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Jared Kushner On His New Book “Breaking History”

Breaking History: A White House Memoir

Jared Kushner joined me to discuss his new book “Breaking History.” Part one of the interview played on air Thursday, Part two today and part three will be Monday.

The uninterrupted audio is available at my Podcast, “Highly Concentrated Hugh”

Transcript:

HH: This is the first part, and the second part will be tomorrow, of a long conversation with Jared Kushner. His new book, Breaking History, is number three on Amazon this morning. Breaking History is a fascinating read. I’ve spent the last three days combing through it. Jared Kushner, welcome to the Hugh Hewitt Show.

JK: Thank you, Hugh. It’s an honor to be with you today.

HH: Well, thank you. The only time I heard from you during the presidency is when you were lobbying people, including media members, to pass the First Step Act. I am not surprised to find that Mitch McConnell thought you were the best lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Did we lose you there, Jared? Are you there?

JK: I’m here, yes.

HH: Yeah. So why did McConnell think you were so effective?

JK: So I was reaching out to yourself and anyone else who had a voice. We took what we thought was an ember approach where anytime there was a voice of dissent against the bill that was based on misinformation, our opponents were very formidable. But they were spreading a lot of misinformation about the bill, and we had to jump on it right away. What they were saying is that this bill would release violent felons from prison, and that’s a pretty hard thing to argue against if it gets out. But unfortunately, or fortunately, that wasn’t what the bill actually did. What the bill was doing was it was bringing job training programs into the prison so that people who were in the prisons would get, you know, training, and they’d get mental health treatment and drug addiction treatment so that when they went out of prison, they would actually have a chance to reenter society and not go back to prison. The recidivism rate, meaning people who left prison and committed crimes, was in the 70% range, and so we knew where a lot of our future crimes were coming from. So we just had to take these people and get them onto the right track in order to make communities safer. So we were calling anyone who had the wrong information to try to get them down. Now with McConnell, there’s a scene I write about in the Oval Office where he comes to tell the President sorry, we’re not going to have a chance to get Jared’s bill done, and we just don’t have time on the calendar. And so Trump calls me into the Oval Office, and McConnell, you know, Trump says Mitch, you have to tell Jared the news. I don’t have the heart. He’s been working on this so hard for two years. And McConnell says to me, he says look, I have to say, Jared’s one of the best lobbyists I’ve seen. He’s had every single donor in person I know call me. And I said to him, well that’s not true. I have a lot of people who haven’t called you, yet. So what I was doing was basically stalking him and figuring out, you know, which events he was going to be at, which donors he was having dinner with. And I was calling all of them in advance and saying can you please pressure him to give me some floor time so that we can get this bill done. We accomplished like 20 different hurdles that were improbable, and I write about all of the in the book. And then, you know, without the floor time, though, we were dead. So it just shows there’s no partial credit in politics. Good intentions doesn’t really mean much. And I really show in this book, and with this example, how legislation can get passed, and that the system that our founding fathers designed, is a brilliant system, and if you work it hard, you can get big changes done. But I think it shouldn’t be easy to make big changes in our government, and that’s why you have to work hard, build consensus, talk to people across the aisle, and occasionally lobby hard, even people on the same side of the aisle as you.

HH: There is some very interesting inside baseball in here, and especially on the First Step Act, with which it just wouldn’t have happened without you. A dinner with Senators Durbin and Klobuchar, and Bob Corker and Susan Collins, that is very granular level stuff, Jared. And laws don’t get passed unless that happens.

JK: So that was my assumption as an outsider, right? So I was from the business sector, and in the business sector, you have to make deals, right? How do you make deals? You don’t do it just by talking to your allies. You do it by talking to the person on the other side. And it’s okay to have disagreements. That’s okay, but our goal was to try to identify what are we all trying to achieve. And then if we could get commonality on that objective, then it was about having a lot of different ideas on how to get there and finding ways where we thought we could all support it, and obviously navigating the different politics, because you know, again, when we started this process, Hakeem Jeffries and you know, Van Jones, you know, were reaching across the aisle to work with me on it, and they were getting, you know, called horrible names. I mean, Van Jones was being called an Uncle Tom on Twitter for working with Trump. You know, Hakeem Jeffries was getting pressure from Rep. John Lewis and others, you know, in the Congressional Black Caucus who were saying don’t work on this. We don’t want to give Trump a victory here. But they both said, you know, if there’s an opportunity to do something that we believe in that’s good, we’re going to engage in conversations. So you know, there’s not as much courage in Washington as I would have expected, but there were a lot of amazing people who were willing to engage in discussions. And that dinner I try to take people through is how we kind of came together and said okay, we’re all going to work together in good faith, and we kept the trust. And that’s why again, the people who worked with me knew that the conversations never made it to the press. We were able to have disagreements privately. But it was always constructive, and it was never personal. It was about trying to find the best policies to work things forward, and I write a lot about those interactions with Democrats, because again, I hate when I see people saying oh, Washington’s not like it used to. It’s so much more divisive. I think it’s always been divisive. But I think that it takes the courage of the people in power to come together, be bigger than the moment, work across the aisle, and try to get things done. And the First Step Act ended up with 87 votes. I give it an asterisk, because Burr voted against it because he was pissed at Tim Scott on a judicial issue, and Lindsey Graham was in Afghanistan, so both should have voted for it, so we should have been at 89. But 87 was still a pretty good outcome.

HH: I’m going to come back to Richard Burr in a second. I hate that slander, “Uncle Tom.” There’s a new movie out, Uncle Tom 2 over at SalemNow.com. it’s Larry Elder’s second, about people who get on the opposite [side of the left], it’s the worst slander in American politics other than words that we will never use on this show. Jared Kushner, I want to cover a lot with you. I want to cover winning the election, Steve Bannon, John Kelly. I want to talk about First Step. The Abraham Accords, the wall, a couple of Ivanka issues, and then losing. But let me start with Yousef Al Otaiba. I know Yousef. And I am not surprised to find him centrally located, because the op-ed you describe at Page 390, it’s a big, it’s a big play by Yousef to stop an annexation. It also made possible the Abraham Accords. The granular detail in here is just remarkable, that that op-ed, very few people know about that.

