Former New York City councilmember David Yassky had an image in his head: Jared Kushner’s socks. “They had a pink argyle pattern,” Yassky said in an interview, remembering the day he had made his way from his district in Brooklyn Heights to the midtown headquarters of the New York Observer.1 Unlike the offices of Jared Kushner’s wife and father-in-law—where framed magazine covers leaned against the walls and covered their desks—Jared’s office was dominated by an imposing dark wood table, a vast slab untroubled by papers.
Yassky, who was then preparing a run for city comptroller, went to see the twenty-seven-year-old CEO of the Kushner Companies, and owner of one of the most expensive buildings in Manhattan, at the offices of the tiny weekly newspaper Jared published. Though the Observer, still salmon-colored in those days, had a small total circulation, it was a well-connected readership. Editors and opinion writers read it, as did politicians and their consultants, real estate titans, people in advertising and media, and financiers. All the important power sectors in New York.
Yassky remembers little of the conversation, only that it skittered along the general concerns of politicians and real estate magnates in New York—the financial crisis, national politics—and that it was interrupted when Jared took a call from Ivanka, in Turkey at the time. “Sweetheart!” was how Jared answered the phone.
Visiting Jared at his office had become an obligatory stop for ambitious office seekers and government officials in New York City: for his newspaper’s editorial endorsement, for the hope that attention from Jared could translate into favorable coverage, or at least coverage that took one’s candidacy seriously (a limited and highly coveted commodity in New York, like a parking space), and for the possibility that Jared would not only make major contributions, but would unlock his social network to do the same. “You had to kiss the ring,” Yassky said.
This was new. When Eliot Spitzer, himself the Harvard-educated scion of a New York real estate family, had run for governor of New York in 2006, the Kushners had not been on his radar, despite their having given millions of dollars to Democrats. “They were New Jersey,” Spitzer said in an interview.2 It wasn’t until the Kushners bought 666 Fifth Avenue for $1.8 billion, and Jared took over the New York Observer, that Jared Kushner became a stop on New York’s political circuit.
Not long before he was married, in October 2009, Jared’s relationship with Observer editor in chief Peter Kaplan was becoming increasingly frayed. Years before “clicks” and “search engine optimization” became buzzwords of the industry, Jared demanded spreadsheets showing internet traffic. “We really crashed the staff and we went from producing 30 items a week to almost 50 items a week in the paper,” Jared Kushner said in a later interview. “The metabolism of the newsroom changed dramatically. From there on out it was a mandate to close the paper on time—on budget, which is something that they were never very good at before I got there.”
In this interview, for a commemorative book about the Observer, The Kingdom of New York, Jared tacitly acknowledged that Kaplan did not embrace his changes. “My father had extra tickets to the Yankees playoff game against the Tigers, and the banker who was going to use them cancelled,” Jared said. “So I called Peter Kaplan and said, ‘What are you doing tonight?’ He told me he had to be home with his family, and when I told him I had two front-row seats for the Yankees, he said he would call me back in five minutes, as Lisa would understand. So we went to the game and we were sitting there, eating hot dogs and drinking beers, and it was drizzling and we start talking and it was just pouring.” That evening, in Jared’s version, the water-logged outing at Yankee Stadium unlocked a sense of common purpose. “We got on the same page that night,” Jared said.3
But for Kaplan the changes Jared was insisting on were a burning misery. He fought with Jared daily on the side of deeply reported, long-form stories; fought for a standard of journalistic ethics; fought for his writers. “Peter loved that paper like a woman,” his wife, Lisa Chase, also an editor, said in an interview. “We were fighting every night, because I wanted him to quit.” And then one night, Peter Kaplan came home and said, “Get off my case, I quit tonight.”4
Kaplan joined Condé Nast, but when he died of cancer four years later at age fifty-nine, it was his work at the Observer that defined him. His funeral was packed. The New York Times’s David Carr wrote, “Manhattan publishing took a very sad holiday on Tuesday.” The grief was for Kaplan, but also, for his “ideology,” as Carr called it, “bringing truth to the pageant of power in Manhattan. Dozens of his acolytes and colleagues came to work at the magazines, newspapers and eventually, the websites in Manhattan, all bringing with them a belief that journalism was both a caper and a calling.”5
After Kaplan left the Observer, Jared used his perch to consolidate his relationships with the area elite. He’d started an offshoot, the Commercial Observer, with a “Power 100” list of the top people in New York real estate. His business partners would get top rungs of the ladder. His father-in-law regularly got bumped up the list. It was understood in the industry that Jared was playing favorites, but real estate titans cared about their place on the list all the same.
