In 2008, the world economy collapsed and never recovered. People argued then, and argue now, about who was responsible and what should have been done and when. They argue about why no one heeded the warnings of those who saw it coming and why so many Wall Street predators walked away unpunished. What few argue about, however, is that 2008 was a demarcation point. You remember who you were before the crash. You remember what you expected out of life. And then you try not to think about it.
My thirtieth birthday was the week of the crash. By then, I had left journalism and was studying autocratic regimes in Central Asia, first as an MA student at Indiana University, and then as a Ph.D. student in anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. My undergraduate work had focused on Russia; Central Asia was a natural extension. At first, I planned to use my expertise to either cover the region as a journalist or, if all else failed, get a government job. There was a popular notion among my generation—a belief shattered with finality under Trump—that no matter how bad the economy got, the US government would always have jobs and seek out people with regional expertise. As it turned out, my expertise on the former Soviet Union would indeed be of interest to the US government, but not in the way I had imagined.
At Indiana University, I learned Uzbek and Russian and worked as a research assistant for an anthropologist, who encouraged me to get a Ph.D. I had never studied anthropology before but I liked it: the in-depth research, the ethnographic writing, the ability to take on subjects that were often ignored in journalism. I also was lured in by the illusion of meritocracy. Academia had a structure that seemed to favor high-achieving lowlifes like me. I loved the liberation of blind peer review: that the reviewers could not learn my identity but were forced to contend with my words. As an MA student, I published scholarly articles with ease. When my professors told me that my success was unusual, and that publishing was a key part of securing gainful employment in academia, I began to do something I had not dared to do since 9/11 and the bottoming out of the media economy. I began to envision a future for myself.
The more I looked at how Ph.D. programs worked, the more they seemed like the answer to not just a professional but personal dilemma. I was never attached to the idea of becoming an academic, but I liked the idea of having kids while on a multiyear fellowship and therefore not having to choose between working or staying home in a time of skyrocketing childcare costs—a “choice” that was killing either the savings or careers of my female friends. I figured I would become a stay-at-home-scholar-of-post-Soviet-authoritarianism mom, structuring my work schedule around my children and avoiding day care, which cost more than my stipend paid. Like most people my age, I did not look for opportunities so much as I navigated obstacles. The biggest obstacle had always been money, and I had finally figured out a work-around.
I got pregnant in my first semester of graduate school, to the dismay of my department. I assured my professors I’d get my work done during nap times, evenings, and weekends. When my adviser expressed doubts over this plan, I reminded him that he was the chair of my dissertation, not my uterus. I followed through, out-publishing the junior faculty of my department, getting mainstream acclaim (for an Uzbekistan expert, anyway), and receiving my Ph.D. in 2012, one year after my second child was born. For six years, my life involved doing things like interviewing Uzbek political dissidents with a toddler in tow or giving interviews to BBC Uzbek from Gymboree. But in comparison with my Daily News job of cataloging casualties at 2:00 A.M. while living in fear of terrorism and layoffs, graduate school—even with two babies—seemed easy.
I might have stayed in academia had the economy not collapsed two years into my program. Roughly 50 percent of the jobs in my field were eliminated, and contingent and low-paying prestige positions became the norm. In these jobs, the salary is so low compared to the cost of living that many scholars essentially pay to work. About three-quarters of professors work as adjuncts, most making around $2,000 to $3,000 per course, with many living near or under the poverty line.1 They stay in these abysmal working conditions because rejecting them risks professional exile. To even briefly leave academia for a more lucrative field while looking for an academic job—assuming an alternative job could be found—is seen as a sign that one is not “serious” about research. In many respects, academia operates like a cult.
In 2011, right after I successfully defended my dissertation, my academic career came to an abrupt end. I realized I could not afford to enter the job market. To apply for jobs, I would have to pay thousands of dollars to attend the academic conferences in expensive cities where job interviews are held. There was no rationale for universities to do this—interviews could have been done through phone or Skype—but it was their way of culling the herd. My husband and I had no money to spare, and I felt like incurring debt was an irresponsible move for a mother of two in a bad economy. I also resented these prohibitive entry costs in a field that was supposed to be based on merit. When I asked my professors what to do, they said most students borrowed money from their parents at this point. I laughed in disbelief, pointing out that I was a parent and had lived on my own for over a decade. What kind of infantilizing nonsense was this? They didn’t have an answer. A class bias in academia that had been opaque to me was now obvious. In academia, much like in journalism, where you came from determined where you could go. So I said “Fuck this” and stayed in St. Louis.
