Age, Biography, and Wiki
Jared Corey Kushner was born on January 10, 1981. He is a son-in-law of former U.S. President Donald Trump and has been involved in both politics and business. Kushner's rise to prominence began with his family's real estate firm, Kushner Companies, where he played a significant role from an early age.
| Occupation | Real Estate |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 10 January 1981 |
| Age | 44 Years |
| Birth Place | Livingston, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Horoscope | Capricorn |
| Country | Jersey |
Height, Weight & Measurements
Details about Jared Kushner's height and weight are not extensively documented in public sources, but he is often portrayed as a suave and charismatic figure in media appearances.
| Height | |
| Weight | |
| Body Measurements | |
| Eye Color | |
| Hair Color |
Dating & Relationship Status
Jared Kushner is married to Ivanka Trump, the daughter of Donald Trump. The couple has been together since 2005 and has three children together.
Jared Corey Kushner (born January 10, 1981) is an American businessman and investor. He is a son-in-law of the president of the United States, Donald Trump, through his marriage to Ivanka Trump and served as a senior advisor in his father-in-law's first administration from 2017 to 2021. He was also director of the Office of American Innovation.
For much of his career, Kushner worked as a real-estate investor in New York City, especially through the family business Kushner Companies. He took over the company after his father, Charles Kushner, was convicted for 18 criminal charges, including illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering in 2005, although Charles was pardoned by Trump in 2020. Jared met Ivanka Trump around 2005, and the couple married in 2009. He also became involved in the newspaper industry after purchasing The New York Observer in 2006. He was registered as a Democrat and donated to Democratic politicians for much of his life but registered as Independent in 2009 and eventually as Republican in 2018. He played a significant role in the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign, and was at one point seen as its de facto campaign manager. Around Trump's election, Kushner was frequently accused of conflicts of interest, profiting from policy proposals for which he personally advocated within the Trump administration.
His father was friends with Bill and Hillary Clinton and attended several dinners with them. Morris Stadtmauer was Jared's maternal grandfather. His paternal grandparents, Reichel and Joseph Kushner, were Holocaust survivors who came to the U.S. in 1949 from Navahrudak, now in Belarus. Reichel, described as the family's matriarch, led efforts during the Holocaust to escape from the Navahrudak ghetto by digging a tunnel. Later, she became a member of the Bielski partisans.
Raised in a Modern Orthodox Jewish family, Kushner graduated from the Frisch School, a Modern Orthodox yeshiva high school, in 1999 and enrolled at Harvard University in the same year. According to journalist Daniel Golden, Kushner's father made a donation of $2.5 million to the university in 1998, not long before Jared was admitted. At Harvard, Kushner was elected into the Fly Club, supported the campus Chabad house led by Hirschy Zarchi, and bought and sold real estate in Somerville, Massachusetts, as a vice president of Somerville Building Associates (a division of Kushner Companies), returning a profit of $20 million by its dissolution in 2005. Kushner graduated from Harvard with honors in 2003, with a B.A. degree in government.
Following his father's conviction and subsequent incarceration between March 4, 2005, and August 25, 2006, Kushner took a much bigger role in the family real estate business. He set about expanding the business and acquired almost $7 billion in property over the next ten years, much of it in New York City.
Kushner was an active real estate investor during his college years, and increased the Kushner Companies' presence throughout the New York City real estate market. Kushner Companies purchased the office building at 666 Fifth Avenue in 2007, for a then-record price of $1.8 billion, most of it borrowed. He assumed the role of CEO in 2008. Following the property crash that year, the cash flow generated by the property was insufficient to cover its debt service, and the Kushners were forced to sell a controlling stake in the retail footage to The Carlyle Group and Stanley Chera and bring in Vornado Realty Trust as a 50% equity partner in the ownership of the building. By that time, Kushner Companies had lost more than $90 million on its investment. He was the face of the deal but his father Charles Kushner pushed him to do the deal.