To replace Peter Kaplan, Jared recruited Kyle Pope, who had worked for a decade at the Wall Street Journal and who had been an editor at Condé Nast’s Portfolio, the business glossy. Pope had got wind of the tensions between Kaplan and his publisher but Jared seduced him anyway. It seemed like the job of a lifetime; but Pope, too, soon became appalled. Jared had ordered up a “hit piece on an official at Bank of America, and was now in my office to check on how the story was coming together” as Pope described it years later in the Columbia Journalism Review, where Pope is now publisher and editor in chief. “I had spent the previous weeks trying to avoid the subject with him, knowing full well that the Observer was never going to pursue a story about an anonymous banker whose only sin was running afoul of the Kushner family.” Pope finally told Kushner that the piece “was not going to happen, that talk of a ‘hit job’ was a textbook definition of malice, and that I considered the issue closed.” As Pope described it, Jared “pursed his lips, paused a beat, and ended the conversation.” Some time later, Pope, who as part of his job attended weekly meetings at the Fifth Avenue offices of the Kushner family business, came face to face with Charlie Kushner, who asked him what happened to the “hit job.” Now Pope understood why Jared had been so singularly obsessed with this particular, non-journalistic story. It was important to his father. The story never ran. Pope was soon pushed out.6
“There’s always going to be conflicts,” Jared later told a forum at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, when asked about being a publisher and a developer. “If you don’t want conflicts” he said, smiling, “just go in your apartment and stay there and lock the door. Don’t go to work, don’t do anything. As it comes up, you trust people to do the right thing, and we’ve found that we really haven’t had any issues.”7
During the tenure of Kyle Pope as editor in chief, the Kushner Companies were performing a series of fraught financial maneuvers to keep 666 Fifth Avenue afloat. The Kushners had purchased the building in 2007 for just $50 million in equity: that is, they spent just $50 million of their own money, and took out $1.75 billion in debt. The purchase was made near the top of a bubble. “With very little development opportunities available, a sense of near panic set in among the institutional investors to place long-term capital in NYC real estate,” one Columbia University study said. Trophy buildings had become “a whole new asset class.” When it came to office buildings, 666 Fifth Avenue was the most expensive trophy of them all, the biggest deal of its kind in the United States at the time. It was purchased for more than three times what its previous owners had paid, $518 million, just seven years earlier.8
In their hunger to purchase the building, Charles and Jared Kushner had taken on far riskier debt than other borrowers would have, including $535 million in short-term debt at a strikingly high interest rate. Friends were stunned by the level of risk Charlie could tolerate. “I buy it, you make it work,” Charlie told his accountants, according to Bloomberg News. The deal was put together during a series of all-nighters over Thanksgiving weekend.9
Officially, Charles wasn’t part of it. The loan documents noted, “Charles Kushner, the former sole chairman of the Kushner Companies, has an interest in the related borrower.” They added: “Charles Kushner has been released from jail,” and warned that as a convicted felon he was “not permitted directly or indirectly to control the borrower.” There was a “springing full recourse to the sponsors and Charles Kushner in the event Charles Kushner has any involvement in the management of the property.”10
Part of the justification for the enormous loan had been the value of its location, and an optimism that prices would keep rising, that the building could become more profitable. “The in-place rents are significantly below market,” one analysis said, “providing the potential for increased revenue.”11 But by 2008, it was clear the rental market was softening, the real estate market was teetering, and banks were coming under pressure. The building was 94 percent rented when the Kushners purchased it. The next year, it slipped to 89 percent.12 That year, the Kushners created a condominium that comprised the retail portion of 666 Fifth Avenue, and sold off a 49 percent stake in this portion for $525 million, staving off the high-interest loan due dates.13 But the family still had $1.2 billion of debt remaining, all of which their diminished portion of the building had to sustain.