St. Louis had changed since I had moved there in 2006, and I changed with it. When I came there for my interview at Wash U, the professor who drove me around the area near the university apologized for the lack of luxury and promised it would “improve.” He did not know that what I valued most in a city was cheapness and that I feared debt far more than crime. Having grown up in a fairly poor and rough small city, I was fine living in a poor and rough larger city that offered more amenities than I had growing up. When you have children, you start to see your city through their eyes instead of your own.
In St. Louis, I saw parks and free museums and a free zoo and free family events every weekend. I saw a place that was unrefined and looked down upon by outsiders, but whose value revealed itself the more you opened up to it. I became closer to the people I met in my neighborhood, who tended to share my values and frustrations, and moved away from the cloistered world of Wash U. If there’s a unifying positive trait to St. Louisans, it’s a blunt pragmatism, a radar for bullshit that doesn’t quite cross over into cynicism. (I should note that these types of St. Louisans rarely make it into elected office.) And in late 2008, as I was starting to feel at home, I saw St. Louis collapse.
In St. Louis, the brink is a permanent condition. The 2008 recession brought the world of everyone I knew crashing down, with whatever fragile sense of stability they had never to return. Over the next decade, nearly every friend I had in St. Louis lost their job. This group included lawyers, academics, public school teachers, cab drivers, journalists, social workers, service workers, my sister-in-law, her husband, and my husband, whose company was hit by a mass layoff a few years after I finished my Ph.D., when I was working part-time as a journalist. Missouri has the shortest unemployment compensation in the United States, offering only thirteen weeks of pay. (Twenty-six weeks is the national average.) The money did not last long. My husband did not find full-time work for sixteen months, during which time he worked two minimum wage jobs while I balanced freelancing with taking care of the kids. I sometimes refer to my husband’s sixteen months without a full-time job as “the time he was unemployed” and then remember he was overemployed. He was working over fifty hours per week but making wages so low that our family of four hovered near the poverty line.
For over a year I would wake up shaking. The economic nightmare I had documented for years as a journalist had finally gotten me, like a monster I had tracked but failed to slay. I developed health problems that I never treated, contemplating the humiliation of a medical GoFundMe but then deciding to wait in case something worse happened—in postrecession Missouri, the odds of something worse happening were always high. We thought about moving, but the new economy had created an unequal economic geography. Expensive cities had better jobs, but the high cost of living made moving anywhere with our meager St. Louis assets impossible. In the cities where we could afford to live—cities similar to St. Louis—there were few full-time positions available.
None of this was reflected in the portrait of the American economy we saw on the news. In Obama’s second term, the national unemployment rate was around 5 percent—a number that belied the tenuous and low-paid work that was available. People complain of being treated like a statistic, but I longed to be treated like a statistic—to force people in power to acknowledge my family’s grim reality instead of counting us as technically employed workers in a false recovery.
In the end, it didn’t seem to matter. It made no difference what any of us did or how well we did it. It made no difference what we could offer the world. We only knew what the world could take away.
It takes a long time to go broke in St. Louis; that’s part of its charm. My newly struggling friends in rich cities lost their money faster. On the coasts, certain sectors had boomed—technology on the West Coast, finance in New York—but all that did was drive out workers in other professions whose wages stagnated as the cost of living in their gentrifying neighborhoods soared. Many dropped out of fields in which they had trained or worked for years to pursue an occupation that seemed stable, such as health care. Americans weren’t going to stop getting sick from being overworked and underpaid any time soon. One of the most influential Central Asia analysts of my generation became a dentist. Another friend who was a well-known pundit on television—a position for which he was paid in “exposure”—works a minimum wage job after years of being exploited by think tanks and media corporations.
There is a vast body of knowledge that has been lost from young people priced out of their professions, specialists whose skills were sharpened but never fully shared. As a group, we drift with the tides of history, trying not to drown. Most of my friends have life stories that are simply a series of reactions to disasters. One friend, after spending thousands of dollars on an academic job search, left St. Louis for the only teaching job she could find, in Puerto Rico. She and her family were then stuck without basic resources in the catastrophic aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017. She fled to Florida in 2018 with her husband and children, only to find upon arrival that their new city was temporarily occupied by neo-Nazis. (My friend and her family are Jewish.) She is asking me to write a book called An End Times Guide for Modern-Day Parents.
