I was editor in chief of the New York Observer when he allegedly had stories removed from the digital archive in secret. That would be a page out of his father-in-law’s ‘fake news’ book.
Delegitimizing the media is an authoritarian’s signature, and Trump does it intentionally with this kind of malicious, dangerous labeling. His favorite longer-running appellation for journalism that is inconvenient is “fake news” — which is rich, coming from a man whose material success of the past two decades was a reality show on which he pretended to fire people who were not working for him and insisted the drama was real. This is part of who he is: an incorrigible liar who believes he can bend reality to his will simply by insisting loudly and repeatedly things are not what they are.
.. I learned a few months ago his son-in-law, for whom I worked as editor in chief of the New York Observer in 2011 and 2012, is as willing to undermine the work of journalists seeking to publish the truth as Trump is. I have written about what Jared Kushner was like to work for as a businessman, but I had an unexpected coda to my time there a few months ago when a technologist I had worked with confessed to me Kushner had asked him to delete stories that were unflattering to his friends and that he had done it.
.. He could have tried to talk to me about why he objected to the stories, which is a conversation media owners and editors have on occasion at nearly all publications, but he did not.
.. To be clear, the stories were published, initially — some of them in print, and all of them on the Web. The impetus behind deleting them after the fact was to erase the digital trail of the hard work the journalists had done, to undo the factual reality of what they had reported, as far as the public record was concerned.
.. the stories were deleted long enough after publication that the journalists and their editors — including me — would not miss them.
.. There are a number of other technical reasons you might not be able to find a story in the archive, but one that would never occur to any rational journalist, or even any reasonable person, is your boss, the owner of the paper, is stealthily destroying your work and damaging the credibility of his own media publication in the process. Even in the annals of terrible media owners, this is something that would normally be credible only to a conspiracy theorist.
.. If any of us had known our work was being deleted after publication, I am fairly certain there would have been a raft of resignations.
.. what appears to be Trump family values: an active hostility to real journalism, which, if done correctly, is almost always inconvenient for people in power, and a willingness to use deceit to thwart it.
The Benefits of Standing by the President
He heaped praise on Jared Kushner at a private gathering of bankers and corporate executives in December, congratulating President Trump’s son-in-law on the surprise election triumph.
He stood up again in May before a group of corporate leaders on the 39th floor of Citigroup’s offices to remind them of all the good the Trump administration could do for the economy and the country.
.. Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chief executive of the private equity giant Blackstone and the leader of one of the councils, has not been alone on Wall Street in his embrace of the Trump presidency, particularly after the corporate world endured eight years of Obama-era regulation. But in each of these private meetings, recounted by people who attended them, Mr. Schwarzman emerged as one of the president’s most respected and reliable allies in high finance.
.. Mr. Schwarzman’s stature in both the world of finance and in Mr. Trump’s Washington helped Blackstone nail down one of the biggest deals on Wall Street this year — its selection by Saudi Arabia to manage a new $20 billion fund, according to a person with knowledge of the selection process.
In May, while the president was visiting Saudi Arabia, Blackstone announced the agreement to manage the fund, the largest in the world to invest in infrastructure projects. The announcement was made at the royal palace in Riyadh as Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner looked on.
.. the Saudis had been discussing a possible partnership with a number of other firms as well, and formally decided on Blackstone — a fund-raising juggernaut that manages funds larger than the economies of some nations — only after Mr. Schwarzman had started advising the president.
.. the company’s experience illustrates the incentives that corporate leaders have to develop strong ties with Mr. Trump — the country’s businessman in chief — and the reputational risks associated with those relationships when Mr. Trump veers off course, as he did this past week.
.. Some of the other investment firms that were in discussions about a Saudi partnership, including Brookfield and the Carlyle Group, had more experience in managing infrastructure funds and are still in talks with the Saudis
.. But while Mr. Schwarzman’s alliance with Mr. Trump is new, his ties to Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, run deeper. Mr. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, attended Mr. Schwarzman’s 70th birthday party in February at his home in Palm Beach, Fla., near Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
.. In 2013, well before Mr. Trump was even a candidate, Blackstone financed the purchase of a few warehouses and industrial buildings by Mr. Kushner’s family company
.. Mr. Kushner is also friendly with Jon Gray, a senior Blackstone executive who runs its real estate business.
.. Mr. Kushner and Mr. Gray, a Democrat, have been photographed together at Manhattan social events, and before the election, Mr. Kushner urged the staff at the Commercial Observer newspaper, which Mr. Kushner used to run, to place Mr. Gray higher on its list of “Power 100” real estate executives, according to a former employee with knowledge of the list. In 2016, Mr. Gray was No. 1 on that list.
.. Unlike many people in Washington, Mr. Schwarzman said, Mr. Trump could accomplish tax policy reform and an infrastructure overhaul.
.. Mr. Schwarzman speaks with Mr. Trump as much as once a week, typically about the economy though also about social policy, including a conversation in which Mr. Schwarzman advised the president to continue shielding young undocumented immigrants from deportation
.. Blackstone manages about $370 billion.