Their financiers were under pressure, too. The summer after the Kushners bought the property, their bankers sold the right to collect the debt from Kushner Companies for seventy-five cents on the dollar, some of it to financier Richard Mack, then at Apollo Real Estate Advisors. Like Jared, Mack was the scion of a New Jersey real estate family; his father, William Mack, was chairman of the board of Mack-Cali Realty, one of the nation’s largest publicly traded real estate investment trusts. Dick Mack had attended Jared and Ivanka’s wedding. Now, he held $95 million of Kushner Companies debt in 666 Fifth Avenue.
Real estate prices were sinking. The building’s net operating income was dropping further and further below the debt payments.14 Its occupancy rate slid to 78 percent.15 One of the building’s largest tenants, the law firm Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, had a lease up for renewal. Orrick was paying $45 a square foot under their old lease. Mack counseled Jared to take $90 a square foot. Jared insisted on $120 a square foot. In a law firm, such an increase is particularly onerous; the way such firms are structured, the increased rent would have come directly from each partner’s compensation. The partners rejected Jared’s offer and moved to a building on the same block. Dick Mack expressed his displeasure. Jared yelled at him: “Who do you think you’re talking to?” according to a person familiar with the conversation. “I’m working my ass off!” Mack was taken aback. It’s unusual to yell at people who lend you money. But Mack moved on. Jared, apparently, did not.
Not long after, Jared spoke to Elizabeth Spiers, then his third editor in chief at the Observer, and told her at their weekly meeting that he had a really good lead on purported financial chicanery by Dick Mack. Jared said the story was “very important” to him. This, Spiers later wrote in a blog post, was unusual in itself, since “Jared actually didn’t pitch specific stories on a regular basis, just made broad generalities about what and who should be covered.” Spiers said she knew Jared had an agenda, but people with agendas pitch actual stories all the time.
“So I agreed to put a reporter on the story with the caveat that it had to 100% check out,” Spiers wrote, “because if Jared was willing to tell me about it, he’d probably told other people and if there was even one tiny inaccuracy, no matter how small, the guy would probably have a case for defamation. Jared was sure it would check out. ‘Just talk to anybody in the industry,’ he said.”
The story did not check out. Spiers assigned a reporter who “called everyone within a 100 mile radius of the subject and came back after a few days and told me he couldn’t find anything.” So she went back to Jared, and he insisted she assign it to someone else. Spiers did this, but said that “if it didn’t check out this time, the story had to be dead. Permanently.” And this second reporter came back and said “point blank that the story was bullshit.” Jared still wasn’t done. He insisted that all of them—him, Spiers, and the two reporters—meet with his source, at which point Jared concluded the reporters were questioning the source too aggressively. “And that’s finally what killed the Big Dick Mack story,” Spiers wrote.
But not entirely. Several months after she herself was fired (while traveling in China), her future husband, who was then the editor in chief of the Commercial Observer, “came home and said, laughing, ‘You’ll never believe the conversation I had with [the new editor] Ken today: he came over and said he had a really great story for me . . . About a guy named Richard Mack.’ ”16
(Years later, when Sarah Ellison of Vanity Fair published a story with some of these details, “a person close to Kushner” maintained that Kushner had never done business with Mack and that it was a former business partner of Mack’s who presented the tip to Kushner.17)
By 2011, the New York economy was coming back to life and commercial real estate rents were once again on the rise. But Orrick had moved out and the lease for the Kushner Companies’ largest tenant at 666, Citibank, was coming due. The building’s offices were now only 77 percent occupied.18 The net operating income was little more than half the debt payments.19 Kushner’s lenders were facing default, or huge losses. A special servicer, LNR Partners, a Florida firm that handles distressed real estate debt, stepped in to staunch the potential losses to the lenders. (The co-CEO of LNR was Justin Kennedy, the son of US Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy. Justin Kennedy had previously worked at Deutsche Bank’s real estate capital markets division, which had loaned hundreds of millions of dollars to Donald Trump.)
