Jared Kushner or Mr. Ivanka Trump is a strange sort of guy. We did not even know what his voice sounded like for quite some time, and then it failed to impress. We do know that he and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) hang out on unscheduled trips filled with cozy talks through the night. We do not know what they talked about, but Kushner is talking Tuesday, defending Donald Trump and the family.
Congress thought that Kushner might be naive and at risk, but look at who his father-in-law is. His own father was sent to prison for hooking up his own brother-in-law with a prostitute, taping it, and then giving the tape to his wife (the elder Kushner’s sister). Nice.
Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern said, according to The Baltimore Sun:
‘I’m not only troubled—I am stunned by the friendship. It looks bad. It smells bad. It is bad.’
Kushner made his appearance in The Washington Post investigative journalist Bob Woodward’s new book Rage. The golden son-in-law was impressed by Trump:
‘[He knows] how to trigger the other side by picking fights with them where he makes them take stupid positions.’
Kushner told Woodward the best way to make sense of Trump was to observe the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland:
‘If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will get you there.’
Kushner told the book’s author that the reason Trump tweet-bashed Baltimore was to bait Democrats. He was hoping to start an embarrassing feud. He claimed it was politically “crazy” to take Baltimore’s side. The comments resulted in a torrent of city representatives’ responses. It did indeed ignite a long-running war of words between the Republican White House and the Democratically-run city.
Kushner called Woodward’s book false:
‘He’s got tapes of everything, I have tapes of everything. That was never implied in that regard.’
Woodward responded to the veiled threat on The Today Show:
‘If you look at Jared Kushner’s quote, he said, well, there were people in the campaign and then suggested he was referring to these ‘overconfident idiots’ in the campaign. In the transcript, it’s clear he’s talking about the administration. The administration is not the campaign.’
Woodward added:
‘It is kind of this whole idea, you can take facts and kind of turn them and suggest. I’m quite interested in, when Jared says he has tapes, I have tapes. I taped him with his permission. I suspect that he was taping me. He did not extend the courtesy to me that he was taping the conversation.’
Woodward said:
‘He says that Trump executed a “hostile takeover” of the Republican Party. That the platforms are written by people who are extremists and it is a disparagement of the Republican Party.’
The author continued:
‘Do they look at Trump as a hostile takeover? Certainly, he’s different. But is it hostile? We will be dealing more and in depth with what Jared Kushner had to say.’
Kushner’s quotes are peppered throughout Rage. He is apparently awed by his father-in-law:
‘[He knows] how to trigger the other side by picking fights with them where he makes them take stupid positions.’
Kushner was talking to an associate and said:
‘When he did the tweet on Elijah Cummings, the president was saying, this is great, let them defend Baltimore. The Democrats are getting so crazy, They’re basically defending Baltimore. When you get to the next election, he’s tied them to all these stupid positions because they’d rather attack him than actually be rational.’
Former state Democratic Party Chair Rockeymoore Cummings said about Baltimore’s lawsuit against Kushner’s apartment complexes there, according to The Vanity Fair magazine:
‘The suit alleged Westminster used “unfair or deceptive [to] victimize consumers, many of whom are financially vulnerable, at all stages of offering and leasing.
‘[The firm was] charging improper fees and threatening evictions to force payment. Baltimore Circuit Judge Philip Jackson issued a one-page order agreeing with the company that the suit shouldn’t proceed.’
Twitter world lit up after Kushner spoke. Check out some of our favorite responses.
The Mueller Report Adventures: In Bite-Sizes on this Facebook page. These quick, two-minute reads interpret the report in normal English for busy people. Mueller Bite-Sizes uncovers what is essentially a compelling spy mystery. Interestingly enough, Mueller Bite-Sizes can be read in any order.