The Son-In-Law Also Rises

The secret weapon of the Trump campaign: His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who created a stealth data machine that leveraged social media and ran like a Silicon Valley startup. The inside story of the biggest upset in modern political history.

- Steven Bertoni

It’s been one week since Donald Trump pulled off the biggest upset in modern political history, and his headquarters at Trump Tower in New York City is a 58-storey, onyx-glassed lightning rod. Barricades, TV trucks and protesters frame a fortified Fifth Avenue. Armies of journalists and selfie-seeking tourists stalk Trump Tower’s pink marble lobby, hoping to snap the next political power player who steps into view. Twenty-six floors up, in the same building where washed-up celebrities once battled for Trump’s blessing on The Apprentice, the president elect is choosing his cabinet, and this contest contains all the twists and turns of his old reality show.

Winners will emerge shortly. But today’s focus is on the biggest loser: New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who has just been fired from his role leading the transition, along with most of the people associated with him. The episode is being characterised as a “knife fight” that ends in a “Stalinesque purge”.

The most compelling figure in this intrigue, however, wasn’t in Trump Tower. Jared Kushner was three blocks south, high up in his own skyscraper, at 666 Fifth Avenue, where he oversees his family’s Kushner Companies real estate empire. Trump’s son-in-law, dressed in an impeccably tailored grey suit, displays the impeccably polite manners that won the 35-year-old a dizzying number of influential friends even before he had gained the ear, and trust, of the new leader of the free world.

“Six months ago, Governor Christie and I decided this election was much bigger than any differences we may have had in the past, and we worked very well together,” he says. “The media has speculated on a lot of different things, and since I don’t talk to the press, they go as they go, but I was not behind pushing out him or his people.”