Jared Kushner set for a job at Trump White House

The only one in Trump’s inner circle possibly able to keep him focused is meticulously polite, with a scandalous back story.

Jared Kushner, son-in-law of of President-elect Donald Trump. Picture: AP

When Donald Trump arrived at the White House two days after his shock election win he brought a small group of confidants with him. One stood out: the tall, softly spoken and slightly awkward young man seen walking the South Lawn with Denis McDonough, President Obama’s chief of staff and the chief gatekeeper to the Oval Office.

That stroll was a rare public demonstration of the rising status of Jared Kushner, who is married to the president-elect’s eldest daughter, Ivanka. He is credited with bringing to the Trump campaign a cool head, a moderate voice and a raw skill for electioneering.

His back story is steeped in a scandal that may already have shaped the Trump administration: Mr Kushner took the reins of his family’s dollars 2 billion property empire at the age of 24 when his father was jailed after a tawdry attempt to blackmail his own sister.

The prosecutor behind that case, Chris Christie, now the governor of New Jersey, was dismissed from the Trump team soon after the election. Coincidentally or not, Mr Kushner is said to be fond of The Count of Monte Cristo, a novel about an unjustly imprisoned man and his quest for revenge.

Now he appears to be on course for a role at the Trump White House, possibly as a formal but unpaid adviser - an arrangement that would try to skirt anti-nepotism rules but which could easily wind up as the target of a court challenge.

Pundits have started calling him “The Trump Whisperer”, suggesting that he is the one member of the inner circle able to keep the president-elect focused. Some suggest he will be in charge of blocking sycophants and time-wasters from the Oval Office, much as Nancy Reagan did for Ronald.

He is the grandson of Holocaust survivors and has been a supporter of gay rights. During the campaign he arranged key meetings for Mr Trump with the likes of Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.

Mr Kushner will strike some as an unlikely foe of the establishment. He attended Harvard after his parents gave a donation of dollars 2.5 million to the university and, more recently, has sought out the former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who visited Trump Tower last week, as a foreign policy mentor.

The Trump presidential campaign was his first serious involvement in politics. The polling and data operation that he helped to set up - for dollars 90 million, a pittance in US election terms - spotted weaknesses in Hillary Clinton’s “firewall” states. He was also a guiding hand behind the team that determined that the Democratic candidate was weak across the rust belt of the Midwest, and that Mr Trump could run up vote totals in rural precincts in the critical battleground of Florida.

In March, when Mr Trump addressed Washington’s most powerful Israel lobbying group, it was Mr Kushner, an orthodox Jew, who wrote his speech. It was one of the few times that the free-wheeling tycoon used a teleprompter: his son-in-law, it seemed, was the one person capable of keeping him on script.

Most importantly, perhaps, Mr Kushner offers Mr Trump unfailing loyalty. He was, insiders say, one of the very few who kept faith in the campaign’s darkest period; the days after a tape emerged of Mr Trump bragging about being allowed to grope women because he was famous.

The pugnacious Mr Christie became a key Trump ally in the spring after he ended his own presidential campaign, but his days may already have been numbered. In 2005, when he was a federal prosecutor, his efforts resulted in Mr Kushner’s father, Charles, being sent to prison for tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal political donations.

Mr Christie was made the head of the transition team that was to assemble Mr Trump’s cabinet and other government staff but he was pushed out days after the election win - partly, diplomatic sources say, because of his history with the Kushner family.

The youthful Mr Kushner took the reins of the family business after the jailing of his father. Every Sunday, he flew from New York to Alabama to visit him in prison. “He was the best son to his father in jail,” Charles Kushner said in 2009. “The best son to his mother, who suffered terribly, and he was a father to his siblings.”

In 2007 he bought a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper for dollars 1.8 billion, the highest price ever paid for a single building in New York, but when the economy crashed in 2008 it appeared that he had overpaid: the property was worth less than the debt attached to it.

In less than a decade, however, he would buy almost dollars 7 billion worth of property. When he appeared on the business channel CNBC in 2007 the presenter marvelled: “You’re in your twenties, and you’re a mogul already!”

Mr Kushner, who is often described as being meticulously polite, replied: “You’re using that term very loosely.”

In 2006 he bought the New York Observer, a newspaper known for dishing up gossip on the city’s billionaires, for an estimated dollars 10 million. It has since fallen victim to an industry-wide advertising slump and announced this month that it would scrap its print edition, and publish only online.

Its staff complained to Mr Kushner during the campaign that Mr Trump had tweeted “blatant antisemitic imagery” - a Star of David next to a pile of money and an allegation that Hillary Clinton was corrupt.

Mr Kushner wrote an article to defend his father-in-law. “Donald Trump is not antisemitic and he’s not a racist,” he said. “The worst that his detractors can fairly say about him is that he has been careless in re-tweeting imagery that can be interpreted as offensive.”

Six months after buying the Observer he started dating Ivanka Trump. “Jared and I are very similar in that we’re very ambitious,” Ivanka told New York Magazine in 2009. “That’s what makes it so amazing to be in a relationship with someone who is supportive of that. I’m happy for him when he is in the office working late. I know how good that feels when you sit down and return emails.”

She converted to Judaism to marry him in 2009. Russell Crowe and Natalie Portman were among the guests at the ceremony.

Mr Kushner may have already shaped the internal dynamic of the Trump White House. He is said to have supported Steve Bannon, the campaign’s chief strategist, when he was accused of promoting white supremacist views through the Breitbart News website.

He is also said to have steered Mr Trump towards appointing Reince Priebus as his chief of staff. Mr Priebus, chairman of the Republican national committee, is a consummate political insider who has a strong relationship with Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives. The Priebus-Ryan relationship will be critical if Mr Trump is to advance his agenda on Capitol Hill.

Before this summer Mr Kushner had appeared to be on the left, politically. Campaign officials have claimed, however, that he underwent a kind of political epiphany while speaking to the crowds at Mr Trump’s rallies.

The Times