As I write this, in the fall of 2019, the headlines come rolling in, wave after wave on a gray, insistent sea. Thousands of children separated from their parents at the border, 680 migrant meat-packing workers swept up in one of the largest US raids ever on migrant workers, dozens of their children left alone and bereft on the first day of school. Fifty-eight thousand asylum seekers stranded in Mexico in camps vulnerable to violent gangs, the number growing every day. The number of refugees allowed into the US slashed drastically, to 18,000, the lowest number in forty years. Even as Trump presided over these actions, for two decades his company employed undocumented workers to build the specialty fountains at his golf courses; many more worked in his resorts, personally serving him Diet Cokes with the paper on his straw folded just so. The White House announced it would be hosting the 2020 G7 summit at Trump’s golf resort in Doral, Florida. His acting chief of staff said: “It’s almost like they built this facility to host this type of event.” The president’s lawyers went to court against the Manhattan DA to argue a sitting president cannot even be investigated. Neither can his business associates, nor his company, for anything the president has ever done, even prior to his presidency. The Justice Department weighed in on the side of Trump’s lawyers. A federal judge ruled that Trump’s arguments were “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values.” Trump appealed. La loi, c’est lui.
In July 2019, Vice President Mike Pence was accompanied by a small group of reporters to a border detention facility in McAllen, Texas. As the Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey wrote it up: “almost 400 men were in caged fences with no cots. The stench was horrendous. The cages were so crowded that it would have been impossible for all of the men to lie on the concrete. There were 384 single men in the portal who allegedly crossed the border illegally. There were no mats or pillows—some of the men were sleeping on concrete. When the men saw the press arrive, they began shouting and wanted to tell us they’d been in there 40 days or longer. The men said they were hungry and wanted to brush their teeth. It was sweltering hot. Agents were guarding the cages wearing face masks.”1 Afterwards, Pence said families in border detention centers told him they were “well cared for,” and that reports to the contrary were “harsh rhetoric.”
At the end of the nineteenth century, the Jewish writer and activist Emma Lazarus wrote the poem “The New Colossus” to raise funds for the construction of the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. The poem begins: “Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, / With conquering limbs astride from land to land; / Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand / A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame / Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name / Mother of Exiles.” Lazarus’s ideas about exiles and immigration were contested before she wrote the poem, and after. Yet the United States of America still likes to think of itself as a nation of immigrants, though for some this means immigrants are welcomed so long as they arrive in ways that are in accordance with an ever-varying set of laws. Even so, in late summer of 2019, the Trump administration announced it would penalize legal immigrants who availed themselves of government services. Ken Cuccinelli, the acting head of Citizenship and Immigration Services, proclaimed that this policy was entirely consistent with “a hundred and forty-year old tradition in this country, legally.”
“Would you also agree,” Cuccinelli was asked by NPR’s Rachel Martin, “that Emma Lazarus’s words etched on the Statue of Liberty—‘give me your tired, your poor’—are also part of the American ethos?” Cuccinelli responded: “They certainly are: give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.”2 He later said Emma Lazarus was thinking about immigrants from Europe, only.
In El Paso, Texas, the same month Cuccinelli was saying these things, a man killed twenty-two people in a Walmart, after posting a manifesto that referred to an “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” and that articulated a fear of “replacement,” referring to a white supremacist theory of “great replacement.” In a speech, President Trump claimed he condemned acts of racism. Then his campaign said it would continue to speak of “an invasion” in its Facebook ads, a locution it had employed two thousand times in 2019 alone, according to an analysis by the New York Times.3 El Paso’s shooting recalled one in Pittsburgh, in the fall of 2018, where, the murderer said he “wanted all Jews to die,” killing eleven in a spray of gunfire during Saturday morning Shabbat services at the Tree of Life synagogue, the deadliest attack ever against Jews on US soil. This in turn came after the rally in the summer of 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, where neo-Nazis marched to the chant, “Jews will not replace us”; where a white supremacist man deliberately rammed his car into the crowd, murdering a woman; after which President Trump said at a press conference that there were “very fine people on both sides.”
