How the patrician couple came to have an outsized influence on a populist Presidential campaign.
Ivanka, who is thirty-four, is Donald’s clear favorite. She lends a veneer of professionalism to the campaign, giving speeches that portray her father, who once told New York, referring to women, “You have to treat ’em like shit,” as a Lean In-style feminist.
In early August, Trump, pressed to name a woman he might appoint to his Cabinet, could think of only one: his daughter.
.. Ivanka has counselled Trump on his rhetoric and his policy choices, and Jared was instrumental in the running-mate selection.
.. Ivanka and Jared are an unlikely couple to represent the ticked-off populism that has emerged as Trump’s Presidential theme. Sleek, tall, and patrician, they went to élite schools: he attended Harvard and New York University; she went to Georgetown and Wharton. They live on Park Avenue
.. For young people, Jared and Ivanka’s social circle includes a lot of old people, among them aging media figures such as Barbara Walters, Barry Diller, and Diane von Furstenberg. A friend of Jared’s told me that he’s a bit of a “chameleon”: “He’s really fascinating, in that he is a young, boyishly handsome guy who can act and talk like an old man.”
.. Donald Trump rails against the “rigged” political system that keeps people like Hillary Clinton in power. Yet Kushner’s parents have been among the most prominent funders of Democratic politicians on the East Coast. They were the largest donors to Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, and, despite the acrimony of the current campaign, Chelsea Clinton and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, are close friends of Ivanka and Jared.
.. In less than ten years, he created his own firm, Kushner Companies, and made it into one of the largest private landlords on the East Coast, with assets worth an estimated billion dollars, and including twenty-two thousand apartments in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, commercial properties, an insurance company, and a bank.
.. He was generous, making large donations to charities. “If you met him right now, you’d walk away saying, ‘He’s the most charming, nicest person I’ve ever met,’ ” an associate told me.
But Charlie had another side, which former associates describe as “threatening,” “nasty,” and “vindictive.” One former Kushner Companies executive said, “If you pissed him off, it was like somebody gave him drugs. He was like an animal, cursing and foaming at the mouth.”
.. But he had Trumpian qualities, such as a tendency to withhold payment from venders like contractors, cleaners, and architects, forcing them to accept a fraction of their fee. The former Kushner Companies executive told me, “Every week we’d have meetings at Charlie’s house, and we’d go through the bills—the larger bills and corporate bills. And he’d sign them, or he’d say, ‘Offer them forty per cent.’ Or ‘Offer them fifty per cent.’ ” This was a cost-saving measure, not unheard of among developers. “It was, Why pay someone a hundred per cent when you could pay a lot less?”
.. As with the defense industry and the financial industry, success on a large scale in real estate often depends on government connections.
.. The legal actions caught the attention of Chris Christie, a Republican who was then the U.S. Attorney for the state of New Jersey.
.. Kushner became furious with his younger sister, Esther Schulder, whom he believed was coöperating with Christie, and, in retaliation, he set a trap for her husband, Billy Schulder, a former Kushner Companies employee whom he resented for having had an affair at the office. He hired a prostitute, who, posing as a stranded motorist, approached Schulder at the Time to Eat Diner, in Bridgewater. Schulder then met her at the Red Bull Inn, on Route 22, where a camera installed in an alarm clock captured them in a sex act.
.. Students at the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy wore duct tape over their sweatshirts, to hide the family name.
.. He had attended Harvard, a circumstance that, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Daniel Golden described in “The Price of Admission,” may have been connected to a gift of $2.5 million that his parents pledged to the university, in 1998.
.. For a college student, Kushner was uncommonly pious and devoted to his family. He called his parents every day.
.. In 2007, soon after Charlie was released, the Kushners bought an office building, 666 Fifth Avenue, for $1.8 billion, much of it borrowed. It remains the highest price ever paid for a building in Manhattan.
.. Jared at the helm, the Kushners had managed a Gatsbyish reinvention—emerging from disgrace in New Jersey as up-and-comers in the glitzier world of Manhattan real estate.
.. the Observer gave Kushner a kind of access that money alone couldn’t. Soon after buying the paper, he had dinner with Rupert Murdoch
.. “I think Jared’s been the key in getting Rupert to come around to the idea of a Trump Presidency.”
.. These days, the Observer’s coverage of the rich and powerful includes stories like “21 Young New York Socialites You Should Know,” and the occasional negative article about people whose ties to the Kushners have frayed
.. “Jared, he’s human. He’s got people he likes and doesn’t like and is plotting and scheming. But Ivanka’s unusual. She’s a little bit like Bill Clinton. She seems to be on message one hundred per cent of the time.” It’s a comparison that Ivanka’s friend Chelsea Clinton has made as well. “She’s always aware of everyone around her and insuring that everyone is enjoying the moment,” Chelsea told Vogue last year. “It’s an awareness that in some ways reminds me of my dad.”