Andrea Bernstein - American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power

AMERICAN
OLIGARCHS

THE KUSHNERS,
THE TRUMPS, AND THE MARRIAGE
OF MONEY AND POWER

ANDREA BERNSTEIN

W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923

To Liz, Maya, and Jonah, who keep teaching me the next mountain is always worth climbing.

No human being could have written this script. Only God could have.

CHARLES KUSHNER

A s 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 Trumps golf resort in Doral, Florida. His acting chief of staff said: Its almost like they built this facility to host this type of event. The presidents 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 Trumps lawyers. A federal judge ruled that Trumps arguments were repugnant to the nations governmental structure and constitutional values. Trump appealed. La loi, cest 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 Posts 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 pillowssome of the men were sleeping on concrete. When the men saw the press arrive, they began shouting and wanted to tell us theyd 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. 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. Lazaruss 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 NPRs Rachel Martin, that Emma Lazaruss words etched on the Statue of Libertygive me your tired, your poorare 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. 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. El Pasos 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 theyre going around free; and this scares us, this is very painful. to bear in mind their terrible history as they built a more enlightened future.

In the summer of 2019, Raes 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 grandsons working in the White House.

Its 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 youve got sixty-five million refugees in the world. You cant have all of them come into your country

I know, Swan interjected, but whats the rationale for cutting so dramatically?

It doesnt make a difference one way or the other, Kushner answered.

Swan disagreed. Well, it does. It means people are either living here or theyre not.

Yeah, Kushner said. But in the scheme of the magnitude of the problem we have, I think that were 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 youre 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 were very lucky to be where we are.