In 1982, Rae Kushner had begun to tell her story. “Certain things should not be like in this country,” she said, her English inflected with Yiddish cadences. “Nazis are going with the swastikas in front of the White House, and they’re going around free; and this scares us, this is very painful.”4 Telling her story was an obligation, as she saw it, but it was also prophylactic: by recording the history, by making sure the world did not forget, Rae and other Holocaust survivors could erect the protective shield of truth; they could press modern human beings to bear in mind their terrible history as they built a more enlightened future.
In the summer of 2019, Rae’s grandson Jared Kushner was asked to discuss his grandparents’ legacy by journalist Jonathan Swan, for Axios on HBO. “My grandparents came here as refugees and they were able to build a great life for themselves. You know my father worked hard and was able to be successful,” Jared Kushner said.
“How has that experience changed the way you think about things?” Swan asked. “Have they shared what it was like being a refugee?”
“It was more they would share what it was like being persecuted,” Kushner responded. “I mean my grandparents survived the Nazis.” He added, “Seventy years later their grandson’s working in the White House.”
“It’s true,” Swan said, before pressing. “The flip side is, that picture is also a reminder of, you know, you guys have dramatically reduced the number of refugees intake into this country. I think the lowest level in forty years.”
Jared Kushner deflected: “I think right now you’ve got sixty-five million refugees in the world. You can’t have all of them come into your country—”
“I know,” Swan interjected, “but what’s the rationale for cutting so dramatically?”
“It doesn’t make a difference one way or the other,” Kushner answered.
Swan disagreed. “Well, it does. It means people are either living here or they’re not.”
“Yeah,” Kushner said. “But in the scheme of the magnitude of the problem we have, I think that we’re doing our best to try to make as much impact to allow refugees to be able go back to their places and conflicts in places like Syria and find ways to make sure that you’re funding these situations so that the people who are immediately becoming refugees can have as much care as possible. But we have a lot of tragedies all over the world and that, again is one of the reasons why as Americans we’re very lucky to be where we are.”5
Jared Kushner’s wife, Ivanka Trump, daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of immigrants, has faced her own questions on US immigration policy. What was her low point in the White House, she was asked by journalist Mike Allen at a Washington, DC, forum in the summer of 2018. Was family separation a low point? Yes, she acknowledged, it was. “I am very vehemently against family separation and the separation of parents and children.” But she added. “I think immigration is incredibly complex as a topic, illegal immigration is incredibly complicated. I am a daughter of an immigrant, my mother grew up in Communist Czech Republic, but we are a country of laws. So, you know, she came to this country legally and we have to be very careful about incentivizing behavior that puts children at risk of being trafficked, at risk of entering this country with coyotes or making an incredibly dangerous journey alone. So, it is—these are not easy issues, these are incredibly difficult issues and like the rest of the country, I experienced them in a very emotional way.”6
Ivanka Trump invoked a frequent trope used by those who defend President Trump on immigration: her own mother “came to this country legally”—had played by the rules. But Ivanka Trump’s husband’s grandparents, the great grandparents of her own three children, had not played by the rules. “We went from border to border, from border to border, from Austria, to Hungary—” Rae said in 1996. “Nobody wanted to open the doors for us.”
“How did you get across the border into Italy?” she was asked by an interviewer from the USC Shoah Foundation.
“From—the Israelis helped us to cross the borders. They organized that,” Rae said.
“Did you have to sneak across?” she was asked.
“Sneak across, they showed us the way, they had people—they knew what to do. They took us around the border.” That’s how she and her husband and father and sister got to the displaced persons’ camp in Italy. “Oy yoy yoy we were three and a half years in Italy,” Rae said. They were stuck in the limbo so many refugees face; no place to go back to, no place to move on to. They were told: “we cannot take you to Israel, we cannot go to Palestine, you must sit here until you gonna get the visas.” Twenty people to a room, some with young babies, waiting. “Nobody wanted to open the borders for us,” Rae said.