Every ordinary person around my age has a secret self from before the crash, one who dared to dream of more than a life of necessities reclassified as luxuries. There are marriages that never happened, children never born, chances never taken, because the struggle to hang on to what you have is so great that it hurts your heart to hope for more. You can’t afford the literal cost, and you can’t afford the psychic cost. In the postemployment economy, a generation learned to manage its expectations.
The rage, though—that stays with you.
As opportunity for ordinary people fell, opportunism for the rich and unqualified flourished. The Trump administration is often described as a “kakistocracy,” a word that means rule by the least competent.2 I have never used this word, and prefer the term “kleptocracy,” which describes countries where rulers steal their nation’s resources to enhance their personal wealth. “Kakistocracy” assumes that the Trump administration’s malice is the result of incompetence, and that the dismantling of departments is the incidental result of appointing unqualified people. In the Trump administration, people are hired to dismantle the departments they lead, and the main quality for which they are valued is blind and total fealty.
The Trump administration is, in fact, very competent in achieving its main goal: stripping America down for parts and selling those parts to the highest bidders. That is not kakistocracy but kleptocracy, with elements of burgeoning authoritarianism. Like most kleptocracies, the Trump administration has carried out an enormous number of hirings and firings. Kleptocracies like to move players around to create the illusion of debate and dissent. Changes in personnel give the impression that power is distributed equitably rather than consolidated around a dictator, while also distracting the press from the regime’s more substantive flaws. As during his reality television days, Trump shakes up the status of players, and positions are cast more than filled. Firings create court intrigue that reporters will pounce on while ignoring the steady spread of rot.
But there is consistency within the contrived chaos. As in foreign kleptocracies, the glue that holds the Trump administration together is nepotism.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who opposes public education, is the sister of military mercenary Erik Prince, a key operator in Trump’s network of back-channel trades with other kleptocracies. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao is the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the architect of the GOP coup. In 2019, the appointment of Attorney General William Barr was followed by the appointment of Barr’s son-in-law, Tyler McGaughey, as Trump’s White House legal counsel and his daughter, Mary Daly, as an employee of the Treasury. These are just a few examples of the nepotism-infested administration Trump has constructed.
The longer autocrats stay in power, the smaller the inner circle becomes, and the more kinship ties tend to dominate. Parties bound by blood or marriage are easier to control. Nepotism allows for an easy accumulation of leverage: if a staffer dares to diverge from the party line, their relative’s position—and if necessary, their life—can be threatened. (Witness the deadly kin rivalries in the authoritarian governments of North Korea or Saudi Arabia.) Officials who are not related by family ties in Trump’s cabinet are often people who have been working together in corrupt ventures for decades. For example, Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross were both protégés, like Trump, of Carl Icahn, who stepped down as a White House adviser after a year following a proposed ethics investigation that was, like so many other investigations, mysteriously dropped.
Expand the circle further, and you find political actors who are tied by complicity, including, at this point, the entire GOP, which is contaminated by the influx of dark money in the 2016 election and beyond. For example, in 2017, the GOP made Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer who would later be sentenced to three years in prison for campaign finance violations, the deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. Corruption breeds loyalty out of fear. The choice is to embrace the crooked gains, hoping that the new regime will consolidate power and rewrite laws to create a sort of preemptive exoneration, or leave politics entirely. The record number of GOP officials—forty-four—who stepped down during Trump’s first year in office shows the difficulty Republicans have had with this calculus.3
The most egregious beneficiaries of nepotism in the Trump administration are, of course, daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared. In the beginning, the elevation of Ivanka and Jared Kushner into the upper echelons of the administration struck many as a violation of basic tenets of American governance. The United States was founded, after all, in rebellion to a monarchy. While there have been numerous political dynasties—Roosevelts, Kennedys, Bushes—there had never been such a blatant insertion of unqualified relatives into such high positions of power. We have never seen adult children operate as official advisers from the moment a president took office. Pundits initially attempted to rationalize their rise with a baseless argument that Ivanka and Jared were a moderating influence. But the two never intervened in Trump’s brutal domestic policies, nor did they counter his racist rhetoric. Instead they carried out their own illicit schemes with foreign partners, abusing executive power for personal gain.
The foreign deals Ivanka made that implicate the emoluments laws or that Jared made with Middle Eastern countries who agreed to pay down his debt as he influenced policies that favored them also serve as a perverse method of résumé-padding, especially to a gullible and sometimes compromised American press. That Jared and Ivanka’s activity in office has abetted enemies of America (like Russia) or states rife with human rights violations (like Saudi Arabia) has proven irrelevant to media personalities seeking to normalize them: after all, many of these media personalities are themselves the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful. The new American economy runs on purchased merit, and now we bear the consequences on a national security level.