After purchasing the Observer, Kushner published it in tabloid format. Since then, he has been credited with increasing the Observer's online presence and expanding the Observer Media Group. With no substantial experience in journalism, Kushner could not establish a good relationship with the newspaper's veteran editor-in-chief, Peter W. Kaplan. "This guy doesn't know what he doesn't know", Kaplan remarked about Kushner, to colleagues, at the time. As a result of his differences with Kushner, Kaplan quit his position. Kaplan was followed by a series of short-lived successors until Kushner hired Elizabeth Spiers in 2011. It has been alleged that Kushner used the Observer as propaganda against rivals in real estate. Spiers left the newspaper in 2012. In January 2013, Kushner hired a new editor-in-chief, Ken Kurson. Kurson had been a consultant to Republican political candidates in New Jersey.
Jared Kushner had been a lifelong Democrat prior to his father-in-law Donald Trump entering politics. He had donated over $10,000 to Democratic campaigns starting at the age of 11. In 2008, he donated to the campaign for Hillary Clinton and his newspaper the New York Observer endorsed Barack Obama over John McCain in the 2008 United States presidential election. After expressing disappointment with Obama, however, he registered as an independent in 2009 and endorsed Republican U.S. presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012 via the New York Observer. In 2014 he continued to donate to Democratic groups, but joined his father-in-law Donald Trump's nascent US presidential campaign in the field of the Republican candidates in 2015. Kushner had no prior involvement in campaign politics or in government before Trump's campaign.
From the outset of the presidential campaign of his father-in-law Donald Trump, Kushner was the architect of Trump's digital, online, and social media campaigns, enlisting talent from Silicon Valley to run a 100-person social-media team dubbed "Project Alamo." The digital team tested more than one hundred thousand ad combinations a week, raising more than $250 million in small-dollar donations in the closing months of the campaign. Andrew Bosworth, Facebook's top advertising executive during the 2016 campaign cycle, called it the “single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser.”
Kushner, together with Paul Manafort and Brad Parscale, hired Steve Bannon's firm Cambridge Analytica to support the Trump campaign. Kushner has also helped as a speechwriter, and was tasked with working to establish a plan for Trump's White House transition team. He was for a time seen as Trump's de facto campaign manager, succeeding Corey Lewandowski, who was fired in part on Kushner's recommendation in June 2016. He had been intimately involved with campaign strategy, coordinating Trump's visit in late August to Mexico, and he is believed to be responsible for the choice of Mike Pence as Trump's running mate. Kushner's "sprawling digital fundraising database and social media campaign" has been described as "the locus of his father-in-law's presidential bid."
During the presidential transition, Kushner was said to be his father-in-law's "confidant," and one of Donald Trump's closest advisors, even more so than Trump's four adult children. Trump was reported to have requested the top-secret security clearance for him to attend the presidential daily intelligence briefings as his staff-level companion, along with General Mike Flynn, who already had the clearance prior to his resignation.
After Donald Trump became President-elect, Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump met with the Japanese prime minister and other Japanese officials, while Ivanka was conducting a licensing deal between her namesake clothing brand and Sanei International, a company whose investors include the Japanese government's development bank. Although negotiations around the deal had begun in 2015, well before Donald Trump secured the Republican nomination for president, Ivanka backed out of the deal to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. She sat in on a meeting between her father, then-president-elect Donald Trump, and Japan's prime minister, Shinzō Abe.
Kushner's business activities in China drew press scrutiny for mixing government with business. Kushner's investments in real estate and financial services have also drawn controversy for conflicts of interest. In May 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported that he had failed to disclose all required financial information in his security clearance applications, including that he owes $1 billion in loans. While noting that “it is difficult to calculate net worth” using financial disclosure forms, the Washington Post estimated that during 2017, Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump made $82 million in outside income at the same time that they served as senior White House advisors. Kushner and Ivanka's lawyers asserted that their net worth had largely remained the same.
