Jared Kushner Is Writing “the Definitive” Book About the Trump Administration, i.e. Fiction

After Donald Trump, one of the most loathed people associated with the last presidential administration is his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. That probably has something to do with the fact that Kushner had literally no business serving as a senior adviser to the president of the United States in the first place, yet had a role in numerous issues affecting the lives of millions of Americans, most of which he royally botched. Take, for instance, COVID-19. You remember that whole thing, right? In mid-March of 2020, just around the time the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, Kushner was still insisting the virus wasn‘t a “health reality.” A month later he decided to cut doctors and scientists out of the government’s response before claiming in late April, “We’re on the other side of the medical aspect of this,” and adding, “This is a great success story.” (Note that 58,000 people in the U.S. had already died, with hundreds of thousands more on the way.) Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the first son-in-law was reportedly uninterested in finding a solution to the public health crisis because, at the time, “the virus was primarily ravaging cities in blue states.” As he reportedly declared—and later denied—in a White House meeting regarding the spiraling situation in New York City, “People are going to suffer and that’s their problem.”

So you can sort of understand why no one would ever want to hear from the guy again, and yet someone is actually paying Kushner not just to share his thoughts but to spread them far and wide. Per the Associated Press:

Kushner, the son-in-law of former president Donald Trump and one of his top advisers during his administration, has a book deal. Broadside Books, a conservative imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, announced that Kushner’s book will come out in early 2022. Kushner has begun working on the memoir, currently untitled, and is expected to write about everything from the Middle East to criminal justice reform to the pandemic. “His book will be the definitive, thorough recounting of the administration—and the truth about what happened behind closed doors,” Broadside announced Tuesday. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Kushner was often at the center of the Trump administration’s policies—whether brokering the normalization of relationships between Israel and United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco—the so-called Abraham Accords—or playing a key role in a criminal justice bill passed by Congress in 2018. He has also been the subject of numerous controversies, whether for his financial dealings and potential conflicts of interest or for the administration’s widely criticized handling of COVID-19. In April 2020, less than two months into the pandemic, Kushner…dismissed “the eternal lockdown crowd” and also said: “I think you’ll see by June a lot of the country should be back to normal and the hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again.”

Given that Kushner, like the Trumps, is not one for self-reflection, and that he’s unlikely to write a book called Here Are All the Ways I F–ked Up, he’ll presumably be glossing over a lot of key moments. As we noted when news of his authorial aspirations first surfaced, we can probably assume he’ll fail to mention:

• The fact that one former volunteer on his COVID-19 task force described the administration’s pandemic response as being “like a family office meets organized crime, melded with Lord of the Flies”
• That oopsie on the April 2020 “comeback” prediction
• The fact that the White House publicly declared in October that it was no longer trying to “control” the pandemic
• That Trump left office with a body count of 400,000 people
• How his Middle East “peace” accords made “little mention of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”
• His declaration on Fox News, regarding the Black community, that “President Trump’s policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they’re complaining about, but he can’t want them to be successful more than they want to be successful.”
• His father-in-law’s attempts to overturn the results of a free and fair election, up to and including inciting a violent insurrection

And speaking of Kushner’s father-in-law: In a rare bit of good news, it appears that no one wants to touch his memoir with a 10,000-foot pole.

The signing of Kushner comes during an ongoing debate within the book industry over which Trump officials, notably Trump himself, can be taken on without starting a revolt at the publishing house. Thousands of Simon & Schuster employees and authors signed an open letter this spring condemning the publisher’s decision to sign up former vice president Mike Pence.

At a Simon & Schuster town hall in May, employees confronted CEO Jonathan Karp, who responded that he felt the company had a mission to hear opposing sides of political debates. He also said that he did not want to publish Trump, who issued his 2015 book, Crippled America, through the Simon & Schuster imprint Threshold Editions, because he didn’t think the former president would provide an honest account of his time in office. Trump issued a statement last week that he was “writing like crazy” and had turned down two offers “from the most unlikely of publishers,” a claim widely disputed within the industry.

Asked by Politico if they had heard of such offers, editors and publishers at the Big Five publishing houses said they had heard of nothing of the sort. “It doesn’t matter what the upside on a Trump book deal is, the headaches the project would bring would far outweigh the potential in the eyes of a major publisher,” Keith Urbahn, president and founding partner of literary agency Javelin, told Politico. “Any editor bold enough to acquire the Trump memoir is looking at a fact-checking nightmare, an exodus of other authors, and a staff uprising in the unlikely event they strike a deal with the former president.”

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