “issues list” that explained the major points of contention between the two sides. This would help me understand the granular differences between the two parties. I would then work through this issues list with leaders in the Middle East to hear their perspectives and find concrete resolutions. This was how we approached transactions in business, and it made sense to apply the same technique here.

As we drove from Jerusalem to Ramallah, Greenblatt reminded me, “Don’t say that we’re for a ‘two-state solution,’ because it means different things to different people.” It was good advice, and I decided to avoid the term until we had defined what it meant to be a state. When we arrived, we were ushered through a maze of stairways into a small room that had regal chairs arranged for a diplomatic meeting. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas entered, proceeded to the front of the room, and shook our hands. He was staffed by his top negotiators: Major General Majed Faraj, a trustworthy and insightful member of Abbas’s inner circle and head of the Palestinian Security Forces; and Saeb Erekat, a loquacious and always aggrieved diplomat who had been the lead negotiator for twenty-five years but had little to show for his efforts. As they served us tea, I glanced in the direction of the Palestinian leader. Abbas sat hunched over in his seat, looking every bit of his eighty-plus years. He smoked constantly, so every few minutes he would pull a cigarette from the table, put it in his mouth, and wait for an attendant to light it. I thought that Abbas seemed more like a king than the representative of an historically downtrodden refugee population.

Shortly after Trump assigned me the Middle East peace file, I asked Kissinger how he would approach the job. He recommended that rather than trying to achieve a grand deal, I should focus on creating progress through short-term agreements. In 1974, as Israeli and Arab forces fought for control of the Golan Heights, he had negotiated a cease-fire.15 The text of the deal made it explicitly clear that the agreement was “not a peace agreement.”16 Even so, Kissinger explained, it had become a new status quo over the last five decades. Permanent peace deals make for challenging domestic politics in the Middle East, he said, but if you can get rivals to agree to a short-term pact, or even a change of the status quo, it will last. Kissinger also warned me to resist efforts to run foreign policy out of the State Department. “You always have to run the foreign policy in the White House,” he said. “If the White House loses foreign policy to the State Department, you will never get anything done.

My second piece of advice was to get rid of Steve Bannon. “He has lost his mind, wants everything to be a conflict, and he’s leaking to the press all day.” Kelly assured me that he had already taken steps to take care of that. On August 18 the president fired Bannon. Stephen Miller joked to Hope and me, “I have a plan to split up Steve Bannon’s extensive workload. Hope, you leak to Jonathan Swan at Axios. Jared, you call Mike Bender from the Wall Street Journal. I’ll call Jeremy Peters from the New York Times, and . . . we’re done.

I'm not sure they have any strategic concept at all. They're just trying to do it, as Jared Kushner said, you know, get them to "yes", and then you can work out the details. Really, you can't do that if it's a zero-sum game, which a lot of this has been posed as. I mean, the trick is to take the zero sum game and overturn it and make it into something where both sides can gain. (Excerpt from interview "Amb. Chas Freeman & Trita Parsi: Can the U.S. Finally Stop Netanyahu?")

To get the transition on track, I quietly reached out to Chris Liddell, a former chief financial officer for both Microsoft and General Motors who had been executive director of the Romney Readiness Project. Liddell volunteered to help immediately. He arrived less than twenty-four hours later, the day before Thanksgiving, and worked through the holiday. Liddell became a trusted friend and confidant and was one of the few people who served in the White House for all four years of the presidency.

was far from the only person Bannon turned against. During the transition, Bannon expressed frustration that Kellyanne Conway inserted herself in discussions and leaked to the press to constantly overstate her role. Bannon bet that he could engineer her exit in the first three months. He was convinced that she wouldn’t pass a White House drug test, and he didn’t hide his disappointment when she did.

It quickly became obvious that the White House was very different from my experience in the private sector. Bureaucracy, egos, and people’s obsession with holding on to power stifled collaboration and progress on policy goals. In one instance Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs president appointed to lead the National Economic Council, pulled me aside. “Bannon is leaking on me nonstop,” he said. “I’m not going to take this. I know how to fight dirty.

