In an upcoming memoir, Jared Kushner says he personally intervened to prevent Donald Trump from attacking Rupert Murdoch in response to criticism of the media mogul at the start of Trump’s move into politics in 2015.
In the book, Breaking History, Kushner writes: “Trump called me. He had clearly had enough. ‘This guy is no good. And I’m going to tweet it.’
“‘Please, you’re in a Republican primary,’ I said, hoping he wasn’t about to post a negative tweet aimed at the most powerful man in conservative media. “You don’t have to get on the wrong side of Rupert. Give me a couple of hours to fix it.”
Kushner says he fixed it. If his claim is true, he could be seen to have made an enormously consequential intervention in modern US history.
Murdoch’s support, primarily through Fox News, did much to propel Trump to victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Despite persistent reports of friction between the two men, Murdoch supported Trump during four tumultuous years in office which culminated in Trump’s refusal to admit defeat and the deadly attack on Congress.
The Guardian obtained a copy of Kushner’s book, which will be published next month.
The book comes at a time when Murdoch’s newspapers and, to some extent, Fox News, are distancing themselves from Trump, amid congressional hearings on his election subversion and the Jan. 6 attack, speculation about criminal charges and as he prepares another bid for the White House. .
In his book, Trump’s son-in-law, who became a senior White House adviser, describes a friendship with Murdoch built during time on Murdoch’s yacht and at Bono’s house in France, watching the U2 frontman sing with Bob Geldof and Billy Joel. Kushner also describes how Wendi Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s third wife, helped him get Ivanka Trump back after a breakup.
Kushner claims to have convinced Murdoch to back Trump in 2015.
Trump and Murdoch were not close before Trump entered politics. But in July 2015, after Trump launched his explosive campaign for the Republican presidential nomination with a racist rant about Mexicans, the Fox News host tweeted: “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing the entire country? “
A week later, the New York Times described Murdoch as disparaging Trump. Trump was furious and threatened to tweet. Kushner was not then an official adviser to his father-in-law, but he writes, “I called Rupert and told him I had to see him.
“‘Rupert, I think I could win,’ I said, as we sat in his office. “You agree on many issues. You want smaller government. You want lower taxes. You want stronger borders.
“Rupert listened quizzically, as if he couldn’t imagine that Trump was serious about running. The next day, he called me and said, ‘I looked at this and maybe I was misjudging it.’ He actually has a real following. He seems to be very popular, like he can really be a kingpin in the GOP primaries with the way he’s playing. What does Donald want?
“”I want to be president,” I replied.
“‘No, what does he really want?’ he asked again.
“Look, he doesn’t need a nicer plane,” I said. “He’s got a beautiful plane. He doesn’t need a nicer house. He doesn’t need anything. He’s tired of seeing politicians screw up the country, and he thinks he could do a better job.”
“”Interesting,” said Rupert.
“We had a truce, for now.”
Kushner also writes about Trump’s clashes with Fox News during the 2016 campaign, including a clash with host Megyn Kelly. Kushner says he brokered a deal with Roger Ailes, then head of Fox News, for a $5 million donation to a veterans’ organization of Trump’s choosing, in exchange for Trump choosing not to skip a debate.
Murdoch rejected the deal, Kushner writes, saying that if he accepted it he would have to “pay everyone to show up for the debates.”
Kushner also describes how Murdoch helped shape his vision of why the US needed Trump. At a rally in Springfield, Illinois, in November 2015, Kushner recalled “a book that Rupert Murdoch had given me months before: Coming Apart by Charles Murray, which makes a case that over the last 50 years America has been divided in upper and lower classes. who live isolated from each other, geographically and culturally”.
Trump, Kushner writes, appealed to the “forgotten and disenfranchised.” For his son-in-law, the demonstration in Illinois “was a wake-up call.”
Kushner’s version of another call with Murdoch, on the night of the 2020 election, has been widely reported. He says Murdoch told him that Fox News’ call of Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in Arizona, a decision that infuriated the president and his advisers, was “hardwired, not even close.”
Arizona played a central role in Trump’s attempt to overturn the election through lies about voter fraud. Fox News is now the subject of a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit from a voting machine manufacturer, over conspiracy theories pushed by Trump and his allies and repeated on the network.
Fox News has said it is “confident we will prevail, as freedom of the press is fundamental to our democracy and must be protected, and the damage claims are outrageous, unsupported, and unrooted in a sound financial analysis, which serve nothing more than a blatant attempt to dissuade our journalists from doing their jobs.”