Adult children of authoritarian leaders are useful in multiple ways. First, they tend to be trustworthy confidants in regimes rife with paranoia, as corrupt authoritarian states are. Second, they are excellent vessels for laundering money, creating enough distance that assets stolen from the state are harder to track. Third, they tend to have a warmer public profile, which offsets the brutality of the dictator by distracting the population with pictures of their happy families or glamorous lifestyle. Fourth, a dynastic kleptocracy is the most reliable way to keep assets stolen from the state in the family. It therefore falls upon the authoritarian ruler to legitimize his offspring as successors should he be forced to leave office.
For forty years, Trump hobnobbed with elites from media, business, politics, and entertainment—and then with their offspring, as those professions became dominated by nepotism. In 2016, when Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” Access Hollywood outtakes were released, America was introduced to what I have called “the Billy Bush Principle”: for every asshole, there is an equal and opposite asshole. When Trump says something vile, there is an elite laughing alongside him. When Trump makes a corrupt deal, another party makes or enables that deal. They become implicated by the threat of revelation, and power is imbalanced by Trump’s complete lack of shame. When Trump’s Access Hollywood tape was released, Billy Bush (a first cousin of George W. and Jeb Bush) was fired from his job as a TV host for egging Trump on. But Trump, the shameless sexual assaulter, became the president.
The Billy Bush Principle has been an effective deterrent to documentation of Trump team activity. The insularity of the New York and D.C. political and media worlds—combined with the erosion of media and political power in the heartland—means that Trump relies more on self-censorship than state censorship. He has acquired decades of secrets and is willing to weaponize them. One notable example was when he threatened to reveal the sexual relationship between MSNBC cohosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski (daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser for Jimmy Carter) in 2016 after the two had deviated from their standard sycophancy to raise serious concerns, most notably about Trump’s love of nuclear weapons. Called out, they resumed their ass-kissing. Once they divorced their partners and decided to wed, and Trump lost his leverage, they resumed their critiques. In 2017, the two reported that Trump had threatened them with hit pieces in the National Enquirer and described the experience as traumatic.4
Trump’s inner circle has long included dirty operatives like Roger Stone, who is known for withholding incriminating information on political opponents for years and then torpedoing their lives when the interests of the corrupt power brokers he favors are threatened. (Stone helped ensnare Eliot Spitzer in a prostitution scandal, for example, as Spitzer was cracking down on Wall Street;5 the madam in that scandal, Kristin Davis, was interviewed by the Mueller probe team in 2018 for reasons still unknown.6) A lifetime spent scouring the gutter of politics and media gets an operative a lot of dirt, and not a lot of people willing to cross them—in part because they fear for their careers, in part because they fear for their lives, but also because sometimes the dirt extends to relatives who helped them get their powerful positions. A problem of nepotism has become a problem of national security.
The ultimate manifestation of this national security threat is Ivanka and Jared, who have both seemingly violated the law in serious ways during their time in office yet face no consequences. In 2017, it was revealed that Kushner had lied on his security clearance forms more than any person in US history.7 Ivanka had lied too, but not quite as much as Kushner, who was also reported to have committed the following acts: lobbied for a Qatari blockade after Qatar refused to provide his family a loan to pay off its massive debt; met with the president of a sanctioned Russian bank as part of yet another debt payoff scheme; met illicitly with other Russians connected with plots to subvert the 2016 election; worked with now convicted felon Michael Flynn to devise a secret back channel to the Kremlin; attended the notorious 2016 Trump Tower meeting in which Russian election aid was offered and did not report it to the FBI; helped fire FBI head James Comey in an act constituting obstruction of justice; oversaw the Cambridge Analytica–linked digital influence and data-mining operation that became a key subject of the Mueller probe; helped Saudi prince Mohammad bin Salman cover up the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi;8 illicitly proposed giving the Saudis nuclear secrets;9 conspired with the National Enquirer to threaten US media figures and publish propaganda for the Saudi regime;10 and used personal email and private apps to communicate with foreign leaders.11 Kushner did all of this while keeping up ties to corrupt oligarchs and disgraced politicians around the world, including his old family friend, now indicted Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Jared Kushner Security Crisis exists in a perpetual cycle of déjà news, with documentation of his lawlessness recirculating without repercussions. Every few months, American pundits start to speculate that Kushner constitutes an enormous national security threat, perhaps one greater than Trump, and they begin to discuss his voluminous violations of law and protocol. This cycle lasts about forty-eight hours before its inevitable dismissal and a return to the status quo, where the repercussions of these violations—and what they mean for America—are ignored. In March 2019, I went on MSNBC and proclaimed to AM Joy host Joy Reid:
This is like the twelfth time I’ve been on your show talking about Jared Kushner and the fact that he lied on his clearance forms, that he’s done illicit dealings, that he’s giving away state secrets and that he’s a massive national security risk and so is Ivanka Trump. The only way we can finally stop having this conversation on national TV is if he’s indicted. That is what needs to be done, because this problem is enormous. It’s going to persevere. Even if he is gone, he is carrying around this information; other people are carrying around classified information. They do not have loyalty to country. They have debt, they have financial interests, they have personal interests. This problem needs to be handled now. It’s ridiculous that we are in this déjà news cycle where I appear on here, as do Malcolm [Nance] and David [Cay Johnston] and others, to have the same conversation again and again. Just indict Jared Kushner, indict Ivanka Trump, and get this crime family out of the White House!
