Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump

by Vicky Ward

Overview

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The first explosive book about Javanka and their infamous rise to power

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are the self-styled Prince and Princess of America. Their swift, gilded rise to extraordinary power in Donald Trump’s White House is unprecedented and dangerous. In Kushner, Inc., investigative journalist Vicky Ward digs beneath the myth the couple has created, depicting themselves as the voices of reason in an otherwise crazy presidency, and reveals that Jared and Ivanka are not just the President’s chief enablers: they, like him, appear disdainful of rules, of laws, and of ethics. They are entitled inheritors of the worst kind; their combination of ignorance, arrogance, and an insatiable lust for power has caused havoc all over the world, and may threaten the democracy of the United States.

Ward follows their trajectory from New Jersey and New York City to the White House, where the couple’s many forays into policy-making and national security have mocked long-standing U.S. policy and protocol. They have pursued an agenda that could increase their wealth while their actions have mostly gone unchecked. In Kushner, Inc., Ward holds Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump accountable: she unveils the couple’s self-serving transactional motivations and how those have propelled them into the highest levels of the US government where no one, the President included, has been able to stop them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250185945
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/19/2019
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	584,928
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Vicky Ward is a New York Times bestselling author, investigative reporter, and magazine columnist. She is the author of the bestselling books The Liar’s Ball: The Extraordinary Saga of How one Building Broke the World’s Toughest Tycoons (Wiley) and The Devil’s Casino: Friendship, Betrayal and the High Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers (Wiley). She is an editor at large at HuffPost and HuffPost’s long-form magazine, Highline, as well as at Town & Country magazine. She was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair for eleven years, where she covered politics, finance, art, and culture.

Table of Contents

Prologue: America's Prince and Princess 1

Chapter 1 Rules Are Dangerous 4

Chapter 2 The Tuesday Beatings 13

Chapter 3 Family First 24

Chapter 4 She's Got the Biggest Set of Balls in the Room 32

Chapter 5 The Tower of Debt 43

Chapter 6 The Conversion 50

Chapter 7 "They Are Like Robots" 60

Chapter 8 A Most Convenient Candidate 70

Chapter 9 Making New Friends 80

Chapter 10 Is This That Bad? 89

Chapter 11 Kushner's Disappearing Act 102

Chapter 12 The Secretary of Everything 122

Chapter 13 The Anbang Bang 140

Chapter 14 St. Rex 144

Chapter 15 He'll Take Anything 157

Chapter 16 The Shock Felt Around the World 162

Chapter 17 "That Would Be a Felony" 171

Chapter 18 First Family 181

Chapter 19 The Newspaper Industry Is Out to Get Me 192

Chapter 20 Trump Is Different and I'm Different 196

Chapter 21 The Passover Revelation 207

Chapter 22 The Double-Dipper 210

Chapter 23 Charlie Barks and Bites 217

Chapter 24 Prison Reform, Mommy grams, and NAFTA 223

Chapter 25 Mr. Bone Saw and the Real Estate Agent 231

Epilogue: The Selfie President 236

Acknowledgments 241

Notes 243

Index 287

Editorial Reviews

03/25/2019

The Trump administration's premier power couple is a study in arrogance, incompetence, and corruption in this caustic exposé. Huffington Post writer Ward (The Liar's Ball) paints First Daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, both top advisers to President Trump, as poster-kids of overentitled, ethically dubious wealth. Ivanka, Ward reports, is "talented at telling self-serving bald lies" by posing as a moderate while doing little to rein in Trump's excesses; she was, he writes, neck-deep in Trump Organization deals with shady foreign investors, then exploited her presidential access to get advantages for her fashion business from foreign governments. Kushner, Ward contends, is awash in rules violations, such as failing to report meetings with Russian officials, and trades on his far-reaching government influence to get foreign investments for his family's real estate business. (Ward credits his interference in Middle East policy, motivated by a desire to wring investments from oil monarchies, with almost starting a war in the Persian Gulf.) Ward's rehash of the "Javanka" saga is well-researched but not well-presented; it's an eye-glazing maze of small-to-middling improprieties, with the thread often getting lost in the chaos of White House power plays and backstabbing. Still, Ward offers a useful, though dispiriting, guide to the ascendance of private business over the public interest in the Trump administration. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

2019-03-25
A dishy, skeptical portrait of Jared Kushner, the naive, overleveraged, and conflict-mired developer's son who has Donald Trump's ear.

Intermittently, anyway. A running theme of investigative reporter Ward's (The Liar's Ball: The Extraordinary Saga of How One Building Broke the World's Toughest Tycoons, 2014, etc.) book is that the husband of Trump's daughter Ivanka is so clumsily meddling that the president keeps him at arm's length. "Get rid of my kids, get them back to New York," Trump reportedly said of "Javanka" six months into his administration, after their presence became like sticky tar in the West Wing. How did Kushner, with no political or foreign policy experience, become the White House's point person on corporate innovation and peace in the Middle East? Thereon hangs a tail of greed, incompetence, desperation, and felonious behavior. Jared's father, Charlie, was a mercurial New Jersey developer who wasn't above tax fraud and blackmail to get ahead. (He was sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005.) Jared was key to restoring the family's good name, which entailed a role in the family real estate business, though he "was hardly ever in the office"; a job as publisher of the New York Observer, though journalism baffled him; and his marrying Ivanka, another scion of a developer with a dodgy history. When Jared doesn't seem out of his depth, he seems corrupt; much of Ward's story turns on his disreputable dealings with Saudi and Qatari leaders, perhaps pursued in hopes of covering the $1.2 billion mortgage on a Manhattan Kushner property. Many details here have been previously reported, and the author's efforts to elevate the book above a clip job rest mainly on a raft of juicy quotes delivered by anonymous sources. ("Jared is as sinister as Donald Trump," intones a "business associate.") As a portrait of Jared's character, the book's fiendish aura is hard to trust, but given the factual record, it's not out of bounds.

A handy primer on a troublesome Trump in-law, even setting its gossipy parts aside.

Kirkus Reviews