JK: So first of all, Yousef is a giant. And you know, I saw in Washington, you know, there are different kind of ambassadors. Some of them were there just to try to do cocktail parties. Yousef was one of the most effective, thoughtful, just great people who I encountered who really understood how Washington worked and how to be constructive. I mean, his country, the United Arab Emirates, is one of the great allies of America. They fought with us in six wars. They were the first Muslim country after American went into Afghanistan to say we don’t want this to be perceived as a war of the West against Islam, so we’re going to join, because this is a war of like-minded nations against radical extremism and terrorism. And so they’ve been a great ally to America, and Yousef has really been instrumental in building that. But with regards to the Abraham Accords, they would not have happened without him. He was an essential player. You know, a lot of people asked me when I left government how did the Abraham Accords occur. And quite frankly, I couldn’t really answer that question in a soundbite. And so what I tried to do in the book was just go through all the different things that led up to the conditions that were created in order for it to occur, and I tell people we succeeded on Plan C, but only because we went through the alphabet three times with ideas that failed. And one thing, we kept learning from our different experiences on how to find pathways forward. And again, President Trump gave us the directive to find a way forward, and so you know, failure was not an option and quitting was not an option. And so I really try to take the readers on my journey as somebody who had no diplomatic experience and wasn’t even deep in the conflict as to coming at it with an outsider’s perspective, a fresh approach, and trying to use common sense and not being stuck in the history or the way that allowed the professors or the previous negotiators had looked at it. I tried to just look at it for what it was at that time, and then how do we push people forward. I felt like peace is about the future, and it’s very easy to get stuck in a conflict because of the past. But fundamentally, the job of leaders is probably number one to keep their people safe, and then number two, to give their people opportunity. And I used that as a premise to say okay, what are the right things that leadership should be doing in order to accomplish those objectives. And that was the framework that I tried to approach the problem with.

HH: One of the things that leaders have to do in diplomacy, and you mention two books in passing in your own book, Breaking History. One is the Hundred Year Marathon by Pillsbury about China, excellent book. The other is Lawrence Wright’s book on Camp David. You have to be read. You have to be well-informed. But you also need partners. I notice, you were trying for four years to get, and the Abraham Accords are the key big deal of the Trump years. I mean, history will be looking at them in 300 years. The key thing was not moving forward until Mike Pompeo replaced Rex Tillerson at State, until Robert O’Brien arrived to replace John Bolton. Why do individuals matter so much when the principals want to get somewhere?

JK: So that’s actually one of the fascinating things that hopefully people will get from reading the book, is that I learned that nobody in Washington can get anything done by themselves. It’s really a function of different people from different backgrounds with different experiences from different geographies coming together, having to agree on an objective, create a plan, and then all row together in order to accomplish it. And you know, I think in the beginning, Trump’s policies were so radical to Washington, right? You know, a lot of people say he’s conservative. Some people call him other things. I think of him as a pragmatist, and I thought that a lot of the things he was saying just made sense, right? Why are we stuck in all these endless wars? If we’re fighting a war, let’s fight to win. Why are we getting taken advantage of on trade by people who we’re protecting, like Europe and NATO? And so all these things, to me, just made a lot of common sense. And so you know, you had people in there. I think the biggest difference with a guy like Tillerson was that he wanted to manage the world whereas Trump wanted to change the world. And Trump, I write a lot about his decision making. I write about how he would take calculated risks in order to make big differences. And I give great examples. I take people into the Situation Room, and into the different scenes when he was deciding to move the Embassy, the fierce resistance he got from the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, from the Intel community, from every other world leader. And Trump understood why no other president had done it before. It was just a barrage. But he didn’t allow that risk to dissuade him. He studied it, and then he said to me, Jared, I want you to go mitigate that risk. If people’s fear is that there is going to be riots and explosion in the Middle East, call all the leaders in the Middle East and tell them we’re watching. They want our help now with Iran, they want our help with military, they want our help with trade, they want our help with a million other things. Tell them this is a decision we are going to make. Israel is a sovereign nation. They have the right to determine where their capital is, and we are a sovereign nation, and we have the right to recognize that decision. And so if they have a problem with it, you know, they can voice it, but that’s it. You know, I don’t want to see big problems. And so we really mitigated it. There’s one leader in the Middle East who said to me at that time, he said Jared, I’m not going to tell you to move the embassy. I’m not going to tell you not to do it. But what I will tell you is that if you do do it, you’ll find out who your friends are. And that was a very, very true and wise statement. And we ended up working with everyone, and we got it done. And I think that with Trump, the more that he slaughtered these sacred cows and did the things that everyone warned him couldn’t be done, and again, he did them very thoughtfully, they were not doing recklessly or impetuously, I think the more he found that you know, he did something that everyone said the world was going to end, whether it was tariffs or getting out of the Iran deal. And then the next morning, the sun rose. The next evening, the sun set. And life moved on, and Trump got more and more empowered to figure out how to maneuver things. And when you’re the president of the biggest superpower in the world, your ability to impact outcomes is tremendous. And that’s why again, I watched what’s happening now with Russia and Ukraine, totally avoidable. Russia, for four years, Trump had no problems, despite all the ways that they made it a toxic environment to deal with Russia. China, we had them on their back foot the whole time. You know, we totally changed the world’s perception of what was going on. We made an incredible trade deal with them, which helped our farmers stop their theft of intellectual property, protected our crown jewel industries. And again, there was no provocations with Taiwan. North Korea wasn’t shooting their missiles off like crazy. So I think Trump’s approach was very different. Again, he was an outsider. I was an outsider. Business people are focuses on results, and I think it shows how somebody not from Washington went into Washington and really shook things up in a very big way despite being under constant attacks, which I also go through as well.

HH: Oh yeah, you do.

JK: So those are really the two currents of the book.

HH: Let me drill down on this, because the Abraham Accords matter so much to history. You’re a constant in this. The President is a constant in this. Yousef doesn’t change. TBZ doesn’t change. MBZ doesn’t change. But what changes is Pompeo replaces Tillerson. Now I don’t know Tillerson, so I won’t talk about him, I know Mike very well. But Ambassador O’Brien replaces Ambassador Bolton. How does that matter? And I mean, you’re pushing for the same thing for four years. You start with the embassy, you end up with the Abraham Accords, and even after the Abraham Accords, the F-35s, the Western Sahara, the Sudan issues. You just followed it through. Bibi is a constant. The only two things that change are at the seventh floor of State and at the West Wing office that everybody sees in every shot, O’Brien for Bolton. Why do those two matter, and your constancy matter?

