Jared Unplugged

Takeaways from Lex Fridman's interview with Jared Kushner

Earlier this month, Jared Kushner sat down for two interviews with the podcaster Lex Fridman—one before, and one after, the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel. The subsequent podcast episode—which includes both interviews, the more recent one first—dropped last week. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the most extensive media interview Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor has given since leaving the White House, if not ever. It’s almost four hours long. The transcript runs to 43,000 words—the length of a short novel.

Fridman is a computer scientist by trade. As a podcaster, he’s drawn notoriety by interviewing a variety of controversial figures, from both sides of the political spectrum, including Kanye West, Elon Musk, RFK Jr., and Noam Chomsky. He gives his subjects plenty of room to speak. This is generally a good thing—I take the same approach on my podcast—but when your guests are chaos agents, propagandists, and Trump West Wing alums seeking to rewrite historical narratives, the lack of pushback is not as constructive. It’s one thing to champion free speech, quite another to platform liars.

The point is, Kushner is on friendly ground here. He appears tanned, rested, and relaxed—not at all like the ghostly, whiny Jared we saw on tape at the January 6 hearing. (The fat $28,000,000 commission he scored from his new job must be salubrious to the soul.) He answers the questions put to him thoughtfully, or as thoughtfully as he can, although he tends to come off a little condescending. He casually calls Elon Musk’s hellsite “X,” as if it never had another name. In 2023, he uses the word “homosexual.” And he loves business school jargon. Like, he uses the word “paradigm” 18 times during the course of the interview.

There are also moments that he presents as human, even likeable—as when he extols the glories of the New Jersey diner. Sometimes—and way more often than I’d expected—I found myself agreeing with him. But then, the successful disinformation merchant always begins by establishing common ground.

The failure of the interview lies in its many omissions. While Fridman did ask about Jamal Khashoggi, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (aka MbS), and Kushner’s aforementioned new career managing $2 billion in Saudi investment capital—it wasn’t all softballs—he conspicuously avoided mentioning the insurrection, or the pardons Jared was busy doling out while the Capitol was being besieged, or his father-in-law’s theft of classified documents related to Israel, or all those Trump indictments, or the Kushner family’s long relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu, or the 1,147,253 Americans who have died of covid-19 because of the Blue State Genocide Jared reportedly implemented. And Kushner did not veer into that territory on his own—even to grouse about people like me continuing to bring this stuff up.

Not only that, but in his answers, Jared omitted key details in order to construct a more perfect narrative: one in which Donald Trump was a “very, very strong president” who “did a great job,” and Ivanka Trump is “an amazing role model,” and Senior Advisor Jared Kushner was getting all kinds of shit done that the Biden people came in and screwed up. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, for example, was totally the result of Trump no longer being Commander-in-Chief, per Jared:

“I think 100 percent, it would’ve been avoided. Not 99 percent. President Trump, for four years, had no problems with Russia,” he said. “Under Bush, they took Georgia. Under Obama, they took Crimea. Under Trump, there was no problems. And then under Biden, unfortunately, I think they misplayed a couple of things, which I think provoked Russia to go forward. Still no excuse to do what they did. I think that the invasion was a terrible thing and should not have occurred. But with that being said, I think 100 percent, if Trump was president, there would not be a war in Ukraine today.”

What actually happened is this: Under Bush, Putin took Georgia. Under Obama, Putin took Crimea. And under Trump, Putin took Washington. (We all saw the footage from Helsinki, Jared. What we never got to see were the translator’s notes Trump confiscated.)

That Trump lickspittle Matt Gaetz, hellbent to cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine, jettisoned the Speaker of the House right before the flurry of Russian terrorist attacks in Ukraine, the ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Hamas atrocities in Israel, seems too well-timed to be a coincidence.

Here, in no particular order, are some takeaways from the interview:

---

Putin and Russia

“You’ve been attacked quite a bit,” Fridman notes sympathetically. “One of the ones that stands out is the accusations of collusion with Russia. . .Can you tell me some aspects of this story?”

Jared is happy to do so:

Sure. So to give the listeners some context, and people remember this now, it’s been kind of swept away because it turned out not to be true, was that after President Trump won the election in 2016, instead of the media saying, “Oh, we were wrong” —because, again, everyone thought he had zero chance of winning—they said, “Okay, well, we couldn’t have been wrong. It must have been the Russians who worked with him.”

And so, at first, when this started coming up, I thought this was ridiculous. I was very intimately involved with the operations of the campaign. I was running the finance of the campaign. I was running the digital media of the campaign. I was running the schedule for the campaign. And I knew that on most days, we had trouble working, coordinating with ourselves, let alone collaborating with another government and colluding, as they called it. And so, we did a great job, I think, as an underdog campaign, very leanly staffed. And then they said that we were working with the Russians. And so, at the time, I didn’t take it too seriously because I knew there was no truth to it.

