Voices: I read Jared Kushner’s memoir ‘Breaking History’ and I have to admit that Trump was right

Last year, two intrepid CNN reporters revealed that associates of former president Donald Trump were unhappy with the news that Jared Kushner was writing a book.

Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law turned White House adviser, was reportedly given a seven-figure advance for a memoir of the four years he spent working in the White House for a single dollar per year. The ex-president was said to be perturbed about that — as well as worried that Kushner might be planning to take credit for Trump’s achievements.

Your correspondent spent four years reporting on the Trump White House, authoring numerous fact-checks, countless explainers, and all sorts of other journalistic forms documenting the 45th president’s myriad utterances and the truth or falsehood thereof.

Usually, there was little — if any — truth to whatever the ex-president had to say on any given day. No, China was not paying the US millions of dollars because of the tariffs he imposed. Windmills do not cause cancer. The phone call was definitely not perfect. And the 2020 election was not stolen.

And yet, I’m going to say something I rarely had occasion to say between January 2017 and January 2020. Just four words that I must warn may be shocking to you if you read much of my coverage of the previous administration.

Please, take a moment to compose yourself — take some deep breaths. Breathe in, breathe out.

Are you ready? Good.

Donald Trump was right. Jared really does want to take the credit. And he showed that pretty plainly in the pages of Breaking History: A White House Memoir.

Although Kushner, a first-time author, writes fawningly about the ex-president (he is still married to Ivanka, after all), he manages to find ways to remind the reader just how important he was. Did you know, dear reader, that Bibi Netanyahu once tried to borrow Kushner’s own copy of Great Expectations? The then-once-and-future Israeli prime minister was on a speaking tour during his brief time out of public office when he stayed at the Kushner’s New Jersey home. He was jetlagged, and wanted to borrow the book in order to get to sleep. But Kushner informed him that the Dickens book was a gift from a girlfriend (not Ivanka), and Netanyahu relented and promised not to touch it. How wonderfully important Jared is, indeed, to have held sway over such a man.

But what about what Jared has to say about his father-in-law?

When Kushner addresses the insurrectionist riot Trump incited in hopes of keeping himself (and presumably Kushner) in the White House for a second term against voters’ wishes, he writes that he was “confident” that Trump “would have prevented” the riot “from the beginning” if they’d “anticipated violence”. And the narrative continues from there. Nothing, it seems, was ever Trump’s fault. Not the riot, not the countless dead from Covid, nothing.

He even adopts his father-in-law’s vocabulary for the long-running and, according to the Department of Justice Inspector General’s Office, totally legitimate probe into ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Russian government. It’s all a “hoax”, of course.

Kushner describes everything that happened between 2017 and 2021 as one of two things: the results of Trump’s decisiveness — and therefore the unparalleled advice he got from his son-in-law, who (in his telling) sacrificed so much to serve — or the evil machinations of slimy leakers and infighters who didn’t understand Trump’s brilliance (or his own).

In one telling passage, he describes his nemesis — ex-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly — and Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, as “military heroes who devoted their lives to America and served with sacrifice and distinction”. But in the very next sentence, Kushner dismisses them as having “decided that they knew better than the president of the United States”.

Nowhere does Kushner even consider the possibility that the two US Marine Corps combat veterans did know better than a draft-dodging real estate developer — or, more importantly, his son-in-law. In other words: If you’re looking for actual insight into the White House under Donald J Trump, look elsewhere. Breaking History has a lot of things, but perspective isn’t one of them.