Around the same time, the media ran a series of stories on Ivanka, claiming that because her business had previously applied for trademarks in China, she was profiting from her government position. In reality, following the 2016 election, numerous companies in China had filed hundreds of trademark applications to exploit Ivanka’s name and brand on products completely unrelated to her. On March 8, the headline of a Washington Post article read, “From Diet Pills to Underwear: Chinese Firms Scramble to Grab Ivanka Trump Trademark.” The article went on to say that “an astounding 258 trademark applications were lodged under variations of Ivanka, Ivanka Trump and similar-sounding Chinese characters between Nov. 10 and the end of last year.” Ivanka had a successful business and owned hundreds of trademarks globally before her father ran for public office, and in May and June of 2016, after Trump entered the race, she submitted a number of additional trademark applications in an effort to protect her name in countries where trademark theft was rampant. Ivanka’s applications had been caught up in the Chinese bureaucracy for a full year. When several of the requests were approved around the time of Xi’s visit, the media tried to make it sound nefarious, but Ivanka had no control over the timing and was merely doing her best to prevent Chinese companies from counterfeiting her brand and deceiving customers.

During dinner that night with President Xi, the national security team let the president know that the strike was going very well. Fifty-eight of fifty-nine missiles “severely degraded or destroyed their target,” and no Russian soldiers had been harmed. It was still nighttime in Syria, and we didn’t expect to have conclusive satellite images for another few hours. When an aide whispered an update into Trump’s ear, he immediately told Xi the news. Xi couldn’t hide his shock. He was clearly impressed that Trump was so relaxed in such a consequential moment, and I got the sense that he didn’t know what to make of Trump. The Chinese had never dealt with anyone like him before. No one had.

Part of what ultimately made Trump successful in his foreign policy objectives was that leaders found him unpredictable. He built warm rapport with his counterparts and approached each situation with an open mind. He was willing to change course at any minute and take calculated risks. His opponents never could tell whether he was bluffing or making a serious threat.

When we met with Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi, he asked to see me one-on-one. The prime minister took seriously Trump’s public statements that he wanted countries to pay a larger share of the defense cost. Al-Abadi said that he was willing to pay something for US protection, but essentially hoped for the “cheapest deal.” We probably could have gotten 20 percent of Iraq’s oil revenues in exchange for our military support, but Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis thought Trump was crazy for suggesting such a proposition and stalled the discussion indefinitely. In another instance, Mattis and his leadership team came to talk to the president about their budget and claimed that $603 billion—the largest request since 2012—wasn’t enough to keep the country safe. They needed $609 billion to achieve “military readiness.” “So with one percent more, you are military ready, but with one percent less you’re not?” Trump queried skeptically. After the brass had filed out, Trump pulled me aside and remarked, “These guys may be the best at killing people, but they sure don’t understand money.

Many authors—including former senior administration officials—have tried to explain Trump through a conventional lens. Most of these accounts fail to convey how Trump thinks, why he acts the way he does, and what really happened in the Oval Office. The truth was often hiding in plain sight. Through his untraditional style, Trump delivered results that were previously unimaginable: five major trade deals, tax cuts for working families, massive deregulation, the lowest unemployment in fifty years, criminal justice reform, a COVID-19 vaccine in less than a year, confronting China, defeating ISIS, no new wars, and peace deals in the Middle East.

remember one meeting that typified the resistance Trump faced in Washington from both Republicans and Democrats. A veteran of the George W. Bush administration came to see me to discuss US-China trade policy. While he fully agreed with our aims on China, he thought that using tariffs was a grave mistake. When I asked him what he would recommend instead, he suggested more rounds of talks. I said the first thing that came to mind: “So you want us to accomplish something you couldn’t by doing it the same way you did it?” For the Washington establishment, the answer to that question was a resounding yes. Many Beltway insiders are experts at pointing out problems, but they’re even better at shutting down solutions. When confronted with the potential risks of change, they play it safe for fear that any disruption to the current system will jeopardize their political careers. This explains why even some of Trump’s own cabinet members clashed with him and those of us who believed that it was time to take calibrated risks and deliver more opportunities for the American people. Instead of spending endless energy diagnosing the problem, I focused on clearly defining the optimal solution and then worked backwards to reach the best possible outcome.

Second, I learned that our political differences are not always as insurmountable as we think. Ordinarily, the Washington game revolves around the party out of power trying to stop the party in power from accomplishing its priorities. While initially I found this frustrating, I learned to keep moving ahead and to focus on the long game. Almost all of the greatest accomplishments of the administration involved former adversaries coming together to make the lives of normal people better. Rather than starting from two different sides of the table on any given issue—from criminal justice reform to peace deals in the Middle East—I tried to bring everyone to the same side of the table to agree on shared goals and search for win-win solutions. I wasn’t always successful, but it is the responsibility of those in power to try. We can’t solve problems by talking only to those who agree with us. For anyone who’s looking to advance bipartisanship, I hope this book provides insight into how it’s possible—and why it often fails.