So to give the listeners some context: The Mueller investigation found that, yes, the Russians were actively trying to help Trump and hurt Hillary, and yes, there were a number of meetings between members of Trump’s circle and Putin’s circle. It is not typical for campaigns to meet with representatives of hostile foreign governments; in fact, it never fucking happens.

Volume 5 of the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Russian Interference also found that, yes—and I quote—“the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.” The Senate report then goes into great detail about various Trump/Russia topics, including: the seditious activities of the Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, who worked closely with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence officer who specializes in election sabotage; the hapless not-so-useful idiot George Papadopoulos; the infiltration of the NRA brass and the GOP nomenklatura by Putin BFF Alexander Torshin and his protégé, Maria Butina; the bizarre activities of Carter Page and Michael Flynn; the Trump Tower meeting; Candidate Trump’s foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel; and much, much more.

Who organized that April 27, 2016 foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel, working with Dimitri Simes—who subsequently left the U.S. to host a pro-Putin news show in Russia? Jared Corey Kushner. Who hobnobbed with Sergei Kislyak, the multi-chinned Russian ambassador to the United States, at that same event? Jared Corey Kushner. Who attended the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Don. Jr., Paul Manafort, and the Kremlin attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya? Jared Corey Kushner. Who, in early December 2016—during the transition—accompanied Mike Flynn to a clandestine meeting at Trump Tower with Kislyak? Jared Corey Kushner. Who proposed, at that same meeting, a “backchannel” to Moscow through the Russian embassy? Jared Corey Kushner. Who, two weeks later, met with Sergei Gorkov, Putin crony and former head of a sanctioned Russian bank, at the Carlyle Hotel, for reasons we still don’t fully understand? Jared Corey Kushner.

But sure, no collusion. No coordination with Russians. No working together. The news outlets were just making shit up. Uh-huh.

---

Jamal Khashoggi

Fridman does not ask if Kushner agrees with the assessment of the intelligence community that MbS was responsible for the gruesome murder of Jamal Khashoggi. He does not ask if Kushner had any advance warning that Khashoggi’s life was in danger. Instead, he says, “One big source of tension between the United States and Saudi [Arabia] is the case of Jamal Khashoggi. I was wondering if you can comment on what MbS has said about it to you. You’ve spoken to him about it and what MbS has said about it publicly on 60 Minutes and after.”

While Fridman does note that Kushner has become “friends with” MbS, and allows Jared to spin the story about how he heroically organized Trump’s state visit to the Kingdom, he omits critical context: that MbS had cultivated a relationship with Kushner, that Kushner had visited the Crown Prince in Riyadh solo, that Kushner acted as the de facto U.S. ambassador to the KSA in the early years of the Trump Administration, and that MbS bragged that he had Kushner “in [his] pocket.”

That allows Jared to supply a useless, anodyne response:

Yeah, so what he said to me was no different than what he ultimately said on 60 Minutes, which was, “As somebody helping lead this country, I bear responsibility, and I’m going to make sure that those who are involved are brought to justice, and I’m going to make sure that we put in place reforms to make sure things like this don’t happen again.” It was a horrible situation that occurred. What I saw from him after that was just a doubling and a tripling down on the positive things he was doing, figuring out ways to kind of continue to modernize this society, build opportunity in the Kingdom, and to continue to be a better ally to all the different countries that wanted to be aligned with them.

One way MbS could be a better ally would be to not dismember journalists, or imprison dissidents (or citizens who complain about his oppressive policies on social media), or lead the world in beheadings (which rose dramatically from 2017 to 2018, as MbS consolidated his power), or keep U.S. diplomats waiting for hours. Neither Fridman nor Kushner bring up the fact that the Crown Prince runs the country like Caligula.

---

Mohammad bin Salman

In Fridman’s follow-up to the Khashoggi answer, he wonders “how much of a dramatic impact it had on creating tension between the United States and Saudi [Arabia], and in general in the Middle East, that somehow Saudi’s not a friend, but is against the ideals and the values of the United States.”

Somehow? The thing is, the Kingdom is against the ideals and the values of the United States. State-sanctioned patriarchy is against the ideals and the values of the United States. Public beheadings are against the ideals and the values of the United States. Suppressing freedom of speech is against the ideals and the values of the United States. Suppressing freedom of religion is against the ideals and the values of the United States. And so on.

Kushner just runs with the inherent bias of the question, which suggests that the people who made such a big stink about one pesky journalist being executed and chopped into bits totally ruined all the cool shit Jared the Great was cooking up:

So it definitely created massive tension and it became a very high profile action that actually overshadowed a lot of the good work that was being done in the region and a lot of the progress we were making.