But, in 1996, Rae was still keeping a secret about her immigration to the United States of America.
“What is your name?” her interlocutor asked her, at the outset of her interview.
“My name is Rae Kushner,” Rae answered.
“And what was your maiden name?”
“My maiden name was Kushner.”
“Your maiden name and your married name are the same names?” her interviewer asked, sounding baffled.
“Yeah,” Rae answered. “We were relatives.”7
This was a misdirection. Rae’s husband’s name was Yossel Berkowitz, a name erased before her family crossed the border into the United States, where the immigration law in 1949 pushed Rae to identify herself as her own father’s daughter-in-law, and for her husband to be her own father’s son. This breaking of the rules is referred to in the self-written family history, The Miracle of Life. “Because sons and fathers were given priority to get visas, Yossel assumed his wife’s maiden name being that he traveled with his father-in-law.”8 The Berkowitz family became the Kushner family: Joe was not Joe Berkowitz, Charlie was not Charlie Berkowitz, Jared was not Jared Berkowitz. In 1949, right before sailing to the United States, the matrimonial name became the patrimonial name.
The family’s ruse continued when they docked in New York, where aid workers discovered that the Kushners’ named sponsor disavowed any knowledge of them. Joe told the aid workers Rae’s father was his father, her sister was his sister. The aid workers recorded “Germany” as their country of origin, at a time when immigrants from Poland were subject to stricter rules. The Kushners, with two dollars to their name, were given shelter and food, helped to find jobs and housing by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS. They were, in Emma Lazarus’s words, “Your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” In New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty spoke directly to them: “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The Kushners uttered untruths to enter America’s golden door. These were deemed necessary for survival, necessary to confront a bureaucratic immigration system in a still hostile-to-Jews-and-foreigners nation. The Kushners did what they needed to do so their family could live, and thrive and grow, like millions of refugees, before and after, so their grandson would have every opportunity, including to work as a senior White House advisor for President Donald J. Trump, who erected barriers and policies so that what Jared Kushner’s grandparents could do, others could not.
It is no coincidence that Donald J. Trump, the head of a family business who brought that business model to the White House and the executive branch of the government of the United States of America, is undoing decades of refugee and asylum and immigration laws at the same time he is tilting the country towards oligarchy. These are two heads of a Hydra, not discrete, unrelated phenomena. Oligarchy means government by the few, and privileging a few necessarily means viewing concentric rings of people outside this circle of privilege as “superfluous,” a term coined by the political scientist Hannah Arendt.
Tilting the country towards oligarchy requires confusing—as Trump did in his first formal press conference as president-elect—“company” and “country,” making no distinction between the national interest and what he sees as his broader “family” interest. Trump’s family is, necessarily, his own family: his wife and children and their spouses and their children. “Family” also includes those officials and employees from whom he demands obsequious loyalty, though unlike his actual family, these people can move in and out of favor at Trump’s whim. This broader group also includes the very rich, who can prove their own loyalty through incessant financial favors: campaign donations, club memberships, hotel stays, condo purchases. His own attorney general booked a ballroom at a Trump hotel for a holiday party, for the price of thirty thousand dollars.
The entire apparatus of government, the president argues almost every day, should serve his interests: intelligence and national security officials must see the world his way, the military’s generals are his generals, the treasury secretary’s job is to protect him from having his personal tax forms revealed. As he sees it, the attorney general should be his lawyer, his Roy Cohn; the Justice Department should target businesses he doesn’t like and favor those he does like. The judges Trump appoints are to rule in his favor. The officials he names are to serve the needs of rich and influential Americans who see the entire apparatus of state as an impediment to making money as rapidly as they’d like to, an impediment to be lifted, no matter who might be poisoned, killed, or stolen from along the way. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies’ most important function should be to investigate and indict and otherwise thwart his enemies, and his family’s enemies, because for him there is no distinction between his family business and the government itself.