Facing the possibility of not being able to make their debt payments, the Kushners, father and son, had to make another deal under pressure.20 This one involved selling 49.5 percent of the office portion to LNR’s part owner, Vornado Realty Trust, run by Steven Roth, a real estate magnate who had started off in New Jersey. Vornado negotiated a deal in which, in exchange for up to $80 million in investment and the obligation of taking on half the debt, it would gain ownership of almost half the office portion of the building.
The deal was so favorable to Vornado that it didn’t actually require the company to spend $80 million, just to promise it could spend up to that amount. Eying Kushner warily in the refinancing, lenders now insisted the deed to the building be placed in an escrow account, where they could seize it in the event of default.21 Kushner Companies now owned just a hair over 50 percent of the office portion of the building, and just a hair over 50 percent of the remaining retail portion of the building. The building still carried a debt of more than $1.1 billion.
Joe Kushner, like Fred Trump, hadn’t much liked debt. They both borrowed, but settled their obligations quickly. Charlie and Jared and Donald Trump had a different business model, one that relied on a willingness to take out massive debt and not necessarily pay it back. As long as they could find partners who were willing to take the risk with them, it worked. The lesson Jared learned from the refinancing of 666 Fifth Avenue, according to someone familiar with the deal, “was not ‘holy shit I almost lost everything,’ it was ‘I should take on as much risk as I can.’ ”
To get to the Kushner Companies offices on the fifteenth floor of 666 Fifth Avenue, a visitor had to walk by a framed picture of the words beginning Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, which famously opens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity. . . .” Also in the reception area was a prominently displayed copy of The Miracle of Life, the story of Joe and Rae’s escape from the Nazis.
Past the reception area, a large portrait of Joe and Rae dominated the conference room. The Kushner family worked closely here: Charlie, Seryl, Jared, and, sometimes, Nicole, greeting each other warmly, kissing each other as if they were newly reuniting, even though they worked together and spoke to each other multiple times daily. This was—apparent to dozens of employees and associates and partners who worked with the Kushners—a tightly-knit family business, where no one with the last name “Kushner” could be at fault for anything, and no one else was safe. Jared sometimes boasted about upcoming “hit jobs” at the Observer. Or he’d hold up the newspaper containing them, as if to suggest: This could be you. Charlie once conspicuously gave an Observer scoop to a reporter at the New York Post. Jared and Charlie could be warm and caring and attentive. When relatives were sick or dying they could be generous to a fault. But the constant threat of their mercurial tempers created a deep level of unease. “He was lovely until he was not,” said a person who knew Jared through real estate. “Until you had a falling out and were dead to him and he was out to get you.”
And always, the Kushners presented an outsized picture of their assets: one Kushner promotional booklet included glossy photos of buildings in which the company owned only a few percentage points in equity.22 It was a business model not unlike Donald Trump’s: suggesting a much larger financial base than the company had, which in turn helped enable it get financing for further projects.