Then, still riffing on the same question, he offers up this word salad, almost Rumsfeldian in its mumbo-jumbo emptiness:

In a political deal, it’s always about paradigms. So the end of a problem set is always the beginning of a new paradigm, and you’re always thinking through how do you create an environment that leads to hopefully the best amount of positive outcomes that could occur versus creating a paradigm that will lead to negative outcomes.

---

Covid-19

In the late winter-early spring of 2020, as the pandemic began, Kushner formed a team of “Morgan Stanley bankers liaising with billionaires,” a group that included his college roommate, to tackle the problem. By some miracle, the team managed to devise a workable plan that called for aggressive, widespread, centralized testing—only to have it go “poof into thin air” that April, as one participant told Katherine Eban at Vanity Fair. This is how come:

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said.

To the best of my knowledge, Kushner has never publicly commented on this in any detail. Fridman did not ask him to. Jared mentioned covid five times in the interview. Four times, it was used as shorthand for the period of time some accomplishment he was touting occurred in spite of. For example, when asked about his relationship with Putin and Russia, he said:

So I didn’t deal with Russia a ton, but in my interaction with Putin and with Russia, I would kind of point out a couple of things. Number one is, when America was hit with covid and New York was looking like we were going to run out of ventilators and masks, Russia was the second country that sent us a planeload of supplies. And they didn’t send that because they hate America, they sent that because we were starting to make progress together as countries, and they thought that they wanted to show goodwill to figure out how can we start working together.

The other time—the first time—it was to suggest that the incoming Biden Administration should have focused less on covid and more on finalizing a business deal between Gulf oil states:

We left them a place where they had tremendous momentum in the Middle East. I met with them during the transition and said, “Look, we even got the Qatar-Saudi conflict done, which was a big [deal]. No peace between Israel and Saudi would’ve been possible without that so we even got that done in our lameduck period. They came in and they said, “Look, we want to focus on the three Cs, which is Covid, climate change, and China.” I said, “That’s great, but the Middle East we have in an amazing place right now. It’s stable, there’s momentum. Iran is basically broke.”

When Biden took office, most Americans had not yet gotten vaccinated, and the pandemic was still raging. Trump himself caught the virus in October 2020 and was much worse for wear than he let on. The whole world ground to a halt. In short, nothing required Biden’s urgent attention more than, you know, stopping the plague.

Almost four years after the virus first emerged, Kushner still seems oblivious to the harm his pandemic policies wrought.

---

Hamas

Kushner reveals a more nuanced understanding of the Israel/Palestine conflict than I expected. He’s spot-on here, and his optimism is refreshing:

And unfortunately, the people who suffer the most are really are just the Palestinian people. And I think that in Gaza, they’re hostages to Hamas. And in the West Bank, they’re just held back because their leadership just is afraid or too self-interested to give them the opportunity to change their paradigm and pursue the potential of what they have. And by the way, it’s an incredibly well-educated population, it’s an incredibly capable population, and they’re right next to Israel where the economy—they need everything. And so the potential should be incredible if you can just move some of these pieces.

In the first interview, he mentions Hamas just twice, despite the Abraham Accords—his signature diplomatic achievement—being a major topic of discussion. In the second interview, recorded after the attacks, he mentions Hamas 49 times. At the beginning of that second interview, he shares his thoughts on the tragedy, and says:

I think that Hamas has shown the entire world who they really are. I think what their aim is, what they’re willing to do, and all of the strong security that Israel’s put in place over the last years, which in some instances was criticized, I think is now being validated, that there was a real threat that they were looking to deter. Short answer is my heart is broken, praying for peace, praying for strength, praying for Israel to do what it needs to do to avoid being in this situation again, which is either eliminating or severely degrading Hamas’ capabilities. There cannot be peace in Israel and in the Middle East, while there is a terror group that is being funded by Iran that is allowed to flourish and is allowed to plan operations that are going to aim to kill innocent civilians.

What Kushner doesn’t point out is that Hamas was also “allowed to flourish” by Netanyahu’s far-right Likud Party. As the Times of Israel reported:

Most of the time, Israeli policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset. Far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, now the finance minister in the hardline government and leader of the Religious Zionism party, said so himself in 2015.

According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

The stated goal of Hamas is to control Palestine “from the river to the sea.” That is, coincidentally, what Netanyahu and his far-right Likud comrades also want. As Meron Rapoport noted last week at Responsible Statecraft:

In his speech at the UN General Assembly two weeks ago, Netanyahu presented a map of “The New Middle East,” depicting the State of Israel stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and building a “corridor of peace and prosperity” with its neighbors across the region, including Saudi Arabia. A Palestinian state, or even the collection of shrunken enclaves that the Palestinian Authority ostensibly controls, does not appear on the map.