When officials block him, he fires them; when they stand up to him, he goes around them; when those outside his sphere of influence oppose him, he discredits, or sues them, or threatens to sue them, or deploys his enormous social media audience against them. And because the Justice Department has determined it cannot indict a sitting president, there are no consequences for Trump; he can do all this with relative impunity. Trump is constantly promoting the strands of oligarchy in his current government, a government where the rules that apply are those that Trump decides will apply; a government racing towards a world where it’s impossible to play by the rules, because the rules exist only according to Trump’s whim.
The flip side of such a system, where the president’s family and his wealthy or influential friends who can keep him in power set rules only for themselves, is that some human beings are seen as “superfluous.” This group begins with those who are black and brown, or Muslim, or women, or queer, but expands daily under Trump to encompass political enemies, journalists, Puerto Ricans, Jews who he believes are insufficiently loyal to Israel, even some members of Congress. For “superfluous” people, the right to belong to a system of laws to which they can appeal—what Hannah Arendt called “the right to have rights”—is diminishing. Asylum seekers and refugees are given narrower and narrower access to judges who can hear their cases, and the Justice Department has seen to it those judges almost always rule against immigrants. “Send them back,” has become a new chant at Trump rallies, referring to members of Congress who are black, or brown. Gerrymandering, restricting access to polling sites, scrubbing voter rolls, and outright denial of suffrage is increasingly common.
Many critics have rightly pointed out that American representative democracy never extended to everyone: it was, dating back to the Declaration of Independence, something that was reserved for the privileged, for men, and above all, for whites. Expanding that privilege has been the work of more than two centuries, but, as President Barack Obama said after the election of Donald Trump, “the path that this country has taken has never been a straight line. We zig and zag and sometimes we move in ways that some people think is forward and others think is moving back.” American government has always been imperfect; it has committed acts of brutality and segregation and outright theft from black, brown, and indigenous people and marginalized large portions of its population. But the fact that it has been ever thus does not excuse the Trump administration for molding government so that more and more people experience this marginalization, this loss of the right to have rights.
In 1951, when she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt identified the problem of statelessness, “the newest mass phenomenon in contemporary history, and the existence of an ever-growing new people comprised of stateless persons, the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics.”9 The problem has set and grown in the nearly sixty years that have passed since 1951; Trump’s response is to deploy the language of “invasion.” This not only inflames his supporters, it displaces blame for Trump’s not actually alleviating the problems of the working class, of his not making health insurance or education more affordable, of his not protecting against abuse or theft by banks or credit card agencies, of his not ameliorating inequality. The constant stream of news about refugees, new policies on migration, tweets about raids on migrants without proper paperwork, even the negative reaction itself to Trump’s policies and announcements serves to build anti-immigrant fervor, deflecting attention from the unraveling of democratic institutions and norms.
The language of invasion serves a similar function as the repeated surfacing of conspiracy theories, the incessant battle cries of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” the systematic dismantling of government systems that record history and facts and scientific observations themselves. Because Trump interprets all negative press through the lens of “hit jobs,” his view is that all critiques are subjective, not fact-based. Trump’s lies, delivered blatantly, don’t just cover up the truth, they undermine the notion that truth can exist, suggesting that all scholarship, history, and journalism is merely opinion.
In 1967, Arendt wrote an essay for the New Yorker called “Truth and Politics” that articulated where such mendacity could lead. “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.”10
“People should know what happened to us,” Rae Kushner said in 1996. “If we are not going to tell now, in twenty years, I don’t know who’s going be to tell. And now we have still the strength and the power to do this, and to warn the rest of the world to be careful: who is coming up on top of your government?” Rae pushed for remembering, for the past as a caution for the future, for building an edifice of fact and truth that would stand as a levee against the rising tide of relativism that was for her the vanguard of a murderous regime. Jared Kushner has interpreted Rae’s testimonies to buttress an ideology that suggests the way to beat enemies is to bar them, suppress them, kill them, and build walls to keep them out. Above all, it means propping up his father-in-law, whose very presidency draws strength from the forces Rae warned against.