Kushner was reportedly an influential factor behind the firing of New Jersey governor Chris Christie as head of the transition team, as well as the dismissal from the Donald Trump transition team of anyone connected to Christie. An anonymous source familiar with the transition told Politico, "Jared doesn't like Christie... He's always held [the prosecution of his father] against Christie." Kushner told Forbes that the reports that he was involved in Christie's dismissal were false: "Six months ago, Governor Christie and I decided this election was much bigger than any differences we may have had in the past, and we worked very well together. ... I was not behind pushing out him or his people." In his memoir Christie said that Steve Bannon fired him at Trump Tower but that Kushner had his firing ordered as revenge for what Christie had done to Kushner's father Charles Kushner for several felonies.
Since the electoral defeat of his father-in-law, Donald J. Trump, Kushner has stayed active in the region through a nonprofit organization he established. He took a special interest in the petroleum-rich monarchies of the Persian Gulf. Kushner attempted to raise money from the Persian Gulf states for a new investment firm he has founded.
Shortly after Trump assumed office, Kushner and several administration officials initiated discussions with the Mexican government around renegotiating NAFTA. In April 2017 reports surfaced that Trump intended to withdraw from the trade agreement. Working with counterparts in the Mexican and Canadian governments, Kushner convinced Trump to set aside these plans and instead enter into formal trade negotiations. When the Senate confirmed Robert Lighthizer as United States Trade Representative in May 2017, Lighthizer commenced formal negotiations, leading on the technical aspects of the discussions while Kushner managed the relationships with the Mexican and Canadian governments. On August 27, 2018, the United States and Mexico announced that they had reached a preliminary deal without Canada. A month later, Canada announced that it intended to join the deal as well. At a press conference in the Rose Garden on September 30, 2018, Lighthizer stated that the $1.3 trillion trade deal “would not have happened” without Kushner's efforts. In recognition of these efforts, President Peña Nieto awarded Kushner the Order of the Aztec Eagle, Mexico's highest honor granted to a non-Mexican citizen, calling Kushner a “grand ally” of Mexico and an “important actor” in the U.S.-Mexico relationship.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Kushner was an influential advisor to President Trump, and shaped the administration's actions. At Trump's order, Kushner set up what has been described as a "shadow task force," separate from the official coronavirus task force chaired by Vice President Mike Pence. The Kushner operation was staffed by a dozen young volunteers from the private sector; they worked out of offices on the seventh floor of the Health and Human Services building. Their first assignment was to facilitate the search for medical supplies and protective equipment, with their performance receiving criticism for favoritism shown to Trump associates. According to The Washington Post, numerous rudimentary initiatives proposed by Kushner interrupted the work of other government officials who were seeking to manage the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic. The New York Times reported that one way that Kushner was seeking advice on how to deal with the coronavirus outbreak was to ask his brother's father-in-law, a physician, for recommendations. The physician then proceeded to crowdsource advice on a Facebook group for physicians.
Kushner did not participate in the Trump administration's attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election. He started writing a memoir, made plans to move his family to Miami, and focused on his project of Middle East diplomacy. He met with Biden administration security advisors Jake Sullivan and Jeffrey Zients to prepare for transition of power. During the January 6, 2021 United States Capitol attack, he was returning from a diplomatic trip around the Persian gulf states. On January 11, 2021, he arranged a meeting between vice-president Mike Pence and Donald Trump to try to reconcile their relationship. On March 31, 2022, he voluntarily spoke to the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack for six hours. He was the highest-ranking Trump administration official interviewed to date, as well as the first Trump family member to be interviewed.
On September 15, 2017, Carl Kline, the director of the personnel security office within the Executive Office of President Trump, recorded Kushner as having an interim Top Secret/SCI security clearance. Kushner and his wife were among at least 48 officials granted interim clearance giving them access to sensitive compartmented information (SCI): detailed accounts of intelligence sources and methods.