My commentary was not well received by White House loyalists. But I was speaking from a place of patriotism. I was speaking out for my country, because the elevation of a criminal son-in-law into the world of classified intelligence is not what anyone sought when they cast their ballots—including those who voted for Trump. It is hard to overstate the danger Kushner poses to US national security, and it is hard to explain why this danger was ignored by national security officials during the campaign and continues to be ignored despite warnings and pleas from intelligence experts.
It is easy, however, to explain his rise, for he is as much a product of our times as I and my underemployed friends are. Kushner’s rise was made possible by the same institutional rot that left most of my generation scrambling for survival.
Kushner, born in 1981, benefited from the culture of purchased merit and extreme income inequality built by corrupt baby boomers like Trump, and in many ways his life mirrors his father-in-law’s. Like Trump, Jared was a bad student who went to an Ivy League college—only in the new Gilded Age, the grift required for Jared’s brand-name education had become greater. In The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, journalist Daniel Golden writes that officials at Jared’s New Jersey private school were dismayed when Jared was accepted to Harvard. As one former school official put it, “His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it,” and it meant more deserving students from his high school were rejected.12 According to Golden, Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, donated $2.5 million to Harvard in 1998, the year that Jared applied, to ensure his acceptance.
Like Trump, Jared is the son of a multimillionaire real estate developer linked to criminal enterprises in the New York area. Donald’s father, Fred Trump, was investigated in 1954 by a US Senate committee for profiteering, and in 1966 he was investigated for the same by the State of New York.13 In 2018, The New York Times revealed that Fred had spent decades engaged in fraudulent tax schemes, including by selling real estate to Donald for well below its purchase price, and illegally manipulating the financials to benefit from a tax write-off.14 But unlike Fred Trump, whose team of lawyers helped him avoid federal and state charges, Charles Kushner wound up a convicted felon. He was indicted in 2004 not only for tax evasion and making false statements about campaign contributions, but for a grotesque witness-tampering plot aimed at his brother-in-law, who had been cooperating with a federal investigation of the family businesses.
In 2004, Charles hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, arranged to record the sexual encounter, and had the resulting tape sent to his own sister to intimidate her and her husband. Instead of being intimidated, they were enraged. The plot—reminiscent of the blackmail tactics Trump, Stone, and others embraced under the tutelage of Roy Cohn—failed, and Charles was sentenced to two years in prison, which he began serving when Jared was twenty-three. In 2019, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said of the case: “It was one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted when I was U.S. Attorney. And I was U.S. Attorney in New Jersey!”15
After graduating Harvard in 2003, Kushner, in the manner of modern-day children of millionaires, completed a series of prestigious internships—among them, a stint at the Manhattan DA’s office while he was studying law and finance at New York University. His time at the DA’s office seeing white-collar criminals face justice does not appear to have had any lasting moral impact on Kushner other than sympathy for the criminals themselves. In a 2014 interview, he complained, “The law is so nuanced. If you’re convicting murderers, it’s one thing. It’s often fairly clear. When you get into things like white-collar crime, there are often a lot of nuances. Seeing my father’s situation, I felt what happened was obviously unjust in terms of the way they pursued him. I just never wanted to be on the other side of that and cause pain to the families I was doing that to, whether right or wrong. The moral weight of that was probably a bit more than I could carry.”16
For Kushner, “moral weight” is opposed to both ethics and law. “Moral weight” is whatever interferes with getting what he wants. And what he wanted in 2005 was to own 666 Fifth Avenue, a forty-one-story tower in Midtown Manhattan that became the most expensive real estate deal in New York City’s history—and one of the most disastrous. Kushner bought the property for nearly twice as much on a per-square-foot basis as any previous Manhattan building sale.17 It is unclear why he found this particular building so desirable, and why he would strike such a terrible deal in 2007, when economic experts were warning of an impending housing crash. Though his motives are unclear, the deal mirrors the kind of fraudulent real estate tax evasion schemes at which Fred Trump had excelled.