JK: I think that that mattered in that you know, when they both came in, it took Trump a while. Again, I always say that the first night he slept in Washington, he slept in the White House, right? So he wasn’t a mayor. He wasn’t a governor. He wasn’t a senator. And so it took him a while to find the right people who understood what he was trying to accomplish and who were competent and enabling for him to do that. So I write about, you know, Mike coming in and replacing Tillerson, and how I went to Mike and said look, there’s only one secretary of State. You’re the secretary of State. I’m working on this file. I’m making progress. Do you want me to go off the file? And Mike says no, no, no, you’re doing great with it. Just keep running. Anything you need, I’ll be available. And I actually write, you know, something about how with Tillerson, it was impossible to get him. You wanted to get him on the phone, it would take three, four days and then a conversation would last 30 minutes, and you wouldn’t really accomplish much, because it would be mostly him either lecturing you or complaining about stuff. With Mike, a conversation would take under three minutes. He was very to the point, very decisive. And I would say by definition, he could do ten times more diplomacy. And that’s also why he was always so available and reachable, and really a great secretary of State. With O’Brien, it was the same thing. He understood how to work the system. I worked with him initially on the hostage work, which was very close to my heart. He did an absolutely unbelievable job, and really, you know, just was incredible. And then he came in as national security advisor, and he was really there trying to make everyone better. I always say it’s like an offensive lineman. When if you’ve got a bad offensive line, then everyone’s getting tackled, then it looks bad. When you’ve got a good offensive line, the quarterback looks stronger, the running back looks faster, the receivers look better. And Robert really did a lot of great work behind the scenes that made everyone much more empowered. But he was watching to get the President’s agenda done. And he wasn’t trying to obstruct him, and he knew how to work through the bureaucracy to make sure that people were empowered. So both of them were absolutely essential partners in getting this done. And like I said, you know, the way Yousef describes it is he says the reasons this happened is that we had all the right people in the right places at the right time who were willing to work together, trust together, and do the right things. And that’s, again, it’s much more complex than that, and that’s why I wrote this book for history. But I do think that the book takes you through all the different provenance that occurred in order for this to happen.

HH: Let’s talk and extend the football analogy. Sometimes, you have turnover artists. Sometimes, you have bad coaches who don’t relay signals. I noticed the reference to Margaret Peterlin in here, and that’s too inside baseball for the radio. But I do want to talk about Navarro and Bannon. I’ve known Peter Navarro for 30 years. When he ran for mayor as a no-growth mayor in San Diego, when he ran unsuccessfully for Congress with Hillary Clinton at his side, when he ran for supervisor unsuccessfully, Peter is charismatic and fun to be around. I went to a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert with him once, but he is completely mercurial and off the reservation, often. Why in the world did you recruit him?

JK: Oh, it’s a funny story. So one of the things I did on the campaign was Trump called me and says I want you to write a speech for me for AIPAC. And I go through this in the book, and I wrote a big policy speech for him. It was a policy I understood. And I convinced him to use a teleprompter for the first time, which he was resistant to. He called me…

HH: It’s a good story, yeah.

JK: I go through this story in the book. It’s really funny, but he said look, I used to make fun of the politicians who use teleprompters. And I said no, no, just do this. If you don’t like it, you’ll never have to see one again. And he goes and he used it, and the speech was incredible at AIPAC. And he says to me after, I want you to build the speechwriting teams. So Stephen Miller was on the campaign, and so I called Steve and I said look, can we start developing a policy and a speechwriting team? And he says Jared, this is like the first thing I’ve heard on this campaign that makes any sense, like that should have been done six months ago, but let’s do it. So we started putting it together, and I was looking for people who could give me more nuance on Trump’s, what he was saying about China. And so I found Peter’s book, Death By China, which seemed like a title that was in line with what Trump was saying. So I researched him. I was a little nervous, because I think he was a Democrat.

HH: Very much so.

JK: I shot him an email and asked if he would call me. And we got on the phone and I said hi, I work with candidate Trump, and I said you know, what are your thoughts on him, because I didn’t want to open it up too much. He said oh, I love what he’s talking about. He’s the first politician saying it. And I said do you want to be on our economic advisory council? And he said well, who else is on it? And I said well, I really can’t disclose names. Trump’s a little controversial now. I don’t want to, I don’t want it to be out there. It’s going to be a secret advisory panel. Peter says absolutely, I’ll write stuff for you. I’ll give you know, advice. I’ll send you stuff. He was the only person on it. I had nobody else on it at the time. And so Peter started, you know, advising the campaign, sent us some very good advice. And then when it came to time in the White House, we ended up putting him in a trade position. And again, he was a very useful voice throughout the time. He definitely played hard. I think he was a little bit paranoid that when Trump wasn’t deciding his way that there was some grand conspiracy or people were stewing it up. But I felt like we had a policy on trade that was very revolutionary from a Republican orthodoxy. Trump, I always felt, was there to be tough, but he wanted to make deals. And again, my goal was just to give him different options. And so you had people like Peter, who were full-blown protectionists. But Peter was an academic. You know, he’d never negotiated anything. He’d never done a deal. And then you had people on the other end like Gary Cohn who were all free trade. And then in the middle, you had Bob Lighthizer, who ended up becoming like the greater amongst equals, and really the tip of the spear on the trade policy. And by the way, if there is 8 billion people on the planet, Bob Lighthizer, for all the bad hires, was the single best hire I think Trump made.

HH: Amen. A good man from Ashtabula, Ohio. But the only time I ever sat down with him, Peter Navarro was there, and I brought along a friend from the Obama administration to talk nuclear power And Peter blew up the meeting in about ten minutes at lunch. He embarrassed the hell out of me. That guy is the most erratic guy, and I can’t imagine him and you in the same West Wing, a kind of buttoned-down New York business executive and this kind of wild-eyed academic from California. Let’s go to Bannon, because if there are…

JK: Well, one last thing. I used to call Peter a non-precision guided missile, but he was definitely a missile.

HH: (laughing)

JK: He wouldn’t always hit the target, but he was very useful, and he was a good teammate, and most of the time, you know, it was quite enjoyable. And he was a useful voice to keep other people honest at the table as well. So anyway, it was very funny. But let’s talk about Steve.

HH: Yeah, let’s talk about Steve. I’ll put this in the categories of people who are gutted by this book. And Steve Bannon is number one. Number two is probably General Kelly, and there are some other people. People who get the light touch are like Reince Priebus. And I don’t see Kellyanne Conway in here at all. And I see people who get praise, you know, like General Dunford. I mean, you get Christie, you get Bolton. Richard Burr, can we take a moment on Richard Burr and Richard Haass? Richard Haass is a friend of mine. He’s very smart, but he was a naysayer on foreign policy. Richard Burr is never going to win the spelling bee, but he tried to make nice with you after he’d gutted you on Russia, Russia, Russia, and you were not having any of that, and I approve of that. I think people ought to be honest with the folks who’ve done them dirty and then try and be nice to them.

JK: Yeah, so I thought Senator Burr was just a guy who was a go along, get along guy. He wanted to have his committee with McConnell. But he was totally trapped by the intelligence community, totally romanticized. And again, he was a Republican who was investigating a Republican president on a notion that we colluded with Russia that ended up having no basis. And I remember he called me in after the Mueller report came out that fully exonerated us, and then he’s, they’re subpoenaing me to come back before his bipartisan intelligence committee where Warner was basically, you know, basically had him on a handle and was moving him around the whole time. And it was just absolutely pathetic what he did, tons of wasted resources. And again, I basically said to him, he said oh, we found so much. I said you guys found bullshit here. You didn’t find anything, and what you guys should be focused on is why is China so, getting so far ahead of us in all these different areas. Focus on productive things. And so he was very, very disappointing in the book. And look, I don’t think I gut anyone. I think what I tried to do in the book was just tell it like it is. I tell about my interactions with Steve Bannon, with John Kelly, and again, I’m not trying to tell people what to think. I’m just telling, putting them in my shoes and trying to give them what it was like dealing with these people. And people like Kellyanne aren’t in it, because we didn’t really deal with her much. She was on TV talking and really wasn’t involved in a lot of the serious policy efforts.

