Jared Kushner Defends Donald Trump, His Father-in-Law, on Bias Charge
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Version 0 of 1. “My father-in-law is not an anti-Semite.” With those words, Jared Kushner — an Orthodox Jew who is married to Donald J. Trump’s daughter Ivanka — opened a full-throated and at times personal defense of Mr. Trump on Wednesday on the website of the newspaper Mr. Kushner owns, The New York Observer. Mr. Kushner has emerged as one of Mr. Trump’s most influential advisers, though until now he has made a point of remaining behind the scenes. But in recent days, Mr. Trump came under fire for a Twitter post that included an image of Hillary Clinton with a shape resembling a Star of David next to a pile of cash. It was the most recent in a long list of actions by the campaign that struck many as insensitive to Jewish concerns. Mr. Kushner broke his effective silence in the op-ed, taking pains to delicately condemn the Twitter post while also seeking to shield Mr. Trump by shifting the responsibility to his “fast-acting campaign team.” But hours after Mr. Kushner’s piece was posted, Mr. Trump defended the post and said it was a mistake for his campaign to have taken it down. On Tuesday, a culture reporter for the paper, Dana Schwartz, wrote an open letter to Mr. Kushner on the Observer website calling him out for failing to denounce the anti-Semites and hatemongers who have rallied around Mr. Trump’s candidacy and harangued Jewish journalists like herself on social media. After releasing a brief statement Tuesday praising his father-in-law, Mr. Kushner came out more forcefully in his op-ed. “Despite the best efforts of his political opponents and a large swath of the media to hold Donald Trump accountable for the utterances of even the most fringe of his supporters — a standard to which no other candidate is ever held — the worst that his detractors can fairly say about him is that he has been careless in retweeting imagery that can be interpreted as offensive,” he wrote, under the headline: “The Donald Trump I Know.” “Some of the tweets that Ms. Schwartz has received, depicting her being thrown into an oven, for example, are beyond disgusting,” he wrote. But he said his father-in-law should not be held responsible for them: “Blaming Donald Trump for the most outrageous things done by people who claim to support him is no different from blaming Bernie Sanders for the people who stomp and spit on American flags at his rallies.” Mr. Kushner summoned his own family’s history of persecution in defending his father-in-law, telling the story of his grandmother’s narrow escape from the Nazis in Russia during World War II. She fled into the woods, where she met his grandfather, who had escaped from a labor camp. Two of her grandmother’s siblings were killed, he wrote. “I go into these details, which I have never discussed, because it’s important to me that people understand where I’m coming from when I report that I know the difference between actual, dangerous intolerance versus these labels that get tossed around in an effort to score political points,” he wrote. Though the Trump team was “careless” with the Star of David post, he said, it was evidence of the refreshing originality of Mr. Trump’s spontaneous campaign. “Part of the reason it’s so shocking is that it’s the actual candidate communicating with the American public rather than the armies of handlers who poll-test ordinary candidates’ every move,” he wrote. Mr. Kushner, who runs his family’s multibillion-dollar real estate empire, also spoke to Ms. Schwartz’s skepticism about Mr. Trump, encouraging her to go meet people outside her social orbit — an apparent reference to Trump supporters. Ms. Schwartz, for her part, was more struck by what Mr. Kushner didn’t say. “While I respect his family’s back story immensely, the point that he completely failed to address was that racist people flock to Donald Trump — he’s the candidate for them,” she said in an interview. “If Donald Trump really is as pro-Jew and pro-tolerance as he claims, then why is that the case?” |