Though best known to ordinary New Yorkers for the devil’s number of 666 emblazoned on the top, the building also had a storied history among New York’s financial elites. It was the favored hangout of corrupt operatives like “Wolf of Wall Street” Jordan Belfort,18 and the former headquarters of old-time Trump associates like the Lauder family: the powerful corporate dynasty that includes Ronald Lauder, head of the World Jewish Congress and a lifelong friend of Trump.19 As of 2019, Lauder remains heavily involved with Netanyahu, Putin, and Russian oligarchs like Leviev and Roman Abramovich. Furthermore, according to Trump’s book The Art of the Deal, it was Ronald Lauder’s brother Leonard who held the 1986 dinner party where Trump was introduced to Yuri Dubinin and Vitaly Churkin, the Russian officials who brought Trump to the USSR. After Kushner purchased the property, it continued to be a site of illicit dealings. It was in the Grand Havana Room of 666 Fifth Avenue that convicted felons Paul Manafort and Rick Gates gave Kremlin operative Konstantin Kilimnik US election polling data on August 2, 2016.20 This transaction, once at the heart of the Mueller investigation, was never fully explored after the probe abruptly ended in March 2019.
Regardless of the rationale for the purchase, there is no denying it was a dud. Following the 2008 crash, Kushner lost $90 million, and the property ended up carrying $1.4 billion in debt, which Kushner was supposed to pay off by February 2019.21 But Kushner faced no economic or political penalty for this reckless expenditure. Instead, he benefited, and from 2009 to 2016, paid little to no federal taxes.22 He had achieved the same end that Fred Trump had and his father almost had by “booking heavy losses on reported depreciation of his real estate holdings,” according to The New York Times.23 These losses overwhelmed his reported income, resulting in an artificial lowering of his income taxes and a net gain.
In the postrecession era—as young people lost opportunities, middle-aged people lost careers and homes, and elderly people lost their retirement savings—Jared Kushner built a fortune by exploiting a corrupt corporate system rigged to reward deceit. By 2018, his personal wealth had quintupled to nearly $324 million, despite every enterprise he touched—666 Fifth Avenue, the Observer, the White House—deteriorating in his hands.24 This is not including the fortune wife Ivanka had made through various dirty deals, like Trump SoHo, that nearly got her indicted for felony fraud.
Both Jared and Ivanka hold an SF-86 security clearance, which requires a thorough background check in which state officials look for vulnerabilities, like debt, that can be exploited by hostile states, as well as demonstrations of deceit and disloyalty that render an individual a danger to the United States. Kushner’s massive debt and tax manipulation schemes should have prevented him from holding any kind of clearance—but not in Trump’s dynastic kleptocracy. Kushner’s foreign ties were not a deterrent either, even though his lifelong relationship with Netanyahu—a relationship so close that Netanyahu slept in Jared’s childhood bedroom when visiting the Kushner family25—posed an obvious conflict of interest, one that deepened when he was selected by Trump to be a liaison to the Middle East.