HH: Well, let me tell you. I made a list as I was going through it – Bannon, Kelly, Tillerson, Christie, Bolton, Burr, Haass. They did not get five stars. They got bad Yelp ratings from Jared Kushner. Pompeo, O’Brien, Haspel, Grenell, Avi, we’ve got to talk about him, McMasters, Cipollone, Meadows, Ratcliffe, Lighthizer, they get five stars. You got Reince, gets sort of four stars after the fact. Navarro is just, it doesn’t matter. But it all comes down to people, Jared Kushner. We talked about this after the election about the big learning curve of who can you trust and who is competent. Probably the biggest mistake, and I love the guy. I love Jeff Sessions. Do we have that clip, by the way, Duane? I want to play a clip for you when Jeff Sessions came on when you were separating parents. Not you, but the policy that Jeff Sessions implemented separated parents, I could not believe it, at the border. And I had the Attorney General on, and it went like this.

HH: Mr. Attorney General, are you a grandfather?

JS: Yes, I am.

HH: Can you imagine your grandchildren separated from your children for a period of 72 hours or even longer in a dormitory with up to, the deputy secretary told me, 1,000 other children and the impact on them of that?

JS: Hugh, you can’t, the United States can’t be a total guarantor that every parent who comes to the country unlawfully with a child is guaranteed that they won’t be, is guaranteed that they’ll be able to have their hand on that child the entire time.

HH: Now Jared, I know you’re a man of faith. So is Jeff Sessions. So am I. But that [terrible policy] is obvious. That is completely oblivious to the very predictable and right reaction of the American people to that policy. You got involved in the border later. But how may oblivious people did you bring into the administration? Not you, but I mean, Team Trump and whoever ran the transition? It wasn’t Christie.

JK: Yeah, too many, but I think that you have to also recognize that Trump brought in a lot of great people. And I think that like I said before with Bob Lighthizer, that’s what led to us getting a lot of the different things right in trade. And so again, what I write about in this book and why I go through all the different people is to show that there’s some people you wouldn’t have expected to be good who were. The media perception of people is not always, you know, what was actually accurate. And what I want people to know is just again, with all the investigations, with all of the impeachments, with all the media attacks, somehow, Trump got so many things done, right? We had a peaceful world, we had peace agreements, the trade deals got done, the economy was rocking, inflation was low, gas prices were low. That wasn’t an accident, right? And you know, Biden’s come in with a team of all of these, you know, supposed Washington insider, and they’ve basically reversed it. Now you have war in Europe, you have China’s being provocative with Taiwan. Neither of those things happened for four years under Trump, because he was strong. The economy’s got massive inflation now. And again, and we handed them a vaccine and basically the end of COVID and an economy that was fixed and booming. And so I think that I want people to understand how all these things happen, because I don’t think the media did a good job of being in the room and really showing what that was.

HH: Oh, horrible…

JK: And I write about child separation and how that occurred, and how Trump was misled by General Kelly and General Sessions. And again, I think that it’s awful. But I will say, too, Hugh, is that I am shocked by the lack of outrage by all the people who were killing Trump and our administration on the child separation, which again, I thought was a terrible policy. But now, you have, you know, two children who died yesterday crossing the Rio Grande River. The open border policy right now is leading to massive human slavery, human trafficking, rape and molestation of young women. And I think 600 people so far this year have died crossing the Rio Grande River. So it’s the most inhumane policy possible, what’s being, what the Biden administration is putting forward today at the border. And the same people who were so critical of Trump as these absolute high moralists in Hollywood and different places are absolutely silent. And it’s absolutely, I mean, it just exposes how fake I think a lot of the media and a lot of these celebrities really are.

HH: You bring the receipts on the border. And I mean you bring the receipts. Secretary, General Kelly and his successful, Kirstjen Nielson, built 35 miles of the wall in ’17 and ’18. You took it over, and 415 miles of the wall got built in ’19 and ’20. Moreover, you defend your father-in-law’s rhetoric on immigration, not the fake view of his rhetoric, they’ve always distorted the escalator speech, but the rhetoric that gets picked up by people who are going to make that dangerous journey in the hands of coyotes. It worked. The wall works. It doesn’t stop 100% of illegal immigration, but it saves lives. Do you think that argument can ever be won with a media that just wants to stop the wall?

JK: Oh, I think it absolutely can. And I think we were actually making really great progress on it. I think that in some ways, what Biden’s doing is he’s making the case for us with this awful policy. People are seeing it now what happens, doing, busing people to New York and now getting on the politicians in Washington and New York to be against illegal immigration is quite ironic. Again, I wish that these people weren’t being used as pawns, but unfortunately, I think that Trump’s policy was a very rational policy. People, and again, for me, the whole book also talks about my journey from somebody in an echo chamber on the Upper East Side to traveling the country with President Trump, meeting a lot of people in the conservative movement, Republicans, and a changing my view on a lot of issues. And again, I don’t view myself as left or right. I try to just be pragmatic and openminded. I deal on things issue by issue. But I think that his policy on immigration is an absolute amazing policy, right? Number one, we’re a sovereign nation. We have to protect our border in order to make sure that bad people and drugs are not coming into our country. No brainer. Even the Democrats supported it before Trump came into power. And I think over time, that will have to be supported, although I do write a funny story in the book how when Trump is with Trudeau in a meeting, Trudeau says to him well, I want to thank you for not building a wall on your northern border. And Trump just looks at him, you know, deadpan, and says I would. It’s just too big. And so that was pretty funny. But then the other policy, which I think is where it’s most, where I think it’s most misunderstood is Trump would say the big, beautiful door. I really, one of the things I regret not being able to get done was I spent about four months with a team developing a merit-based immigration system for our country. Trump is pro-immigrant, but he is, he wants people to come to our country legally through a merit-based system. And you look at a country like Canada that has a very open rhetoric but a super closed system where it’s very hard to become a citizen of Canada, and so becoming a member of the United States of America where you get protected, if you’re a hostage somewhere, you’ve got great people who will come get you. If you get old, we take care of you. We have amazing ways to be compassionate as a country. That membership should be something that’s very exclusive, and we have to take care of our citizens who are currently members or citizens. And then in addition to that, what we should be doing is figuring out how we’re bringing people in who aren’t going to lower wages for American workers, who are going to grow our economy, respect our values, and help make our country stronger and more vibrant. If you just opened it up and said who wants to be a citizen of America tomorrow, out of the 8 billion people in the world, you’d probably get north of 6-plus billion who would want to come in tomorrow. So you know, we should be able to pick the best and the brightest from throughout the world who want to come to our country. I think that their influence will make our country continue to evolve. America’s been an incredible experiment for the last couple hundred years. And I think Trump’s immigration policy is one that actually would be like rocket fuel for our economy and for our values and for our society for a long time to come. But it’s been very badly maligned by the media, unfortunately.