While Kushner Companies was grappling with the giant debt on its trophy building, the family quietly moved back into their old business, the Kushners’ cash cow since the days of Joe and Rae: multifamily housing complexes. In June 2011, while they were renegotiating the terms of their 666 Fifth Avenue financing, the company and its partners bought 4,681 “distress-ridden Class B apartments” in cities including Pittsburgh, Toledo, and Cincinnati, some so underwater that the previous owner couldn’t afford to keep the lights turned on, as ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis reported in the New York Times Magazine. Jared Kushner had to settle some two hundred liens before he purchased the properties, for which he paid just half the face value of the mortgages. The Kushner Companies bought another 1,700 units in the Midwest. The next year, they doubled their portfolio with an acquisition of 5,500 units, these past a tangle of highway ramps in the exurbs of Baltimore.23
By the summer of 2012, months after it restructured its debt on 666 Fifth Avenue, the company had acquired nearly 12,000 apartments, more than two-thirds of what it had owned in New Jersey before the big sell-off in 2007. “Kushner Comes Back” was the headline in the trade publication Multifamily Executive. The subhead was “Jared Kushner has been busy re-amassing his namesake company’s multifamily portfolio in leaps and bounds.” According to Jared, the occupancy rate of these properties had risen under their management to the mid-90s, up from 75 percent at the time of sale. (This was almost exactly the opposite of the numbers at 666 Fifth Avenue, which had slid from 98 percent to 77 percent.) “It was a lot of construction and a lot of evictions,” Kushner told the magazine. “But the communities now look great, and the outcome has been phenomenal.”24
“A lot of construction and a lot of evictions” appeared to be the Kushner family business model in New York City, too. That same year, 2012, the Kushners were the biggest buyer in Manhattan of buildings with fewer than 100 units, most of them in Lower Manhattan: in the East and West Village, and in SoHo.25 These were old-world apartment buildings with rent-stabilized tenants, with red brick fronts and fire escapes, some of them without elevators, a sharp contrast to the gleaming tower of Jared’s wife’s branded building nearby, the Trump SoHo.
The Kushners and their partners purchased their East Village portfolio from a group led by a man named Ben Shaoul, who himself had snapped up seventeen buildings in 2007, making so many repairs and renovations that he was nicknamed “the Sledgehammer,” after he was photographed with a worker holding one outside one of his buildings. But to do this work so quickly, Shaoul had hidden from New York City’s buildings department that there were rent-regulated tenants in his buildings, which would have drawn an extra level of oversight to the renovations. The disclosure requirement had been instituted to prevent landlords from driving tenants out through unpleasant, untenable repairs, but according to an exposé in the New York Times, during the course of the aggressive renovations in these seventeen buildings, two-thirds of the rent-regulated tenants moved out. This made the buildings that much more valuable, because the incoming landlord—the Kushner Companies—could then charge more rent.26 Bloomberg News reported Jared’s purchases that year: “ ‘Walk-ups are really a phenomenal asset class’ because they’re a hedge against inflation, Kushner said. ‘They are like gold, only they cash flow.’ ”27
The Kushner family financed the $190 million it spent on downtown properties with other people’s money. As Jesse Drucker reported in the New York Times, “for much of the roughly $50 million in down payments, Mr. Kushner turned to an undisclosed overseas partner. Public records and shell companies shield the investor’s identity. But, it turns out, the money came from a member of Israel’s Steinmetz family, which built a fortune as one of the world’s leading diamond traders.” The Steinmetz who quietly backed the Kushners was Raz Steinmetz. His uncle, Beny, has been at various points under scrutiny by law enforcement authorities in four countries, including for bribery. Representatives of the Steinmetzes told the Times that Raz and his uncle were separate business entities, but Drucker reviewed records showing, he wrote, that the two “have shared offshore investment vehicles, employed the same company director and were once connected to the same Swiss bank accounts.”28
The Kushner Companies’ lower Manhattan acquisitions were emblematic of a shift in financing sources for the Kushner family, an arc that had started with friends and family in New Jersey, grew to the major US banks, and eventually led to Israel. Beginning in 2010, Israelis were becoming significant players in New York real estate, investing $500 million that year alone,29 despite Israel having a population at the time smaller than New York City.30 Jared traveled repeatedly to Israel during this period: according to the New York Times, his company took out at least four loans from one of Israel’s largest banks, Bank Hapoalim, and partnered with Harel, an Israeli insurance company, on another deal.31