Kushner finally received permanent Top Secret security clearance on May 23, 2018. In January 2019, Trump told The New York Times that he had not intervened to grant Kushner's security clearances. On February 8, 2019, Kushner's wife Ivanka also denied that Trump had intervened to grant her or Kushner's security clearances. However, on February 28, 2019, CNN (citing three anonymous sources) and The New York Times (citing four anonymous sources) reported that in May 2018 Trump ordered Kelly to grant Kushner a top-secret clearance, which Kelly contemporaneously documented in an internal memo. Reportedly, this was the first time any U.S. president had intervened in such a way. Carl Kline later testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that there had been no external intervention in the decision to restore Kushner's clearance.
After his appointment as Senior Advisor to Donald Trump (in January 2017), Kushner resigned as head of his family's real-estate firm, Kushner Companies, and partially divested himself of some of its assets, including all his stake in Thrive Capital, a venture capital firm co-founded by his brother, all common stock holdings and over 35 other investments, and his stake in 666 Fifth Avenue. However, he did not actually sell off his assets or set up a blind trust with outside management. Instead, he transferred ownership of some of his assets to his brother and to a trust overseen by his mother rather than selling off his assets to a third party or setting up a blind trust with outside management. The New York Times reported that Kushner managed to retain "the vast majority of his interest in Kushner Companies. His real estate holdings and other investments are worth as much as $761 million." Disclosures he was required to make show that Kushner still receives millions of dollars a year in income from rent collected by his assorted real estate portfolio.
After her father was elected president, global sales of Ivanka Trump merchandise surged. On April 6, 2017, the same day that Kushner and Ivanka dined with Chinese president Xi Jinping and his wife at a dinner hosted by the president at Mar-a-Lago, the Chinese government provisionally approved three new trademarks for the Ivanka Trump brand giving it monopoly rights to sell Ivanka Trump brand jewelry, bags and spa services in the world's second-largest economy. Ivanka applied for the trademarks in 2016 due to concerns about the proliferation of knock off and counterfeits goods being sold under her name in China as her father's presidential campaign progressed.
Kushner has a younger brother, Joshua, and two sisters, Dara and Nicole. He married Ivanka Trump in a Jewish ceremony on October 25, 2009. They had met in 2005 through mutual friends. Kushner and his wife Ivanka (who converted to Judaism in 2009 ) are Modern Orthodox Jews, keep a kosher home, and observe the Jewish Shabbat. They have three children, a daughter born in July 2011 and two sons, born in October 2013 and March 2016.
In 2004, Kushner's father pleaded guilty to eighteen felony counts of tax fraud, election violations, and witness tampering. (He retaliated against his own sister who was a cooperating witness in the case.) The case against Charles Kushner was prosecuted by Chris Christie, who later became Governor of New Jersey and, for a period was part of Donald Trump's election campaign team in 2016. Christie subsequently claimed that Jared Kushner was responsible for having him fired as revenge for sending his father to prison.
In 2017, federal disclosures suggested Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump had assets worth at least $240 million, and as much as $740 million. They also have an art collection, estimated to be worth millions, that was not mentioned in the financial disclosures initially. The United States Office of Government Ethics has said that the updated disclosures comply with the regulations and laws.
| Parents | |
| Husband | Ivanka Trump (m. October 25, 2009) |
| Sibling | |
| Children |
Net Worth and Salary
As of 2025, Jared Kushner's net worth is estimated to be around $800 million to $900 million. His annual salary is not publicly disclosed, but it is reported that he earns around $200 million annually from his business ventures. His wealth primarily stems from his family's real estate business, Kushner Companies, and his investments in ventures like Affinity Partners.
He became senior advisor to Trump in 2017, and held the position until Trump left office in 2021. His appointment was followed by concerns of nepotism. Here, he led the administration's effort to pass the First Step Act, a criminal justice reform bill signed into law in 2018. Kushner was the primary Trump administration participant for the Middle East Peace Process, authoring the Trump peace plan and facilitating the talks that led to the signing of the Abraham Accords and other normalization agreements between Israel and various Arab states in 2020. Kushner also played an influential role in the Trump administration's COVID-19 response, where he advised Trump that the media was exaggerating the threat of the disease. He was a leading broker in the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement. Since leaving the White House, Kushner founded Affinity Partners, a private equity firm that derives most of its funds from the Saudi government's sovereign wealth fund.
