According to Woodward, “hen combined, Kushner’s four texts painted President Trump as crazy, aimless, stubborn and manipulative.” “I could hardly believe anyone would recommend these as ways to understand their father-in-law,” Woodward breathlessly writes, “much less the president they believed in and served.” But despite his 49 years reporting on Washington politics, 19 previous books, and two Pulitzer Prizes, Woodward comes off here and elsewhere as surprisingly naïve. A “hair-splitting, fact-checking debate” is irrelevant.
The controversy over the economy helps Trump because it reminds voters the economy was good. “Controversy elevates message,” Kushner said. Lastly, Kushner recommended Scott Adams’s Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter (2017), in which Adams explains that Trump’s misstatements of fact are not regrettable errors or ethical lapses but part of a technique he calls “intentional wrongness persuasion.” As Adams sees it, Trump “can invent any reality” for most voters on most issues, and “all you will remember is that he provided his reasons, he didn’t apologize, and his opponents called him a liar like they always do.” Kushner explained that Adams’s approach explained Trump’s February 2020 State of the Union speech when he declared, “Our economy is the best it has ever been.” While the economy was in excellent shape then, Kushner acknowledged it was not “the best” in US history. In a chapter added in March 2018, Whipple wrote that Trump “clearly has no idea how to govern,” and regardless of his chiefs of staff, “Trump will be Trump.” Kushner’s third choice on his reading list was Chris Whipple’s The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency. “Did Kushner understand how negative this was?” Kushner was acknowledging that “Trump’s presidency was on shaky, directionless ground.” He paraphrased the cat: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will get you there.” Woodward is stunned.
Second, Kushner recommended that observers take a look at the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. From his well-informed yet strangely aloof perch, Kushner identifies four writings that he claims “someone in a quest to understand Trump needed to absorb.”įirst was a March 8, 2018, opinion piece by Peggy Noonan titled “Over Trump, We’re As Divided As Ever,” in which she called the president a “circus act” and “a living insult,” whose presidency was characterized by “epic instability, mismanagement, and confusion.” LATE IN BOB WOODWARD’S controversial new book Rage, Jared Kushner, priding himself as the insider’s insider, enters from stage right to offer an assessment of his father-in-law.
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