Raised in a strict Orthodox Jewish family, Kushner, like many in Trump’s inner fold, now worships at and donates heavily to Chabad, whose religious leadership—including the deceased leader of modern-day Chabad, Rabbi Schneerson—were longtime supporters of Netanyahu and his hard-line, right-wing politics.26 But Netanyahu is not the only right-wing state leader connected to Chabad. The biggest financial backers of Chabad are Leviev and Abramovich, two of the oligarchs closest to Putin.27 (In 2018, Abramovich became an Israeli citizen after running into visa troubles in the West.)28 Putin, who is not Jewish, has also embraced Chabad through his “personal rabbi,” Berel Lazar.29 Branches of the organization, like in Port Washington where Felix Sater became Chabad’s “Man of the Year” twice, have served as sites of liaison for some members of the criminal cohort surrounding Trump.30 These criminal connections of course have nothing to do with the millions of ordinary people who attend Chabad branches for religious or social reasons. The question remains why so many in Trump’s circle—especially gentiles like Putin and Tevfik Arif—are so invested in Chabad, and how factions within Chabad influence Kushner’s foreign policy. As investigative journalist Craig Unger notes, “Chabad provides some of the richest and unexpectedly direct sets of connections between Putin and Donald Trump.”31
The Netanyahu connection is less mysterious. The Kushner family are investors in illegal West Bank settlements, meaning that Jared has not only a political conflict of interest by serving as a White House adviser on the Middle East, but a financial one.32 It is also a humanitarian conflict of interest. As Netanyahu transforms Israel into a more hard-right state, employing extreme violence against Palestinians and lobbing vitriolic rhetoric against liberal Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora, extremist rabbis have flourished—and Kushner favors them. In 2018, Ivanka and Jared were blessed by Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, who calls black people “monkeys” and believes that non-Jews exist in Israel solely to be the slaves of Jews.33 This racist rhetoric mirrors that of the Trump administration—including that of Christian evangelicals like Mike Pence or Mike Pompeo who align with Israeli extremists in order to fill their own political ambitions and sate their own religious fanaticism.34 Contrary to press portrayals, Jared and Ivanka were never outliers in the extremism of the Trump administration.
According to Kushner biographer Vicky Ward, Kushner’s devotion to Netanyahu is all-encompassing. Aside from the countries that interest him as targets for kleptocratic shakedown schemes—like Qatar, which ultimately paid off his 666 Fifth Avenue debt through Brookfield, a company backed by the Qatar Investment Authority35—Israel is Kushner’s major foreign policy concern. Ward writes of a December 2016 attempt by Kushner to rig a UN vote in favor of Israel before taking office (this plan required the aid of the aforementioned Churkin, who had remained in Trump’s orbit decades later as Russia’s ambassador to the UN):36 “What was highly unusual was the battle between the transition team and the sitting government. It was as if Kushner viewed Netanyahu as his boss and Obama as his enemy.”37
Had Kushner not been Trump’s son-in-law, he would have never been considered for an advisory role, given his lack of qualifications, history of financial disasters and fraud schemes, and ties to gangsters, oligarchs, and dictators. The same can be said of Donald Trump, and he is the president. Unlike Trump, however, Kushner was not elected. He was appointed by a relative, another blight in a society increasingly based on nepotism. Kushner is like a hellspawn incubated in the “iron triangle” of state corruption, corporate corruption, and organized crime that Mueller warned of in his 2011 speech. But he did not create it: he inherited it.
Kushner entered adulthood in an era in which the conditions of American life had been constructed to benefit young people like him—a small band of nepotistic elites whose pursuit of profit over law or country is condoned by their elders in media and government. Given the ongoing danger his actions pose to US national security, many intelligence experts I’ve spoken to throughout my reporting assumed Kushner would be indicted by the FBI or special counsel or, at the least, be forced to relinquish his access to classified information. As of 2019, no such accountability has come, and that should not surprise anyone. Kushner does not need to fear the law when his father-in-law can rewrite it. That is how life works in a dynastic kleptocracy. That is how life works now in the United States of America.
Prior to Trump’s campaign, Kushner tended to be portrayed as a supporting player in the endless series of puff pieces about the fashionable Ivanka. A 2008 breakup of the couple, who began dating in 2005 and married in 2009, was in part remedied by right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his then wife, Wendi Deng, who seemed to have great interest in unifying two white-collar crime families in matrimony. The owner of Fox News, the New York Post, and other right-wing media properties, Murdoch became a mentor to Kushner after Kushner bought the Observer. Meanwhile Deng, a New York socialite, befriended Ivanka, who was over a decade her junior.38 Following the breakup, Deng invited them separately to the Murdoch family yacht, where they were reunited.39 Ivanka and Jared soon wed, while Deng went on to divorce Murdoch, allegedly date Putin during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and take vacations in Eastern Europe with her old friend Ivanka.40 Murdoch later insisted that Deng was a Chinese spy, a claim backed up by US intelligence agencies.41
These events seem, in retrospect, foreboding and strange. All of the players in this little love story eventually became subjects of the federal probe into election interference, with several suspected of espionage. Corruption in the federal government has become expected to some degree, but a president’s social circle being implicated in multiple criminal and espionage plots spanning the course of several decades is not normal. And the refusal of the press and state officials to treat it as abnormal is part of the problem.
