It had rained the day before, but by the morning of October 25, 2009, the weather had cleared. The sun brought the temperature to sixty degrees—mild, for late October in central New Jersey. By midafternoon, the only reminder of the previous day’s rain was the pleasant smell of damp, newly fallen leaves, and the still-welcome faint whiff of composting plants that wafts over farm country in autumn.
A string of cars made its way down Lamington Road, past fields and woodlands, past vivid red and yellow oaks and maples, past a low semicircular stone gate with the words “Trump National Golf Club” written in gold script, below the Trump family seal, and above the subtitle: Bedminster.
The cars brought wedding guests from Manhattan and Atlantic City; from Newark and Livingston, New Jersey; from Harrisburg and Albany and Tallahassee; from Hollywood and Palm Beach; from Slovenia and the Czech Republic. Some arrived by helicopter.
The stream of limos and black SUVs ferried politicians and media moguls: Rupert Murdoch and his wife, Wendi; and Jeff Zucker and Mark Burnett from NBC. Barbara Walters, Regis Philbin, editors from Vogue and Time and Town & Country and the New York Observer. The chairman of Macy’s was also among the guests, as were bankers, lawyers, and business partners; multiple rabbis; generations of people in real estate and finance; company employees. And, above all, the preeminent tribes, two patriarchs, their children, wives and an ex-wife; siblings and their spouses, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces.1
All there to celebrate the marriage of two beautiful, impossibly successful, and wealthy young people: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, twenty-eight and twenty-seven years old, with the world spread out before them like the gently undulating lawns of the golf course.
Jared Kushner rarely spoke in public, but when he did, his tenor voice betrayed the stretched-out vowels and thudding d’s of New Jersey. He had become known, fleetingly, in 2006, as one of the subjects of Daniel Golden’s book The Price of Admission, which chronicled how, despite an unexceptional academic record, Jared had been accepted at Harvard after large contributions from his father and a call from a US senator.2
By October 2009, Jared Kushner, just six years out of Harvard and two from his double business and law degree from New York University, owned a skyscraper on Fifth Avenue bought for nearly $2 billion and a salmon-colored weekly newspaper, the New York Observer.
Ivanka Trump had grown up, sometimes awkwardly, in front of the paparazzi; she was eight when her parents’ public divorce swamped the front pages of the New York City tabloids; she’d done some modeling as a teen, and had appeared—clumsily—on television.
By her wedding day she had an undergraduate economics degree from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, was an executive vice president of the Trump Organization, had launched a jewelry line, had been named to the board of Trump Entertainment Resorts, and had published the book The Trump Card. She’d become a recurring character in the all-important gossip columns: in the New York Post’s “Page Six,” and New York magazine’s “Intelligencer.” She had been pictured on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar wearing a black bathing suit and wielding a jackhammer, her wrists encircled in elaborate diamond bracelets; and on the cover of Town & Country with the tagline “Smart, Successful and Sexy.” But in 2009, Ivanka Trump was known, most of all, for her regular role as a judge on her father’s television fantasy, The Apprentice.
By the time of his older daughter’s wedding, Donald Trump had divorced two of his three wives and, putatively, cheated with two different women on the third (though no one knew that yet). He had defaulted on bank loans, sued his business partners and government officials with almost ritualistic rigor, and been sued, in turn, by vendors, customers, and financial partners. He had declared over a billion dollars in business losses and avoided a lifetime of taxes. His companies had gone into bankruptcy, he had survived multiple criminal investigations, and yet he was seen almost affectionately as the enfant terrible of Manhattan, Atlantic City, Palm Beach, and, sometimes, Beverly Hills. In those years, during the title sequence of The Apprentice, he would pronounce the lie, “My name’s Donald Trump, and I’m the largest real estate developer in New York.”
Unlike Donald Trump, Charles Kushner, the father of the groom—by then grey-haired, espresso-eyed, athletically lean and coiled—had not been able to avoid the consequences of his actions. The son of Holocaust survivors who had endured unimaginable conditions in Nazi-occupied Poland, Charles Kushner had once been the developer and manager of a New Jersey empire of 22,000 garden apartments and single-family homes, a don of suburbia. He had been, for years, a flagrantly generous philanthropist and the largest Democratic donor in New Jersey, showering the Democratic Party with donations the way the Enron Corporation had contributed to George W. Bush. For a while, he was on track to lead the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, to be the chairman of a bistate transportation and real estate behemoth that has a larger budget than a fifth of US states.
Then he began to blur the lines between the family business and his own interests, so much so that his older brother—his business partner—sued him. The suit caught the attention of the new US attorney for New Jersey: Christopher J. Christie, who enlisted Charles Kushner’s sister and brother-in-law as witnesses. In a rage, Charlie retaliated by hiring a prostitute to entrap his sister’s husband, William Schulder, at a diner in Bridgewater, New Jersey, and then lure him for sex to the Red Bull Inn, just a twenty-minute drive down Route 22 from the Trump golf course in Bedminster.