In Baltimore, at this time, a Kushner family company, JK2 Westminster LLC, engaged in an aggressive series of lawsuits against tenants in its Baltimore complexes. JK2 was named for Jared’s initials, and for Westminster Avenue, the road in Elizabeth, New Jersey, that ran by the house Joe built and Charlie and his siblings grew up in. The limited liability company and its affiliates began filing hundreds of lawsuits against tenants who they said, often wrongly, hadn’t followed proper procedures to terminate their leases, who had been late on their rent, or who otherwise had possibly violated their rental agreements. These tenants were often barely eking out a living, with sick parents, young children whose health was sometimes threatened by poor maintenance, or other mitigating circumstances, yet the Kushner Companies’ lawyers pursued them with relentless zeal, adding charge after charge so the amounts due would pile up, often sanctioned by unsympathetic judges, as painstakingly documented by MacGillis. Most galling to some of these tenants was that building management would post their late notices out in public, for everyone to see. The Kushner Companies didn’t deny that it was doing these things; rather, it claimed a “fiduciary obligation” to its partners to maximize the revenue from these modest apartments.32
Charlie had certain moral rules, according to associates. He never drove a Mercedes. None of his apartments could contain German appliances, even if that would save money. But at the same time the Kushner Companies were holding their poorer tenants to the letter of their agreements, they were flouting their own obligations. After their foray into Manhattan, the Kushners began buying more multifamily units, in Brooklyn and Queens. Beginning in 2013, the advocacy group Housing Rights Initiative found, Kushner Companies routinely failed to pay fines for everything from “loose rubbish” to not getting permits for electrical work. They amassed $350,000 in fines before they were caught. And, according to an Associated Press investigation based on Housing Rights Initiative research, the Kushners had adapted “the Sledgehammer’s” business playbook; the company filed paperwork as a matter of course saying it had no rent regulated tenants, when it in fact had hundreds, thus evading the extra level of scrutiny that was supposed to be triggered.33 (The Kushner Companies said a contractor had filled out the forms incorrectly. The company was fined an additional $210,000.) Operating without that scrutiny, the AP found, the Kushners emptied some buildings of three-quarters of their rent-regulated tenants, bringing in revenue of $155 million in just a few years.
“There’s probably not a lot I can tell you about Brooklyn,” Jared Kushner said at a real estate conference at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in May 2014.34 His company had just acquired a portfolio of town houses in Brooklyn Heights from the Brooklyn Law School. It was about to invest in property in trendy Williamsburg, and on Third Street, on the Gowanus Canal. Its biggest deal, however, was to participate in the purchase of the former Jehovah’s Witness headquarters, including the Watchtower building. This had been an imposing landmark for decades, its iconic red sign and digital display providing the time and temperature for tourists walking the Brooklyn Bridge. The complex dominated the neighborhood of DUMBO, an acronym for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, what Jared’s father-in-law might have called “a chic artist’s enclave.”
“The last place I thought I would be, would be spending a lot of time in is Brooklyn,” Jared Kushner told the audience.
Jared, had begun to hear from his employees at the New York Observer and what he called “our venture business.” “A lot of kids in the companies were really living and wanting to work here and it led us to start really exploring so we crossed that river that is such a moat for a lot of Manhattan people.”
Jared had been influenced by his brother Josh, who worked in the tech sphere. “I saw that in all the different technology businesses that my brother was investing in, all of our best creative people were all living in Brooklyn and loving it,” Jared said at another forum.35 He saw a way to monetize this interest, to use the burgeoning creative community as a way to lure a big, important tenant to one of his Brooklyn properties: a tenant like Facebook, or Google, that would be willing to pay top dollar.
“It always struck me the Kushner Companies were late on the Brooklyn arc but thought they were early,” a former city official said in an interview. By the time Jared bought the Watchtower complex, Brooklyn had been rapidly gentrifying for over a decade: Mayor Bloomberg’s rezonings had had their predictable effect and high-rises were now dotting the Brooklyn skyline, the Nets had been playing NBA basketball for two seasons at Barclays Center, and oligarchic wealth from Ukraine had already been used to buy Paul Manafort’s town house in Carroll Gardens.
“He understood good real estate, not necessarily good investments,” another major builder said of Jared, in an interview. “You could look at a building, great location, if you’re paying too much and the capital structure is wrong it’s not going to be a good investment.” When Jared entered Brooklyn, he seemed unaware of the existing development ecosystem, a racially diverse group who were either born in the borough or who arrived before it was fashionable. “It was awful,” one business associate said of an interaction with Jared. “He didn’t know any facts, but was so righteous. I had a million times more information than him.”