In March 2020, the Associated Press reported that Kushner had sold stakes in a firm that had benefitted from the same Opportunity Zone tax breaks—incentives for new investment in low-income communities—that Kushner pushed for as a senior White House advisor.
Within the Trump administration, Kushner had been a staunch defender of Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman. In 2021, Kushner started an investment firm, Affinity Partners. He sought funds for the new company through the sovereign wealth funds of Gulf countries. Advisers for the Public Investment Fund, the Saudi government's sovereign wealth fund, expressed several concerns about the transaction—including the inexperience of Affinity management, the degree of risk to be assumed by the Saudi kingdom, an "excessive" management fee, and a finding that Affinity's operations were "unsatisfactory in all aspects". However, PIF management overruled them and invested $2 billion in Kushner's firm, only six months after Kushner had left the White House. The firm primarily depended on Saudi money, as, by April 2022, it only had $2.5 billion under its management. According to ethics experts, the investment created the appearance of potential payback for Kushner. The House Oversight Committee said on June 2, 2022, that it had opened an investigation into whether Kushner had traded on his government position to get the deal.
Investments and Ventures
Kushner's investments span across real estate, tech, and other sectors. His role in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2021 also influenced his business relationships and opportunities.
Kushner then enrolled in the JD/MBA dual degree program at the New York University School of Law and New York University Stern School of Business, and graduated with both degrees in 2007. He interned at Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau's office, and with the New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
In 2011, Kushner purchased a 130,000 square foot office tower at 200 Lafayette Street in Manhattan for $50 million, selling it two years later for $150 million. In 2013, his company led a transaction to purchase the Jehovah's Witnesses headquarters in Brooklyn Heights for $375 million and invested $100 million into the site, transforming it into a sprawling office park, and signing online retailer Etsy to a 10-year lease. The same year, Kushner co-founded WiredScore, a global organization that provides a digital connectivity certification rating the quality and resilience of digital infrastructure in buildings.
Throughout 2013 to 2014, Kushner and his company acquired more than 11,000 units throughout New York, New Jersey, and the Baltimore area. In August 2014, Kushner acquired a three-building apartment portfolio in Middle River, Maryland, for $38 million with Aion Partners, later selling the complex for $68 million. In May 2015, he acquired a 50.1% stake of the Times Square Building from Africa Israel Investments Ltd. for $295 million.
In 2014, Kushner, with his brother Joshua and Ryan Williams, co-founded Cadre (now RealCadre LLC), an online real-estate investment platform. His business partners included Goldman Sachs and billionaire George Soros, a top Democratic Party donor. In early 2015, Soros Fund Management financed the startup with a $250 million credit line. Kushner did not identify these business relationships in his January 2017 government financial-disclosure form. He did, however, disclose his ownership of BFPS Ventures, the company that housed his stake in Cadre. In 2020, his ownership stake in Cadre was estimated at $25–50 million.
According to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (who worked on technology for Hillary Clinton's campaign), Kushner's role in the 2016 election was its biggest surprise. Schmidt told Forbes, "Best I can tell, he actually ran the campaign and did it with essentially no resources." Federal Election Commission filings indicate the Trump campaign spent $343 million, about 59 percent as much as the Clinton campaign.
On January 9, 2017, Kushner was named Senior Advisor to the President (formally, "Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor"). He consequently resigned as CEO of Kushner Companies, and as publisher of the Observer.
Kushner helped broker the sale of $100+ billion of arms to Saudi Arabia, and during a meeting with Saudi officials at the White House to finalize the deal, he called Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson to ask for a lower price on a radar system to detect ballistic missiles.