HH: You know, Jared, there are many things in Breaking History which are asides which I think will show up in biographies of the former president for as long, and maybe future president, for as long as they are written. One of them occurs during the Kavanaugh hearings after a very emotional moment for Brett Kavanaugh. And the President asks you what you think. I think you’re on Marine One. I’ve got five pages of notes in 16 point and they’re not stapled, just like your father-in-law liked it. But I think the quote is, and I can’t find it exactly, Jared, you go down before you cry. Is that right?

JK: Okay, it was just a very funny scene I put in there. So it was between different things we were doing. But we were flying back for the celebration ceremony. I actually had a lot of, you know, the Bush people were there, and they said man, Bush would have dropped this guy in a minute with all these accusations. You know, we really respect that Trump stood in the pocket and he stuck with him through it, you know, once he was, you know, being falsely accused of all these crazy things. And so we’re on Marine One, and Trump says to me, you know, again, he’s always, you know, kibitzing and talking about things, and he says so what did you think of the crying? And I said well, I think it worked for him. So he looks at me and says Jared, you go down before you cry. And again, I think he was joking, but it was just a, it was just a funny moment that we had. But he was very proud of the fight. You know, he felt awful the way that they, that they were going after Kavanaugh’s character. And he felt badly for his family, for his daughters, that he had to endure that. But he was very proud of putting him on the bench, and I think he really thought that he was the right qualifications to be a Supreme Court justice.

HH: Okay, Jared, explain something for me, because I really, I talked to the former president. I have him on the air. I love talking to him. I will never understand. I’ve got my share of Trump tattoos. You know them well when he slapped me around a little bit. I don’t care. It’s the business I have chosen. But Steve Bannon did nothing but undermine the President. Mitch McConnell did nothing but help him. I mean, we would not have three justices changing history but for Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. Mitch is the first mover by holding open the vacancy, and we get Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett because of the McConnell-Trump partnership, or the Trump-McConnell partnership. The President barely gets through a week without blasting Mitch McConnell. Steve Bannon, I mean, to use the old John dean phrase, a cancer on the presidency, he’s a malignant figure in this book. Why is the President so nice to Steve Bannon and so hard on Mitch McConnell?

JK: Look, the President is, you know, he has his different preferences. I think if you look at Steve, so Steve was actually with us very early. He was great on the campaign. He was a great partner in that. When it got to the White House, I think maybe the power got to his head a little bit, or he just, you know, was being more of what he was. And it became very divisive, and he was undermining. He was knife fighting with colleagues, and it just wasn’t helping us implement the agenda. And that was very unfortunate. But one thing I write about the book is I go through a lot of the different interpersonal dynamics, is that you know, I ended up not defeating Steve. Steve really defeated himself. You know, his head got so big, he was you know, just doing all these crazy things. And he ultimately just, you know, like a suicide bomber, blew up. And I think he’s gone on to reinvent himself as a big MAGA cheerleader, which is good and helpful. And I think that again, Steve on the issues is probably right on a lot of them, and I agree with him on a lot of the issues. With regards to McConnell, I think that McConnell, he was very, very good with the judiciary. I think he often gave Trump mostly good advice. But McConnell’s main objective was always really to try to stay in power and keep power. And I think what’s happened, you know, after the election is McConnell, again, I think has just resented that Trump didn’t play by his rules. And you know, again, a lot of these people in Washington who have held the power for so long, they’re kind of generals with no army. You know, after Jan. 6, I think you know, McConnell really went for the jugular with Trump, and I think he misread the fact that the people in this country were not going to stick with him. And I think that that’s really what occurred. And so I think people like McConnell would like Trump to go away, and would like to go back to life as it was before, you know, Trump came in and did a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. But you know, I guess fortunately, the voters have a big say, and the support for Trump is stronger than ever. And so if you look at how McCarthy has managed his relation with Trump versus McConnell, it’s been total day and night. And I think that McConnell, you know, one of the, the advice that he used to give Trump which is very interesting, when Trump would be mad at a Susan Collins or you know, a Bob Corker or one of these what I call more centrist senators who would, you know, sometimes criticize him, is he would always say, he would say Mr. President, the most important vote for me is always the next vote. And he would always try to put little conflicts and little preferences aside in order to accomplish his objective. And he’s a very, you know, again, McConnell is a very, very smart guy. He’s somebody who really knows his business. He knows how to manage the caucus. He knows how to manage the calendar. And he really knows how to kind of pull the levers on different things. And so I don’t think he’s managed his relationship with President Trump particularly well, and I think that’s why you have the situation you’re in. But I do think that…

HH: If you can get, Jared, if you can get Bibi to work with MBZ, you can get the leader and the former president together, because McConnell, I don’t admire anyone more than Mitch McConnell in the legislative branch because he always gets, first, you’ve got to win. You’ve got to get to 51, and you’ve got to get to 51 again and again and again. And the President knew that you’ve got to win. You’ve got to deliver. I just think they should be partners, not adversaries. Let me talk to you about Bannon, though. You eventually say, this is a direct quote that I wrote down. “I couldn’t change the game. I just needed to excel at it, adapt. Any approach, get smarter, get tougher, navigate the process, weather attacks, and solve problems.” You quote your father often in this book. I love the best quote, “Nobody ever sold me a building because they liked my tie.” But you also quote the late Prime Minister Abe about what you do when going gets tough. Is that a good evolution for you personally to have to go through from someone who is rather idealistic about American government to someone who is very, very now experienced in the knife fight that is ongoing everyday?