Few prior to 2017 believed that Jared and Ivanka would play a major role in government. Many even believed Trump when he denied that the two were being given high-level security clearances.42 This belief was in part due to American exceptionalism—surely Trump wouldn’t really install his relatives in the White House like a third-world dictator. There was also the mistaken view that Ivanka and Jared represented mere tabloid silliness—surely two Gossip Girl guest stars could not destroy US foreign policy through a series of kleptocratic shakedowns. But this complacency was also because influential young people in media and politics had increasingly come to resemble Ivanka and Jared—rich, connected, and unqualified. Their insertion into the White House was consistent with an increasingly nepotistic America.
In November 2016, Jared Kushner’s Observer newspaper wrote a hit piece on me.43 It ran thirteen days after the election, a time period where the attention I received for predicting Trump’s win and warning of catastrophes to come spurred the worst death threats of my career. These threats of violence were serious enough that I was assigned an undercover bodyguard when I spoke at an international conference three weeks after the election. Some of the people threatening me said they were inspired by the article in Kushner’s paper, which proclaimed I was a Soros plant who worked for a website run by Democratic Party operative David Brock, among other falsehoods.
The main tactic of the Trump camp and their backers, I would discover over the next few years, was not to directly threaten you with violence, but to smear you to the point that a fanatic might find murdering you an appealing prospect. This was the strategy they used in “Pizzagate,” when a vigilante convinced that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophilic cult out of a D.C. pizza parlor nearly shot up the place. The hit piece on me was standard fare for Kushner. Throughout his tenure as owner of the Observer (which he relinquished in 2017), Kushner used the newspaper as a way to target his enemies.44 The paper was one of two in the United States to endorse Trump in an official capacity: the other was the National Enquirer.
My death threats tapered off somewhat once Trump was installed in January 2017. A congressional call for an investigation into Russian interference had arisen and the Trump team had far bigger problems than me. At the height of my 2016 death threats, in December, I gave an interview to Cosmopolitan magazine, for a column they called “Get That Life.”45 (I told the interviewer that her readers did not, in fact, want to “get this life,” since this life seemed to come with a looming expiration date.) The interviewer asked why I was covering national politics from St. Louis. I answered:
Trump pretends to speak for the forgotten men and women of the heartland. I am one of those forgotten women. I’m pushed to the sidelines a bit just by virtue of the fact that I live in Missouri. People think, if she were for real, she would live in New York. That’s by choice. It allows me some more financial leeway than some of my contemporaries who are bound to the whims of their publishers or worried about their financial situations.
But I don’t have freedom in terms of my safety. I’m under a lot of attacks now with Trump being elected. I’m a target because I’ve been a forthright critic. There have been phishing schemes, threats. I’m worried about my safety and my family’s safety. The New York Observer wrote a smear piece that singled me out and had inaccuracies; I wasn’t contacted for the story. It’s unnerving because I’m a journalist from Missouri and the billionaire son-in-law of the president-elect is watching me.46
There are people who believe that the current American political crisis began with Trump and will end with Trump if he leaves office. But it is Ivanka and Jared, and their burgeoning kleptocratic dynasty, with whom they should be most concerned. They are the products of an intergenerational crisis of inherited corruption and stolen opportunities. Because their ability to keep their fortunes and dodge prosecution is now intertwined with their ability to hold on to political power, it is unlikely they will relinquish it or leave their enemies alone. Jared and Ivanka and I are all around the same age, and our children are around the same age. They pretend to speak for me and my children—the red state rejects, the “forgotten Americans.” They don’t like it when we talk back.
Ironically, it’s my distance from their insular New York world, my rejection of coastal careerism in favor of an independent life in St. Louis, that has given me the ability to criticize the administration that many journalists with full-time national media jobs lack. (Or, possibly, I’m reckless and stupid.) The Trump administration can’t take away my press credentials because I never asked for their permission to speak. They can’t get me fired because I hold multiple jobs so that no one entity can screw me over. I’m not interesting enough to blackmail and there’s nothing in their rarefied world that I want: not prestige, not wealth, not awards. I’m a twenty-first-century American woman; I don’t have enough faith to covet anything but freedom. Over the course of my life, every industry I worked in collapsed, and then my city collapsed, and then my government collapsed.
My career has been a series of reactions to terrible economic and political circumstances caused by the corruption of elites. The same can be said of the careers of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. In the end—in this sick, sad, American story—we all came full circle.