In a statement, Abbe Lowell, Kushner's lawyer, admitted that Kushner had intermittently used private e-mail for official White House business. No classified or privileged information was used on this account. During the campaign for the 2016 presidential election, Trump repeatedly criticized his opponent Hillary Clinton for her use of personal e-mail in her role as Secretary of State, which involved the transmission of classified information over a server Clinton had set up in her basement.
Also in December 2016, Kushner met with Sergey N. Gorkov, a trained Russian spy who then headed Vnesheconombank (VEB), a Russian state-owned bank. Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that Kushner met with Gorkov briefly as part of his role in the transition, and as a diplomatic conduit to the State Department. However, VEB has stated that Gorkov met with Kushner on a private matter concerning his family's real estate corporation, Kushner Companies, even though VEB has been under international sanctions since July 2014. The Mueller investigation examined this meeting and could not confirm VEB's account. The Mueller report did state, however, that it was unable to find evidence that there was any follow up between Kushner and Gorkov after the meeting.
Kushner also helped put together a March 13 Rose Garden event where Trump falsely claimed that Google was "quickly developing" a website that could help test people for coronavirus. Google later clarified their involvement, stating that the website would initially serve the Bay Area. Trump also announced a project intended to set up testing sites across parking lots across the United States, taking the state and federal health care workers who oversee the project by surprise. These drive-through testing sites were later used to support distribution of the coronavirus vaccine. On March 30, 2020, The Atlantic reported that a website that Trump had said would help Americans to diagnose themselves and direct them to a nearby coronavirus testing site in a March 13 press conference had been a project between the government and Oscar Health, a company that Kushner had ties with. Kushner's brother, Joshua, co-founded and owns Oscar Health, and Kushner himself was a partial owner of the firm before joining the White House. The website was quickly scrapped.
Kushner's firm landed the more than $2 billion only six months after Kushner stopped working as a senior adviser for the president, to invest in American and Israeli companies expanding in India, Africa, the Middle East and other parts of Asia. Investors include $2 billion from the Saudi public investment fund, with Kushner stating that he hopes to open an "investment corridor between Saudi Arabia and Israel", seen internationally as a "sign of warming ties between two historic rivals".
The fund plans to invest Saudi money into startup companies in Israel. According to the Wall Street Journal, "The decision marks the first known instance that the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s cash will be directed to Israel, a sign of the kingdom’s increasing willingness to do business with the country, even though they have no diplomatic relations."
In 2023, Republican candidate for President Chris Christie criticized Kushner and Trump for the deal, saying "Why would you send Jared Kushner to the Middle East when you have Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo... You send him? Why? We found out the answer six months after he left office: $2 billion from the Saudis to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, $2 billion, and because he did all this and more with his family. I'm going to end this family grift that's going on. We are not a third-world republic." The Wall Street Journal reported that Kushner has not made any investments despite receiving the funding some years ago, collecting "tens of millions in management fees each year" while not making any investments. Norm Eisen of the Brookings Institution suggested the payments were meant to curry favor with Trump's family, should the former president retake the White House in the 2024 election: "It appears to be money for nothing." The House Oversight Committee Chairman, Kentucky Republican James Comer, said he believes Kushner “crossed the line of ethics” by accepting the investment from Saudi Arabia.
While a White House official, Kushner used WhatsApp to conduct government business, raising concerns among cybersecurity experts that sensitive government communications could be vulnerable to exploitation by foreign governments and hackers. Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman was reportedly one of the individuals that Kushner contacted through WhatsApp; in January 2020, UN investigators said that there was evidence that bin Salman was involved in the hacking of Jeff Bezos's phone through WhatsApp communications, advising that Kushner and others in contact with the Crown Prince should take measures to protect their communications. Kushner reportedly used WhatsApp to communicate with his coronavirus team during March and April 2020. Ethics watchdogs have since confirmed that Kushner turned over his WhatsApp records prior to departing the White House, and that these records have been acquired in full by the National Archives and Records Administration.
Social Network
Jared Kushner is not highly active on social media platforms, reflecting his preference for maintaining a lower public profile outside of business and politics.