Kushner talks a lot about building consensus, bridging gaps between cultures, finding common ground. I think he’s sincere about that. But the first step towards rapprochement in the Israel-Palestine conflict is having leaders on both sides who are willing to negotiate and compromise to put an end to the cycle of violence. Bibi ain’t that. But Jared is either unwilling or unable to recognize this:

Bibi is definitely a historic figure. I’d meet with a lot of different world leaders, and some of them, I would say, they’re very, very special, transformational figures. And some, I would say, how the hell is this person running a country? Bibi is somebody who has done a lot for the state of Israel, he has a tremendous understanding of the security apparatus. He has tremendous global relations. So for a crisis like this, I think Bibi’s the leader you want, if you’re Israel, to be in that seat.

In fact, most Israelis don’t want him in that seat. Public support for him has plummeted. Plus, Netanyahu is a crook who has attempted to subvert the judiciary to cling to power and avoid prosecution. There were already massive protests all summer with the aim of getting him to resign. Indeed, one of the reasons Hamas struck when they did is because the people of Israel were distracted by their Trump-like criminal of a Prime Minister.

And now? After a security failure of this magnitude? After Bibi ignored warnings from Egyptian intelligence that Hamas had something in the works? If Netanyahu had any shame, he would have resigned in disgrace. But then, if he had any shame, he would have resigned months ago.

---

Trump 2024

While talking about Israel, Jared makes the down-low argument that the United States would be safer, happier, and more prosperous if we put aside our petty differences and just coalesce around his father-in-law:

[T]he times in Jewish history where the Jewish people have been most vulnerable have been when there’s been division, and that’s when the Temple was destroyed. But that’s not just with the Jewish people and with Israel, that’s in all societies. So I definitely believe that this division has left them less prepared for the situation than it would. I do think there’s real lessons we should be taking from this here in America, where we’re in a time where we’re very divided. But I do think that it’d be very wise for our leaders to find the areas where we do agree and find ways to secure our Southern border, to make sure that we know who’s in our country, what risks we all face. And I do think that division definitely creates risk for countries.

How clever of Jared, equating the border between Israel and Gaza with the border between Texas and Mexico, as if the threat level is remotely similar.

Reality check: Trump is under indictment in four different jurisdictions, and faces over 90 counts. He has been gagged by one of the judges. He made off with documents so top secret that they cannot even be reviewed at Mar-a-Lago. The State of New York is in the process of dismantling his business empire, such as it is. He is a fraud. He is a liar. He is a criminal. He is a rat. He is a rapist, who keeps getting sued by, and losing to, one of his many victims. He was laughed at derisively when he spoke at the United Nations. Oh, and I almost forgot: he led a violent insurrection to subvert the will of the people and keep himself in power. If he wins the 2024 election, democracy in this country dies.

Fridman doesn’t mention any of this. “Pragmatic question about the future,” he says. “Do you hope Donald Trump wins in 2024? And how can his administration help bring peace to the Middle East?”

Jared’s risible response:

When Donald Trump was president, we had a peaceful world. Everyone said if he was elected, we would have World War III. Meanwhile, he gets elected, and he not only is the first president in decades to not start any wars, he’s making peace deals. He’s making trade deals. He’s working with our allies, getting them to pay their fair share in NATO. He’s having a dialogue with China, with Russia. He’s weakening Iran. So I do think that the job he did as a foreign policy president was tremendous. I think now more and more people are starting to recognize that. Again, under President Biden, this is the second war that’s broken out in the world. And when you have a weak American leadership, the world becomes a less safe place. So my hope and prayers are that President Trump is reelected and that he’s able to then restore order and calm and peace and prosperity to the world.

Trump spent four years undermining NATO, pissing off our allies, and cozying up to the cruel dictators he so admires and wants to emulate. He invited the fucking Taliban to Camp David. And he’s not some big pacifist; we were lucky he didn’t start a war with Iran, like he wanted to.

“And what I would tell people who don’t like Trump is, I would say, ‘Think about how crazy he’s making you and his enemies,’” Kushner said. “He did that to the enemies of America.”

Trump did many things to Putin. Making him crazy was not one of those things.

Why is Jared talking like this? Does he really believe it, or is he just being nice to avoid a scene at Thanksgiving? Does he know the truth deep down, but doesn’t want to admit it? Has he denied reality so many times that he now believes the make-believe counternarrative? Or is he simply too dumb to get it?

It’s impossible to say for sure. What I do know is that Jared Kushner should never again wield so much power. All of us would be better off—including him.

---

The full podcast episode is here:

The (very helpful) transcript is here.

The audio podcast is here:

Photo credit: Screen shot from the Lex Fridman podcast.

Thanks to Sharon Brown for alerting me to this.