Charlie Kushner sent the secretly recorded video of the encounter to his sister, who brought it to the US Attorney’s Office in Newark; after which Charlie was arrested for witness tampering. He was also ultimately charged with defrauding US taxpayers and violating campaign finance laws, pleaded guilty, and served a year in prison for his crimes. This period, in New Jersey, is referred to as “when Charlie went away.”
By October 25, 2009, just three years after he was released from the Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Alabama, Charles Kushner had returned to real estate and moved his office to the fifteenth floor of the aluminum-clad skyscraper his company now owned at 666 Fifth Avenue. He’d bought an apartment abutting Central Park and moved his place of worship from the Suburban Torah Center in Livingston, New Jersey, to the prestigious Kehilath Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. His son had acquired a newspaper whose province was “an Island paradise with fiefdoms, rulers, turf battles, borders and a brutal hierarchy,” as its longtime editor, Peter Kaplan, once wrote. “Its voracious royals thought a great deal of themselves, bought a lot for themselves, dressed accordingly, traded in secret insults . . . brought their battles into private schools and charity balls with the idea that it was a game worth winning.”3 Peter Kaplan, too, was among the wedding guests.
The wedding ceremony was called for four in the afternoon, when the late day sun shone through the clear sides of a tent the size of a gymnasium, pitched on the Bedminster grounds. Donald and Melania Trump’s then three-year-old son Barron (who shares a given name with a former business associate bested by Trump, Barron Hilton) was the ring bearer. Chloe and Grace Murdoch, the daughters of Rupert and Wendi Murdoch, were the flower girls. Strewing white petals, they walked up a broad aisle overhung with vines dripping with pendulous white flowers. The bridesmaids were Donald Trump Jr.’s then-wife, Vanessa, and Ivanka’s half-sister Tiffany (who shares a name with the company from which Donald Trump had acquired the rights to build Trump Tower in New York City).
The wedding party congregated under an enormous chuppah, a canopy of white flowers covering the structure that symbolizes Jewish hospitality, the tents of Abraham, and the presence of God. Jared, grandson of Holocaust survivors, was raised to be a strict Modern Orthodox Jew: the family kept kosher, they went to shul, they observed the sabbath. Jared was supposed to marry a Jew. But then, at a business luncheon arranged by a young diamond dealer, he met Ivanka Trump, whose family was Protestant. Jared and Ivanka started dating. Their parents were not happy. For a time, the couple stopped seeing each other. Wendi and Rupert Murdoch intervened, reuniting the couple on a weekend trip. And then Ivanka began the arduous task of converting to Orthodox Judaism.
Ivanka and Jared’s bond was sealed in front of a crowd of five hundred in traditional Orthodox fashion: the bride circling the groom seven times, a glass intentionally broken underfoot. All witnessed by family and friends, celebrities, movie stars, and a large coterie of influential people.
The guest list included the governors of Florida and Pennsylvania, Charlie Crist and Ed Rendell; the attorney general and comptroller of New York, Andrew Cuomo and Tom DiNapoli; the speakers of the New York State Assembly and New York City Council, Sheldon Silver and Christine Quinn; and the mayor of Newark, Cory Booker. The New York City police commissioner, Ray Kelly, and the city’s schools chancellor, Joel Klein, were there. So were Jim McGreevey, the former governor of New Jersey, and Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York. The guests included people who had regulated or could regulate the Kushner and Trump family businesses; had offered or could offer tax abatements or zoning relief; who could, in theory, investigate the family businesses if they ever ran afoul of the law.
One such person was not there: Chris Christie, who was then in the flat-out final days of a race for New Jersey governor. Christie was running on his image as a no-nonsense prosecutor, which included going after politicians and the people he thought corrupted them, including Jared’s father, Charlie. But although Donald Trump had cultivated a friendship with Christie, and had initially put him on his list, Christie was not invited.
Jared did invite his employee David Wildstein, then the executive vice president of the Observer Media Group, who had a past as a political blogger, Republican elected official, and political dirty trickster. (Four years later, Wildstein would order the shutdown of access lanes to the George Washington Bridge in an act of political retribution against a Democratic mayor who did not endorse Chris Christie for reelection as governor. When he pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors for a reduced sentence, Wildstein derailed Christie’s own White House ambitions.)
The wedding was a lavish and elegant party, an event. The marriage of Jared and Ivanka was the joining of two famous real estate dynasties, each braided into the worlds of politics and media and celebrity. There was, also, the bad-boy allure of Donald Trump, the suggestion that something bold and exciting and maybe transgressive was about to happen. And that the people around him could be part of it, that Donald Trump was pulling back his curtain just for them. Even for this glittering crowd, Trump’s promise cast the same spell it did on prime time at NBC for the nine million American fans of The Apprentice. That by entering into a corner of Trump’s world they, too, could become (even more) rich or famous or successful.
