‘Conservatives are very nervous about Chris Christie,’ says the leader of one activist group, with judgeships and top White House jobs potentially at stake.
But behind the scenes, there’s an insurrection-in-the-making among powerful conservative groups in Washington that are skeptical of Christie’s leadership and want to exert influence over the process of filling roughly 4,000 jobs as part of a new administration, to say nothing of top White House slots and judgeships.
.. “For his judicial nominees as the New Jersey governor, he appointed a bunch of liberals, or he treated the nominations like political payoff positions. It is the type of approach that would be devastating for Trump to have Christie, as attorney general, picking judges or applying the same approach to fill key regulatory positions in the EPA or Treasury Department.”
.. one person on the Trump transition told POLITICO that there is simmering tension between the team’s conservative and moderate Republicans, who have vastly different visions for a future Trump White House.
.. Other conservative activists say they feel best about Christie’s leadership of the transition team when he’s surrounded by conservatives, such as Becky Norton Dunlop and Ed Feulner of The Heritage Foundation.
“Looking at the totality of the transition team, I am comfortable,” another leader of a conservative activist group said.
.. Reservations about Christie persist among some in Trump’s inner circle, including with son-in-law Jared Kushner Because, as U.S. Attorney, Christie successfully prosecuted Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, for tax evasion and witness tampering.
.. Trump is a Northeasterner. He likes Christie and [Rudy] Giuliani. They talk like him. It’s a cultural thing.”
.. As far as Bridgegate is concerned, there’s a general sense in Trump world that Christie can survive the courtroom drama unfolding in New Jersey, barring any devastating revelations. “His scandal in relation to both candidates’ current issues is a walk in the park,” one Republican said. “As far as scandals go, Christie’s looks the least damaging.”
..Clay Johnson, the head of George W. Bush’s transition team, told reporters at a recent even:, “Gov. Christie is the chairman of the transition, but the person driving all of the work is Rich Bagger.”
Tensions Deepen Between Donald Trump and R.N.C.
The Republican National Committee had high hopes that Donald J. Trump would deliver a compassionate and measured speech about immigration on Wednesday, and prepared to lavish praise on the candidate on the party’s Twitter account.
.. The evening tore a painful new wound in Mr. Trump’s relationship with the Republican National Committee, imperiling his most important remaining political alliance.
Mr. Priebus and his organization have been steadfastly supportive of Mr. Trump, defending him in public and spending millions of dollars to aid him. But the collaboration between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Mr. Priebus’s committee has grown strained over the last month
.. There is no prospect of a full public breach between the Trump campaign and the R.N.C. because both sides rely on a joint fund-raising arrangement crucial to their election efforts.
.. Mr. Trump, who has struggled to raise money, is dependent on his party’s national committee to perform many of the basic functions of a presidential campaign.
.. Within Mr. Trump’s circle, there is impatience with what advisers view as a cautious and conventional party bureaucracy, ill-equipped to accommodate Mr. Trump’s improvisational style
.. power is so divided among strategists and members of the Trump family that the process of making even simple decisions is laborious and unpredictable.
.. Mr. Priebus, who has a warm relationship with Mr. Trump and speaks with him daily
.. Throughout the campaign, Mr. Priebus and his committee have been broadly deferential to Mr. Trump, declining to criticize many of his most provocative remarks and quickly designating him as the party’s presumptive nominee in May. For Mr. Trump, Mr. Priebus has appeared to be a patient and accommodating partner, eager to promote his campaign and willing to rebuke Republicans who have declined to support him.
.. In a tone that several witnesses described as imperious and aggressive, Mr. Kushner suggested that the national committee might not be giving Mr. Trump all the support he was due.
.. Ms. Walsh told Mr. Kushner that the committee had a responsibility to take a broad view of its finances, mapping out a budget for the entire party and ensuring it could remain operational for the rest of the year, and could not solely focus on Mr. Trump’s needs.
.. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who has become one of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers
.. “The R.N.C. is giving him a lot of support,” Mr. Giuliani said. “He doesn’t have the united Republican Party behind him in the way that a more establishment candidate would.”
Paul Manafort Quits Donald Trump’s Campaign After Tumultuous Run
Mr. Manafort was also dogged by reports about secretive efforts he made to help the former pro-Russian government in Ukraine, where he has worked on and off over several years. Those news reports were blotting out much of the press coverage of the candidate this week. And they contributed to Mr. Manafort becoming viewed with trepidation by Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and a major force within the campaign
.. When he joined the campaign, he was seen as a peer to Mr. Trump, 70, and someone whose advice Mr. Trump might heed. In fact, Mr. Manafort had pushed for the selection of Mike Pence, the Republican governor of Indiana, as Mr. Trump’s running mate.
.. Aides have tried a range of efforts to reign in his impulses, including adding different travel companions.
.. After he was hired by Mr. Trump, Mr. Manafort helped quash uprisings among Republican delegates that, even if they wouldn’t imperil Mr. Trump’s ability to get the nomination, would have been an embarrassing distraction at the convention.
Ivanka and Jared’s Power Play
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.”