On July 5, 2016, Kushner wrote an open letter in the New York Observer addressing the controversy around a tweet from the Trump campaign containing allegedly anti-Semitic imagery. He was responding to his own paper's editorial by Dana Schwartz criticizing Kushner's involvement with the Trump campaign. In the letter, Kushner wrote, "In my opinion, accusations like 'racist' and 'anti-Semite' are being thrown around with a carelessness that risks rendering these words meaningless." His estranged cousin Marc responded to the op-ed on Facebook that his lesson from the story of his grandparents was to renounce hate.
Early on during the outbreak, Kushner advised Trump that the media was exaggerating the dangers of the coronavirus outbreak; at the time, Trump downplayed the dangers of the coronavirus. Kushner helped write the Oval Office address that President Trump gave to the nation on March 11, 2020, along with Trump's advisor Stephen Miller. Drafts of the address were not shared with any of the staff working on the coronavirus task force or with the agencies dealing with the coronavirus response, and Kushner, Miller and Vice President Pence (who joined the writing process later on) were still working making edits to the draft shortly before Trump gave the address. The Washington Post wrote that the address that Kushner, who had "zero expertise in infectious diseases and little experience marshaling the full bureaucracy behind a cause", helped write was "widely panned". In the address, Trump blamed Europeans and the Chinese for the virus, describing the virus as a "foreign virus". During the address, Trump inaccurately said "all travel from Europe" would be prohibited, and that the travel prohibitions would apply to goods. The speech caused markets to plunge, as White House aides had to clarify what the actual policy was. European leaders said they were blindsided by the address. The speech set off panic among Americans abroad who had to scramble to learn whether they could return to the United States and under what circumstances; this created chaos at airports in Europe and the United States. Trump reportedly blamed Kushner for the widely panned address, telling aides that he should not have listened to Kushner.
In late April 2020, the Department of Defense revealed that the federal government had less than 10,000 ventilators remaining in the strategic national stockpile, far short of the anticipated need. At that time, Governor Andrew Cuomo projected that New York would need 37,000 ventilators. New Jersey, Louisiana, and Michigan also requested thousands of ventilators. The Trump administration, however, refused to empty the stockpile to fulfill these requests, claiming that the states needed far fewer than they were projecting. Kushner described the administration's response to the coronavirus as "a great success story." During the pandemic, Kushner relied on a team of volunteers from consulting and private equity firms who had little relevant experience in dealing with a pandemic. Kushner described the volunteers as "true patriots." The team was intended to assist in procuring PPE, but the team struggled to do so. The New York Times wrote that the search for supplies was "fumbling" and that "personal relationships and loyalty are often prized over governmental expertise, and private interests are granted extraordinary access and deference." Kushner's volunteer team advised senior officials in New York that Yaron Oren-Pines, a Silicon Valley engineer, could produce 1,000 ventilators. New York officials assumed that the team had vetted him and gave him an $86 million contract to produce the ventilators; no ventilators were produced.
In August 2020, when 170,000 had died from the coronavirus in the United States, Kushner reiterated his claim from April 2020 that the administration's response had been a "success story."
Education
Kushner attended the Frisch School in New Jersey and later graduated from Harvard University in 2003. He received his law degree from New York University School of Law in 2007.
In 2006, Kushner purchased The New York Observer, a weekly New York City newspaper, for $10 million, outcompeting a bid by Trifecta Enterprises, a group headed by Robert De Niro. To make the bid, Kushner used money he says he earned during his college years by closing deals on residential buildings he purchased in Somerville, Massachusetts, with family members providing the backing for his investments. The buildings, which he purchased for $8.3 million in 2000, sold four years later for $13 million.
Years later, Kushner was invited to address a forum at the Harvard Kennedy School to talk about Middle East issues. Tarek Masoud, the school's director of Middle East Initiatives, said he chose Kushner since he was the architect of the Abraham Accords. In the interview, Kushner referred to the valuable potential of Gaza's “waterfront property,” suggesting that Israel should move civilians from Gaza to the Negev desert in southern Israel.