In June 2014, a group including the Kushner Companies entered into contract to purchase a plot of land at 175–225 Third Street in the Gowanus neighborhood.36 Soon after, Ivanka Trump was quoted in Vogue saying that Jared had taken her to a “great restaurant” in Brooklyn, and then to the roof of the newly built Gowanus Whole Foods in the pouring rain to view the Kushner development site across the street.37 (Though the Kushner name was on the deal, most of the equity was owned by another partner, SL Green.)
As Jared’s business increasingly bought into Brooklyn, Jared and Ivanka tried to repeat their success with Manhattan society, showing up at events like a gala dinner for St. Ann’s Warehouse, a cultural venue beside Brooklyn Bridge Park beloved of Brooklyn’s elite, a circle led by wealthy creatives and heads of large nonprofit institutions as well as bankers and real estate developers. This group had in many ways crafted its identity in opposition to Manhattan society. “It’s not exactly like bringing Ivanka to Brooklyn is going to help him in Brooklyn,” one member of that elite said in an interview. Ivanka could sell a lot of things: jewelry, handbags, hi-end condos, her father’s presidency. She could not sell Brooklyn to Brooklynites.
As Jared and Ivanka embarked on this new social campaign in Brooklyn, Jared began to show a new edge. After Public Advocate Bill de Blasio became the upset winner of the Democratic primary in the 2013 mayoral campaign—running in part on promise to rein in the real estate industry—a major developer hosted an off-the-record meet and greet to make peace with the all-but-certain next mayor. This was the kind of event where pleasantries are usually exchanged, because the real estate community knows how badly it needs the mayor. Jared did not make nice. He told de Blasio, “what a disaster he was going to be, how crime was going to go up,” according to a person in the room.
“Jared was very vocally critical,” another attendee said. “He was blunt and aggressive about his views. I was taken a little aback because of my prior experiences with him.” Jared had always been considered exceedingly polite—“well groomed” or “well spoken.” Now, a new Jared was emerging, far more political—and politically conservative. For many, this was a surprise, given his family history of supporting Democrats.
At the Observer, Jared kept talking about his weekends with Rupert Murdoch. “There were several conversations on Monday mornings that started ‘Wendi, Rupert, Ivanka and I were out sailing,’ ” said a former colleague. “He would talk about how Ivanka was the trustee for the Murdoch children, their guardian, that’s how close they were.” The ideas that Jared had brought to the Observer at age twenty-five—vaguely liberal, Democrat—were tilting towards Rupert Murdoch’s conservatism. Now in his thirties, Jared talked about cutting the national debt, cutting the deficit, pulling back government spending, and reducing taxes on the wealthy. In 2013, the New York City Council considered a bill that would grant five paid sick days to employees of large companies. Supporters saw it as a modest but essential measure to help the city’s working class, now largely un-unionized, many undocumented, who would lose their jobs if they or someone in their families became sick. Under Jared’s direction, the Observer opposed it. “Paid sick leave sounds fine in the abstract, but those who understand the realities of running a small business know that it would be an intolerable burden,” the editorial read. “Such a mandate inevitably would result in more job losses—just what the city doesn’t need at a time when the unemployment rate is 8.8 percent, significantly higher than the national figure of 7.8 percent. The bill should stay on the shelf.” The byline was “The Editors.”38 The idea was pure Jared.
Not long after, President Obama proposed a small increase in the federal minimum wage, a major plank of progressive Democrats in 2013. The Observer’s editorial page came out against that, too. “The best way to create jobs that pay a living wage is not by mandating pay increases from Washington—a one-size-fits-all policy that does little to recognize regional economic issues and challenges,” the editorial said. “The best way to achieve the president’s goal is by creating economic policy that inspires the nation’s job creators to do what they do best: create jobs. Prosperity will follow.”39
“I thought even Jared would be for a higher minimum wage,” a former Observer staffer said in an interview. “When he wasn’t—that’s when I saw the evolution as complete. Now he was Rupert Murdoch’s understudy.”