There was also the sense of obligation. Trump had trained the political class to understand that their ever-ravenous political machines should compete for some of his purported billions lest he mete it out to their opponents. Years later, when he was running for president, Trump laid this out clearly, in an early Republican primary debate. “I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me.”
“What did you get?” Trump was asked.
“Well, I’ll tell you what,” Trump replied. “Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding and she came to my wedding. You know why? She had no choice because I gave. I gave to a foundation.”4
Hillary Clinton, in October 2009 the US secretary of state, did not attend Jared and Ivanka’s wedding. But Donald Trump had created an implied command, and when he invited politicians to things like Jared and Ivanka’s wedding, they came. The command also came from Jared, who ran a newspaper whose circulation, however tiny, captured the attention of Manhattan opinion makers in an era when social media was still a new toy for early adopters. And the command came from the couple of Jared-and-Ivanka, whose carefully cultivated red-carpet charity-circuit image made them sought-after potential donors.
The wedding itself had its own internal allure. The world of The Celebrity Apprentice was one of famous people who had seen better days: Dennis Rodman, Gary Busey, Dionne Warwick, Joan Rivers. There were actual movie stars at Jared and Ivanka’s wedding: Princess Padmé Amidala of the Stars Wars movie franchise (Natalie Portman) and Maximus Decimus Meridius from Gladiator (Russell Crowe).
Among the old, dynastic families of New York real estate, when asked about Trump, people said, and still say, “Donald Trump is not one of us.” They say they never saw Donald Trump at the Real Estate Board of New York, or the Partnership for New York City or the Alliance for a Better New York; they did not see him at civic events; they did not see him at charity balls or the ballet or the opera. With few exceptions, for example, the US Open tennis tournament in Queens, he stayed in his own homes, frequented his own clubs, and ate in the restaurants in his own buildings.
By contrast, Ivanka Trump had found acceptance in the Manhattan elite. She went to The Chapin School on the Upper East Side, and Choate Rosemary Hall boarding school in Connecticut, she studied at the School of American Ballet and danced as a child extra in The Nutcracker. As an adult she was a sought-after supporter for causes from the World Wildlife Fund to the New York City Police Foundation. She was welcomed at the Met Gala and Vanity Fair parties and chatted about opera with Leonard Lopate on the public radio station WNYC.
Unlike her father and her husband, she had no hint of Queens or New Jersey in her measured speech. Somehow, through her, their accents were laundered.
Ivanka and Jared’s wedding was Jewish in a Trumpian way. As women arrived they were given elegant shawls, to guard against the autumnal chill as the sun slid down the sky, but also to cover their shoulders. Ivanka herself wore a Vera Wang wedding dress, shoulders covered by white lace sleeves extending down to her elbows. In some dances, women were separated from men, in the Orthodox tradition. The food, served in a separate dinner tent, also enormous, was kosher. A rabbi had walked through the tent, koshering a caterer’s knife by dipping it in water. There was pastrami, corned beef, turkey, a sushi station, and Peking duck. A thirteen-layer cake that was almost as tall as the bride and groom, ringed with cream-colored lisianthus, roses, peonies, lilies of the valley, and baby’s breath.
Charles Kushner’s speech was a variant of the one he gave at every family event, every simcha—Yiddish and Hebrew for “joy,” a metonym for “joyous occasion”—about being the son of Holocaust survivors, about the miracle of survival, about Jews thriving and prevailing, about the values of family and chesed—Hebrew for “compassion,” or “grace”—and Torah. He spoke about Ivanka, and how she had worked so hard to become Jewish, and how the family embraced her now.
Donald Trump had been bewildered by his daughter’s conversion, but was gracious at his daughter’s wedding. He spoke appreciatively, and uncharacteristically, of his first wife, Ivana, and all the work she had done to raise Ivanka, acknowledging he hadn’t always been an attentive parent. The guests, who had come to the wedding with a mix of curiosity and anticipation and obligation and appreciation, were greeted warmly. They felt, for a fleeting instance perhaps, the gravitational pull of Donald Trump’s personality.
That night, as guests left clutching their giveaway prayer books and a pair of Havaiana flip-flops that said “Jared” on one and “Ivanka” on the other, laced through with a string calling them a great pair, they were forced to embrace Trump’s ostentatiousness even as they participated in his display; to pay tribute to this marriage of money and power; to acknowledge the authority of the patriarchs. From the vantage point of everything they had built, the families could say: We’ve arrived, you are complicit in our power, we are a force to be reckoned with, pay respect to us.
Foolishly, the world did not.