JK: Good is an interesting word to describe it. I wouldn’t call it the most fun experience of my life, you know, being, you know, bled out in the press and accused of crazy things. But again, that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book, right? I learned from a lot of books reading about Jim Baker, Leon Panetta, the different chiefs of staff, the different, you know, secretaries of State, the people who had, you know, reading about Kissinger and getting advice from a lot of these people. I was able to figure out that again, one of the books I reference is a book about chiefs of staff that was written by Chris Whipple. And basically what I learned from reading that book was that there’s really nothing new under the sun. Every unique situation that I was in had some kind of prologue before. I write about how when we were under impeachment, there was some tension internally, and I was reading about how Panetta dealt with the impeachment, and I tried to follow the same playbook that he did. And ultimately, that led us to a very successful defense. I made a couple enemies in the process, because people weren’t doing their jobs. But the stakes were too high, and I consciously, as opposed to in the beginning where I was unconsciously making enemies, there, I kind of consciously made an enemy, but I did the math before I did that. What I hope people get from reading this book is they see my evolution. I think I’m very honest about what I didn’t know and what I learned, and mistakes that I made. But I show people what it’s like to work in Washington, which sometimes can really be a rat ship. You’re working with very complicated people, and I learned a lot. And hopefully, you know, people, I really hope that people from the private sector go into government, because I think you need results-based people. I don’t think we should have careerist politicians. I don’t think that’s what our founders intended. But I do hope that people who are going to go into government will read my experiences, avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made, maybe take some of the lessons I learned from Prime Minister Abe, even from, you know, Steve Bannon. Again, I think that Steve is somebody who I portray as he is. He’s a very smart person. He’s a very talented person, and he’s somebody who is a very formidable opponent. And I still don’t know how we got to become opponents. I write about that in the book, but when he was my opponent, it was a very tough opponent. And so I show people how I navigated around it, and I didn’t have the luxury of then going to attack him back, even though he was attacking me. What I did was I followed Sun Tzu’s advice from The Art Of War. And I went to basically fortify myself to create less vulnerabilities to be attack on, which meant that I could solve less problems. I could get involved in less situations, but I was doing too many things at first, and that left me way too vulnerable. And I write about that evolution from being more of a generalist and then getting into specific areas. And even people like Kelly, who I had some rough interactions with, I learned from those experiences, and I grew from them, and that’s what I try to detail in the book.

HH: I went into the White House at the age of 32, Jared, on President Reagan’s legal staff. And it’s good to be a young staffer in the White House and have a Fred Fielding teach you and a Dick Hauser teach you what to do. When you go in at the senior level ten steps down from the West Wing, it’s a tough experience. One of those things is lawyer bills. One of the things I want people to understand is when you have to hire Jaime Gorelick and then Abbe Lowell. And Abbe was the one guy interviewed when he was with Stan Brand starting out when I thought about leaving the Reagan administration and didn’t, because he’s so smart. Give us a ballpark on what your legal bill was, because Americans who go to work don’t expect to be prosecuted endlessly by Robert Mueller and his band of partisans. And I have no, I thought Mueller would do a good job. He didn’t, and it was clear to me why at the end when he testified. He wasn’t in control of that ship. But you must have run up legal bills that the ordinary American never makes in a lifetime.

JK: Yeah, it’s sad, but it’s true. And again, I don’t, I don’t advertise it, because I don’t want people, I’m not looking for people to feel bad for me. But I spent many millions of dollars in legal fees. But I, it was a decision I made. I was serving. I was under attack. I ended up doing over 16 hours of Congressional and special counsel testimony. I was transparent with everything, and I knew I’d done nothing wrong. But I knew that my only risk was like stepping on the line and getting a technical violation. And so I really write about how I prepared meticulously to not allow them to take me out of the game or worse. And so I chose to hire the best lawyers. I was very lucky to have both of them. Both Jaime and Abbe were very special people. They were good friends in very low moments for me, and they did a fabulous job. And I write about a lot of the experiences with them as to how they helped me through it. But yeah, you know, I came to the government, I was making a lot of money beforehand in the private sector. I basically volunteered for four years, didn’t take a salary. I didn’t even take health insurance, because I didn’t want people to say, so I had to buy my own health insurance on the exchange, which turned out to be very, very expensive. All of Trump’s campaign speeches were right about that. And then I had to pay all my legal bills as well. And then I felt badly for a lot of my colleagues, though, who didn’t have the same resources as me.

HH: You know, Jared, the very best piece of advice in this book, the very best line that people, and people who want to serve in government should read this, is it’s not enough not to step on the line. Don’t get within six feet of it. And that, you learned that the hard way. But if you get within six feet of it, you get sucked into Nancy Pelosi’s 1/6 Committee. You get sucked into a special prosecutor. There’s no winning. And people, I think this is speculation on my part. I think the reason Navarro botched his defense and Bannon botched his defense, I don’t think they can afford lawyers. And Navarro can’t afford lawyers to deal with the federal court process and subpoenas from Congress. It’s not, you’re not going to win that game if you end up with lawyers.

JK: Yeah, I watch what they’re doing to Navarro and Bannon on this, and it really breaks my heart. It’s cruel. It’s mean. It’s not what they should be doing. And whether they can afford it or not, I think it’s just not a position they should be put into, especially over the situation. So I think that it’s absolutely terrible, but for me, you know, again, a lot of my issues came form the fact that I thought that there’s, you know, there’s right and there’s wrong, right? Again, I had complex holdings. I went before the Office of Government Ethics under the Obama administration, represented by Jaime. I had, you know, several hundred assets they told me to sell. I think it was like 80 different assets. I disposed of them in the manner they did, and then they certified me that I had no conflicts. And so basically, I thought that I was fine. But then, you know, I had a situation where I was in the same meeting as a banker, and because I was recused from my company, I didn’t know that they were doing business with my family. I wasn’t speaking to my family. I didn’t speak about this with the banker. And then the New York Times writes a story on the front page about how I’m doing business from the White House, which absolutely wasn’t true. And actually, it was funny, because that morning, you know, I get a call from President Trump at 7:30. I’m in my office, and he says you know, did you read the, you know, how could you do that? I was like, I didn’t do anything. And he says what do you mean you didn’t do it? This was on the front page of the New York Times. I said wait a minute. So when they write about me, it’s true, and when they write about you, it’s fake news?

HH: Yeah.

JK: You know, so I said look, I didn’t do anything, and every time something came up, you know, I just, I was, I thought that right or wrong was all that mattered. And then after my first like six months, I just put in all these extra controls to make sure that not doing anything wrong wasn’t enough. I had to go much further to make sure that there wasn’t even like giving the worst, most nasty, most cynical critics the ability to kind of even perceive that I was doing anything wrong. So it was a major adjustment for me.

HH: There’s also a primer. There’s a primer in here on how to deal with Congressional investigators and special prosecutors, which is to answer every question, stay as long as you have to, and keep asking do you have any more questions for me, do you have any more questions for me, so you cannot be bushwhacked with the ‘they wouldn’t answer questions, he left’ sort of thing. That’s a hard thing to do, but it is invaluable advice, Jared. I want to close, and we’re running out of time, and I know that you’re generous with your time. But Breaking History is selling books, and this will all play on the Friday edition of the Hugh Hewitt Show as well. I want to talk about the three Marines – Dunford, Kelly, and Mattis. They get three different writeups. First question, why do you think Joe Dunford took you on the helicopter and left the doors open?

JK: (laughing) I don’t know. It was quite a scene. I write about how you know, General Dunford, we were in all these meetings initially about what to do with ISIS, which was a very, very big challenge. And I had no military experience, so he says to me after one of the meetings, he says why don’t you come with me to Iraq. And I said okay, that sounds good. You know, I always learned in business you have to see things for yourself. You have to get dirt under your fingernails.

HH: Yes.

