Kushner Gets Candid

JARED KUSHNER SPOKE TO NEWSWEEK’S Bill Powell at length in mid-June. These excerpts have been edited for length.

What he thought his role would be in January 2017:

JK: That feels like a lifetime ago. I was in a different place in my life then. When we got to the White House at first I was helping [him] find his way; there were so many people with so many agendas coming at him, it was important to make sure people weren’t end-running him, because we were playing with live ammo now. We had to be his eyes and ears to help good people flourish and be a check on people who were playing games. I always had his back.

I think I was good at spotting trends, making decisions and managing organizations. We were doing a lot of learning about how to accomplish his core objectives: get wages rising, rebalance some of the [trade] deals to create long term growth, basically making sure that his big visions had policies put in place below. Every day there are a million crises, you have to figure out how to keep moving forward. In terms of pursuing things that I had interest in, if I identify an objective I get