Where Jared’s words came from
From POLITICO
Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer is often referred to as “Bibi’s brain,” for his close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But according to a new book, he might sometimes play the role of “Jared’s brain,” too.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Jared Kushner was widely credited for the content and unusual style — a rare-at-the-time teleprompter moment — of his father-in-law’s speech in front of the hard-line Jewish lobbying group AIPAC.
But writer Emily Jane Fox, whose book “Born Trump” is set for release Tuesday, writes that it was Dermer who essentially dictated the speech for Kushner, who then loaded it into the teleprompter for Trump.
On a call with Kushner ahead of the speech, Fox writes, Dermer “talked for a solid hour about the U.N., about Iran, about hard lines and language that was very important to the Israelis, and about many people who would be in the audience that day.”
For Kushner, who was scrambling to put together a Middle East policy agenda for his father-in-law, Fox writes, Dermer’s lecture was like “getting your hands on the answer key the night before the final exam.”
The day after his conversation with Dermer, Fox writes, Kushner sent a copy of the speech over to Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson for review. Adelson promptly forwarded it back to Dermer. “The text Dermer read was like a transcript of what he had told Jared in their phone call, right down to the jokes,” Fox writes. “It was basically wholesale theft.”
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Dermer said he briefed Kushner, as he did top officials on many campaigns, but denied that the son-in-law took dictation. “The suggestion that I dictated Trump’s AIPAC speech to Jared Kushner is ridiculous,” Dermer said in a statement to POLITICO.
Three years after Trump officially announced his long-shot campaign for the presidency, interest in what, exactly, happened during that campaign has barely dissipated.
One of the most anticipated books that was expected to tell the definitive tale of how Trump won was a sequel to “Game Change” by the writers Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. That project, however, was canceled by Penguin Press after allegations of sexual harassment were made against Halperin.
The Trump team had participated at length in that project. At a dinner at the White House last year, sources said, Halperin sat at the table with the president, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Hope Hicks, Dan Scavino and Kellyanne Conway, among others, while they shared anecdotes about life on the campaign. Kushner popped in and out. Even former inner circle Trump aides who rarely speak to the media, like Keith Schiller and Johnny McEntee, were in the room and chiming in with nostalgic nuggets.
One person in the room said that Trump, himself, discussed at great length the night of the “Access Hollywood” tape release, and the day after. He reiterated that he had never considered dropping out because of it.
It’s not clear whether the material collected by Halperin and Heilemann will be repurposed in some way for another project. But for now, its absence has left some room for other writers to fill. Fox appears to be one of them.
Fox, a writer for Vanity Fair, interviewed 150 people for her chronicle of the Trump children, whom she tracks from childhood, through their teen years, to their roles on the campaign and transition (she leaves out Barron, Trump’s 12-year-old son). The book ends on inauguration weekend. It is not an authorized biography, but it’s not clear whether the family participated, in some way.
Three chapters are devoted to Ivanka Trump — one on her childhood; one on her relationship with Kushner; and one on the entire Kushner clan. Each of the other Trump children — Don Jr., Eric and Tiffany — gets one chapter apiece.
In a few short excerpts obtained by POLITICO, Fox portrays Kushner as a quiet but cutthroat player on his father-in-law’s campaign — a man who waffled between playing the moderate cop foil to his wild father-in-law, and pointing fingers at others at times, rather than shouldering any blame.
Kushner cribbing Israel’s talking points directly from Dermer seems to foreshadow an actual plagiarizing scandal that hit the campaign in Cleveland, at the Republican National Convention that year.
After Melania Trump lifted entire paragraphs in her convention speech from a speech delivered by Michelle Obama eight years earlier, Kushner was livid, and looking for a scapegoat, Fox writes.
At a hotel gym in Cleveland, according to the book, he approached a campaign staffer working out on an exercise bike and told him, “This was all [campaign chairman Paul] Manafort’s fault.” A month later, Manafort was canned, replaced with Conway. Kushner was quick to blame Manafort for the embarrassing convention screw-up, but, at other times, he wanted to take credit for serving as the real campaign manager, Fox writes. She notes that Kushner never considered Conway a real campaign manager in anything but name and has continued to take credit for that job himself — a sticking point of tension between the two that has never fully resolved.
During the campaign, Fox writes, Kushner would also carry out unpleasant tasks for his father-in-law, like phoning CNN President Jeff Zucker to complain about coverage that Trump believed was unfair.
In one phone call, Fox reports, Zucker lost his cool at Kushner, telling him to “go fuck yourself.” The two later made amends when Kushner visited him at his offices to establish a detente. It wasn't the only Trump-media feud that Kushner sought to reconcile. He also tried to broker a truce between Trump and the co-hosts of “Morning Joe,“ Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.
At a Trump Tower meeting during the transition, Trump told Scarborough that his then-girlfriend and co-host “makes you look like a little baby, Joe.” Trump then turned to Brzezinski and asked her, “Mika, why are you so tough on me?” When she tried to explain to him the damage that his critical tweets were inflicting on her family, Trump did a rare thing: He apologized.
“OK, let’s end the meeting right here because I’ve never heard him say that before,” Kushner said.
Trump might be the dominating figure in Kushner and Ivanka Trump's life. But the couple is also always contending with two other forceful, difficult parental personalities on the other side.
“Lady Macbeth,” is how Kushner’s mother, Seryl, was referred to by former staffers who worked for Kushner at the New York Observer, Fox writes. And Charles Kushner is portrayed as simultaneously controlling and loving to his family.
Part of how Charles Kushner maintains control over his children and grandchildren, Fox writes, is by showering them with his wealth. Jared Kushner’s parents have purchased multimillion-dollar apartments in Manhattan for each of their grandchildren, she writes. For now, the apartments sit in a trust called “Kinderlach,” the Yiddish word for “children."
Fox writes that Ivanka Trump also refers to Seryl and Charles as “mom” and “dad" — a detail that is unlikely to go unnoticed by or to please her actual father. As Fox notes, “Ivanka was essentially neglected by her parents as a child, so having parents around who think to buy her and her children long underwear when they are going to be outside in the cold for a long time, as Seryl did for Ivanka, Jared and their children to have for inauguration events, is appealing.”
If Trump was largely uninvolved in raising his children, he has taken a greater interest in their adult lives, working with them as partners at the Trump Organization and even expressing opinions about who they should date. Trump always wanted his eldest daughter to marry a professional athlete, Fox writes, but he may not have been surprised she ended up with someone like Kushner, whom her father considers an intellectual.
“My father always joked that I was going to marry a 90-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner,” Ivanka Trump jokes in an old interview unearthed by Fox and republished in the book.
A spokesperson responding on behalf of Kushner assailed the book.
"Although there are likely many others, we have seen just two stories from Emily Jane Fox's forthcoming book and both of them are false," said Peter Mirijanian, a spokesperson for Abbe Lowell, Kushner’s counsel. "Ron Dermer did not write the president’s spring 2016 speech to AIPAC. And the scene where Jared is said to have approached a campaign staffer in a hotel gym in Cleveland regarding the First Lady's speech is complete fiction. They never happened.”
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