JK: And I felt like that would give me better context. So two days before we go, the doctor comes by and says what’s your blood type, and I said what do you mean. And he says you’re going to an active war zone. So we ended up going about a mile outside of Mosul, that we land in Iraq, we get into a helicopter, he leaves it open. Dunford looks like GI Joe. I mean, so we’re literally there, we’re flying up, we’ve got Ospreys around us with people outside. We’re flying over Saddam’s bombed-out palace in Iraq. And I had a moment where like everything kind of like slows down, and I see the blades going very, very slow. And I’m thinking to myself, I was doing real estate deal like a couple months ago. What the hell am I doing here flying over Iraq?

HH: Yeah, I love that anecdote. I also love the fact…

JK: …with the chairman of the joint chiefs.

HH: …the blue blazer in the war zone. I would have done that, by the way. So I’ve never been in a war zone. I’ve been to bases and abroad with our military in Kosovo, but I’ve never been in a war zone. I will not now wear a blue blazer. People will have to read that.

JK: Yeah.

HH: But then Dunford…

JK: That is very important fashion advice for people. Do not wear a blue blazer with a bulletproof vest over it in a war zone. I got made fun of it on Saturday Night Live by Jimmy Fallon who played me, and my wife and I still laugh about it to this day.

HH: It’s funny. It’s funny.

JK: Well, you learn lessons. You learn lessons, all kinds of lessons.

HH: Now Mattis gets a fair treatment in here, as does John Kelly. And you are very careful to note that General Kelly made the ultimate sacrifice in losing his son in the war and served himself and is an honorable guy. But maybe Marines ought not to be chiefs of staff.

JK: Look, I wouldn’t generalize like that. I think you know, all people are different. I think that look, I think, you know, they were all probably incredible Marines, and I know that you know, they all had tremendous reputations. I write about, I think what Mattis, you know, it’s interesting. I write one scene where we’re going to send 59 missiles into Syria, and we’re all nervous, because again, you send missile in. You hit one Russian, and you start World War III, which is not what we wanted to do. Mattis was cool as a cucumber. No problem. We have the best equipment in the world. Everything’s going to do what it’s supposed to do. When he had to go to Saudi Arabia to get them to buy $100 billion in military equipment that would basically, you know, save us money as a country, he was very nervous, because he said what happens if they say no? So it was interesting how the negotiation made him nervous, but shooting missiles didn’t make him nervous. And that helped me understand his psychology. But I think that he was a good Marine, and he was good at the military stuff. He wasn’t as good as a statesman or understanding negotiation or nuance, but I think that that with Kelly was more so, because he as in a job as chief of staff where he needed to understand the nuance. So I don’t try to attack their characters. I just try to show how I think Kelly going from a military organization to a civilian organization was very much out of his depth in that situation, and did some things that again, I don’t know if they were intended to be cruel, but he did a lot of things that came across as very arbitrary.

HH: Yeah.

JK: …and really didn’t help the President. And I do think, too, like when you’re a Marine, sometimes, it’s black or white. And again, I don’t want to generalize about Marines. But I think for Kelly, things were very black or white, whereas with Trump as a businessman, there’s a thousand shades of gray. And I think, well, one example I gave is how we’re with Paul Ryan during the shutdown, and he says well, how do we know that if President Trump agrees to something, he’s going to stick to it. And I said well, you don’t understand. Like you can’t call Trump and then give him like one side of a story, get him to agree to it, and think that he’s a sucker, and then when he finds out the other side of the story or like the fine print, he’s going to keep to his word on what he told you when you didn’t give him all the information. And Trump is a flexible person. And when you’re a businessman, the way it works is you agree to a deal, and then the lawyers get together, they work out all the details. But until something’s signed, it’s not a done deal, and that’s because there’s a lot of different things that can come up, and you have to work through the fine print. And I think that’s what these politicians didn’t understand about Trump. I saw his flexibility as an asset. That’s what kept the Chinese off kilter. That’s what allowed us to make these historic trade deals. That’s what allowed us to get everything done. But a lot of these people who didn’t have the experience in the private sector didn’t understand him. And I try to really detail that tension and how it caused some friction and really held us back in certain areas.

HH: You know, I was making notes on the four chiefs of staff and the four national security advisors, and Mick Mulvaney did fine except for one day he walks out and he blows the impeachment. And by the way, that anecdote needs to be ready by historians, because his, oh, quid pro quo statement undermines all the good word he did as a chief of staff. But I’ve come away with a theory, Jared, and I’ll test it on you. The reason O’Brien succeeded as national security advisor is he had been the managing partner of a big law firm. Managing partners have to deal with clients first, but partners second. They’ve got a lot of stakeholders. The best chief of staff you had was Mark Meadows. But four chiefs of staff, four national security advisors, I think you hire managing partners of large law firms to run those two jobs. And your father-in-law told me those are the two best jobs in Washington that are not being president, because you don’t have to deal with the Congress. You’re the national security advisor and you’re the chief of staff. I think managing partners from law firms are what you need.

JK: I think that that’s very good. You know, we had a couple of examples of that. You know, you had a guy like Bob Lighthizer.

HH: Yup.

JK: He wasn’t a managing partner, but he was incredible as a lawyer. And then another one was Jay Clayton who ran the SEC…

HH: Yup.

JK: …who was absolutely phenomenal, did an incredible job there, and very competent. Again, when we had the downturn during COVID, he kept the markets going and did really incredible work. And so yeah, that might be the case. And again, I think that, you know, the more generalized way that I used to do it is that the type of people that we always looked for was people who had high competence levels and low ego. And I think that those were the people who worked out the best, generally. Like you know, you take guys like Chris Liddell, who was the CFO of Microsoft and General Motors, again, you know, most people in Washington were following, you know, the waves, right? And they were following the sensation and the headlines and the investigations and the splash of the day. But if you went under the waves, and this is one of the things that people didn’t realize about the Trump administration, you had tons of people like the Chris Liddell’s and the Brooke Rollins who were super competent, super devoted, super low ego, who were just there every day chopping wood, getting policies done, and allowing President Trump to keep his promise the voters and get things done. And so again…

HH: You know…

JK: …there’s not, you know, you say with Mick like this maybe ruined him, I don’t think people are into good or bad category. I think everyone’s just kind of who they are, and everything’s just got to be more nuanced. And this book, you know, Breaking History, really tries to give people just a lot of the nuance so that they can form their own opinions, because some people are nine parts good, one part bad. You know, some people are nine parts bad, one part good. But I try to see the good in everyone, and I tried to also show what they did so that you can form a better point of view for yourself.

HH: Look, you had great hires like Johnny DeStefano, I just saw Johnny last week, and absolutely essential people like Dan Scavino. And you give him his props here, and Avi. People don’t even know about Avi Berkowitz, but he is an amazing asset. I want to close, though, by talking about Ivanka, because you go out of your way to make sure, I did not know that the trademark, I didn’t know the background on the trademark. People always bring up this trademark crap about Ivanka, and you set the record straight. I also did not know about the G20 video. So I want to salute you for taking care of your spouse here. You take time in your book to knock down the worst misrepresentations of Ivanka. Did you set out to do that? Or was it just a matter of fact?