“I have a different takeaway from my Grandparents’ experience in the war,” Jared’s first cousin, Marc Kushner, wrote on Facebook during the 2016 campaign, after Jared had defended his father-in-law against charges of racism and anti-semitism by invoking their grandparents’ experiences during the Holocaust. Marc Kushner wrote: “It is our responsibility as the next generation to speak up against hate. Antisemitism or otherwise.” Marc’s sister Melissa founded an organization, Yamba Malawi, that endeavors to break the cycle of poverty for children in Malawi. “I will not allow hate to beget hate, but rather use hate to embolden kindness and love,” Melissa posted on Facebook the day of the Tree of Life massacre, which coincided with Marc’s daughter’s birth.
Marc Kushner is an architect and a proselytizer for architecture; he has given a TED talk and written a book, where he articulates architecture as a collective imagining of a common future, where beautiful and functional buildings are a physical manifestation of what binds humans together. Marc Kushner talks about a building his firm designed in The Pines, a gay community on Fire Island, replacing a beloved dance hall that had burnt to the ground. The replacement couldn’t be just a reconstruction, which would have been a reminder of the loss. Instead, he argued, the new building had to be a more beautiful structure than the one that had been reduced to ashes, and to build such an edifice required community re-imagining of the new space that would in itself serve as foundation for new collective memories.11 It was a small example of a community coming together to create a public space, but it represented a broader lesson. The lesson that Marc and Melissa Kushner took from their grandparents is that public shared spaces and a sense of community are not only possible; they are a necessary precondition for a human, and humane, future.
Rae Kushner’s own life was a testimony to resilience and resistance, playing out against what Arendt called “a background of both reckless optimism and reckless despair.”12 Rae would not succumb, or fade, or give up, even in some of the worst conditions imaginable to a human being. Escape is a sign of hope, a signal that all is not lost, a belief made real that there is a promised land, on earth, that is reachable through human action.
The Origins of Totalitarianism did not merely document, in excruciating detail, a terrifying low point of human history. In the writing, there’s a query—where were the moments people could have acted differently? Origins, as my father, the philosopher Richard J. Bernstein, wrote, is “Not History, but Politics.” Arendt “refused to become a prophet of doom.”13 Her book itself stands as a testament to the ever-present possibility of better outcomes.
Over the years, I have interviewed another Kushner, not related in any way that I know to the descendants of Rae and Joe: the author and playwright Tony Kushner, most famous for his play Angels in America. I’ve spoken to him at points in history when the tides of disenfranchisement and destruction of community have seemed particularly high. “You have to have hope,” he told me the first time we spoke, in 1995. Over the next decades, as we spoke periodically, I would ask him: Do you still have hope?
“Well,” he told me in 2011, “I think I may have said it first to you, that I think that hope is a moral obligation and I’ve been saying that for a long time now. I don’t think that hope is just a feeling state. I think that hope is a choice that you make. It’s not a choice to deny reality, but it’s a choice to use your intelligence to examine the world in front of you and the obstacles to progress and to try to identify places from whence progress can reasonably be anticipated and to try to put your efforts into making those—I mean that, to me, is what hope is, it’s an activity, it’s an action in the world. Just as I think despair is, I think that both take effort. And I remain optimistic, I think there is still work to do.”14
I’m often asked, What drives you to do what you do, to document the crashing of norms and laws and the mixing of family and business in the Trump administration? What difference will it make? I’m often asked. For a long time, this was a difficult question to answer.
But then I realized something: the act of telling the story is itself an action, a chance, a tilt toward the future. I still believe in truth, and facts. I still believe that the telling reinforces those things. I believe that in the telling, there is hope.