JK: No, it was just a matter of fact. Look, it broke my heart to see both of those, because again, Ivanka, you know, her, she had a brand that was doing amazing business, and the brand was about empowering women and helping people find balance in their lives, and she was praised for it by everyone in the media. And then she basically gave up the actual business part and just went to pursue the mission, and the same people who praised her for it started attacking her, often viciously and very cruelly. And I think one of the things I admire so much about her, but she never lowered herself to their level. She never got into the mud. She always stayed elegant. But I have to say it was very hard for her. It did hurt her when people would be so nasty, people like, you know, Chrissy Teigen who were nasty trolls who would just say the most awful, horrible things about her, and I would see it. And she would always brush if off, but I would imagine it had to hurt when things like that happened. But you know, then you look at situations like with the trademark, where basically she had an operation that was just protecting her name. And so you know, she was trying to avoid after the election in China, people were doing all kinds of brands that wasn’t her. She wasn’t making any money from it, but they were registering things like voting machines and products, and she basically filed to, or she didn’t even do it, someone in her office did it, to file to stop other people from making money off of her name in China. So it cost her money to prevent her trademark. She wasn’t looking to do any businesses there, and then the media says she gets, and again, I’m sure some like low level person said there’s a meeting there, we’ve got to get this done before. I don’t know, you know, what happened. We didn’t ask for it. And then the media makes this thing like she’s trying to profit off of her service by getting a trademark to prevent other people from profiting off of her name in a market she had no intention of going to. So that was awful. And then the G20 one was also terrible. So she worked with Prime Minister Abe. He had, as part of Abenomics, was trying to get higher workforce participation amongst women, but also having women have more balance and have more babies. They have a population decline issue there, and so he saw Ivanka as a great role model for this, and he worked with her on several initiatives. And when he was hosting the G20, he said Ivanka, I want you to come over and I want you to, I want you to host a panel on the work that we’re doing to change laws in countries to give women property rights and then to invest in women’s businesses and women entrepreneurialism, and it was an amazing program that she did. And so at the G20, she does it. Every world leader decides to show up to it and contribute money to it. And the results of the program are spectacular. So they do an event, every world leader comes, and at the end, there’s a conversation she’s having with Christine Lagarde, who actually was a very strong advocate with Ivanka, she’d asked Ivanka a few weeks earlier to introduce her at an event that she was being honored at, and they were great partners in a lot of efforts. And then somebody posted a video that maybe looks like Ivanka was out of context, and it went crazy on the internet. It had over 20 million views, and people were saying unwanted Ivanka and just, it just was one of these things where you’re trying to do good and then the internet can be so cruel in that regard. So I really, it broke my heart, and I wanted to write those things. But I’m so proud of the work she did, you know, whether it was getting the tax reform done, working with Steve Mnuchin to get some of those key votes, getting votes on a lot of issues that were very important that nobody saw, and then her work really to try to empower all Americans to get a vocational education and job training. She created amazing programs by garnering a lot of the CEOs, and her work was just, was absolutely spectacular, impactful. She did it in true, with true humility as a great public servant, and I was very, very proud of the work she did. And one final thing I just want to say is you mentioned Avi as well earlier. There is a real cult following of Avi. The people who know him love him. He’s been with me for 12 years. I tried to give him his due in the book, but he was really the lead negotiator from the American side on the Abraham Accords, him and Yousef Al Otaiba and Ambassador Dermer. I think between them, they were on version like 116 of the final release. It was, you know, really quiet stuff, not on phones, going to each other’s homes, working it out. And Avi did a very masterful job. He’s a Harvard lawyer, and just somebody I couldn’t be more proud of with the job he did. And again, we joke with him, too, that we’ve named the Abraham Accords after him, which you know, we did after the big, big Abraham, but that he was an essential player in getting all these things done, and really was by my side through all of the different investigations and all the different ups and downs of the administration.

HH: That’s clear. Okay, Jared, the very last thing I want to say is when people read Breaking History, I hope they pause at the Joe Kent anecdote, because your father-in-law took a historically significant and very dangerous decision to target and kill Soleimani. Bin Laden matters, Zawahiri matters, Zarqawi matters, al-Baghdadi matters, but Soleimani is a terrorist organization’s leader, and he is in Iraq to kill Americans, and your father takes him out, your father-in-law takes him out. Nobody understands why that mattered, but then Joe Kent comes to your office and would you just tell people about that conversation about Soleimani, because I hope people read that page if they read one page. It’s Joe Kent. They’re never going to otherwise understand it.

JK: Yeah, so Joe Kent is one of the coolest people I met when I was in Washington. He, yeah, any time a Gold Star family would request a meet, I would always do it. I have so much respect for the sacrifice that these people made. You know, he requested to meet, and so I spent the time with him. He was telling me about his background, which was absolutely incredible. I actually tried to hire him into the administration, but I couldn’t find the right place or the right people to bring him in. But he was a Special Forces guy, and he basically came in and said you have to understand the significance of what this meant to us. He said you know, because Obama was trying to negotiate the Iran deal, he basically told us like don’t be aggressive. And so they knew that we couldn’t be aggressive, and they basically were killing and maiming and being very aggressive with Americans, and we couldn’t retaliate.

HH: The Iranians…Iranians.

JK: We were sitting on our thumbs for a while.

HH: Yeah.

JK: The Iranians, yeah. And so we were like sitting ducks with them, and it was very, very cool. He said this guy masterminded the death and the maiming of so many U.S. soldiers, and what he did was one of the most significant things in the last many decades which will dramatically change the Middle East. And so again, it was interesting for me to hear the perception of somebody who’d been in the field very intimately, who’d lost a loved one in combat, and again, just a very, very special person. He gave me a bracelet with his wife who had passed away’s information on it, and I kept it on my desk for the rest of my time in service, and I always though about it every time we were being faced with a situation where you know, we were going to have to, you know, put troops on the front lines. Again, these were never decisions that I was going to have to make, but I was part of the discussions, and it just always, you know, taught me to try to push for peace, to try to avoid conflict where we can. And again, I was very, very lucky to have met him, and I’m very, very proud of the job he’s doing. He looks like he’s close to becoming a Congressman, which I think he would be an incredible Congressman if he’s able to do that.

HH: It is a superb book. Breaking History with superb anecdotes like that of Joe Kent, and Jared, continued good luck with you as you promote it. It’s selling very well, and I know why. It’s got the details. It’s got the receipts. Thank you, Jared Kushner.

JK: Perfect. Hugh, thanks for having me, and great to be with you.

HH: Thank you.

End of interview.

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