Charles Kushner once owned 22,000 garden apartments and single-family homes in New Jersey. Donald Trump owns apartments, casinos, resorts and an empire of subsidiaries. Their children met and wed; both a marriage and a merger. The two families, both alike in sometime (in)dignity, is where Andrea Bernstein lays her Shakespearean tale of wealth, power — and the corrupting effect of them both.
There are now dozens, perhaps scores, of Trump-inspired and Trump-infused books on the market. Most are screeds, tales of scandal and infidelity, with tax evasion and crudity mixed in. They comprise a modern genre. “American Oligarchs” occupies this space, to be sure, but Bernstein’s account is written with more grace than its cousins, and more care — sometimes even caution.
The story, in its broadest sense, is well-known. The two families — one with German origin, the other Polish — grew rich in real estate in the Mid-Atlantic, where fortunes sometimes require luck, often pluck, occasionally brains, frequently schemes. One of the fathers went to the big house, the other to the White House.
It is a modern American story, as is the tale of the two men’s children, living, as Bernstein puts it, in America’s “uppermost layer, the crust on the crème brûlée,” a deft definition of two people who, working with connections and family money and, it must be said, some measure of intelligence and guile, made at least $82 million in the year the paterfamilias became president.
Today, Jared Kushner, once tasked with solving the tensions in the Middle East, is emerging as the principal figure in Trump’s re-elevation campaign; he wasn’t involved at all in the most important Middle East development of his father-in-law’s presidency, the slaying of Major General Suleimani. His wife, Ivanka, is a constant presence in both the news and society pages of the newspapers her father deplores.
If the Kushner and Trump stories are about money, so, too, is Bernstein’s, for the role of money in politics and the emergence of the modern wealth gap are important sub-themes in this account. Naturally the role Kushner and Trump money played in politics, long before the White House was within the president’s grasp, is examined by Bernstein. Hers is, she writes, “the multi-generational saga of two emblematic families of our time.”
Early in Bernstein’s tale we encounter the modern origins of the Kushners, their Polish shtetl roots and the slaughter of many of them at the hands of the Nazis. It is an affecting, poignant story, told well and without the facile irony — struggling family in merciless mid-century war turns into crooked family in late-century New Jersey —that a less accomplished writer might employ.
The Trump story is less romantic, though Fred Trump did once work as a “horse’s helper,” which is to say that he guided construction wagons along ice-encrusted roads that mules couldn’t navigate. The family’s rise is summarized in one half of a juicy paragraph this way: “It’s the tale of a hustling entrepreneur immigrant grandfather who made money satisfying the appetites of Western lumberjacks and miners for food, liquor and prostitutes; of a builder father whose career included several run-ins with government investigators, and decades of hiding a massive fortune from the IRS.”
In this Big Apple story, the apple didn’t fall from from the poisoned trees. The Kushner story, marked by annual Passover seders at the Fontainebleau, was soiled by illegal campaign contributions and tax fraud, plus the additional elements of sex tapes and a prison sentence. Donald Trump was a skilled manipulator of the tax and bankruptcy codes, a shrewd creator of shell companies, and a successful seeker of loopholes, sweetheart loans and other swindles. Roy Cohn’s name appears in this account. Also Roger Stone’s. So does the phrase “moral compromise.”
Like so many of these books, Bernstein builds on work done by others, especially The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. But through her own research — the footnotes are impressive — we see Trump’s early (1988) relationship with Rudy Giuliani and Jerrold Nadler’s early (1995) suspicions of Trump. These would acquire national significance a third of a century later. Cue the videotape.
Bernstein displays deep understanding of these two families, and how the progeny had social status the parents lacked but coveted. This passage is telling: “Donald Trump was gauche, Ivanka Trump was polished; he was unruly, she was disciplined. He was fun, but always a bit of a spectacle, Ivanka had become, to the Manhattan elite, one of us.”
Bernstein seems to have embraced Michael Cohen’s view that the Trump presidential campaign was principally a marketing opportunity. “The attempts to use the campaign to unleash a cash bonanza started immediately, across the globe,” she writes. In the last section of the book she shows how the presidency itself is a marketing opportunity — for Trump’s hotel in Washington, for his resorts across the globe, for his daughter’s businesses, for his cronies.
The irony of books like this one — and books defending the president, even the one by his own son — is that they reinforce views rather than reshape them. Then again, that is what contemporary media, and contemporary conversation, do every day. In the end, “American Oligarchs” is the American conversation in hardcover.
AMERICAN OLIGARCHS: THE KUSHNERS, THE TRUMPS, AND THE MARRIAGE OF MONEY AND POWER
by Andrea Bernstein
W.W. Norton, 496 pp., $30
David M. Shribman, for a decade the Globe’s Washington bureau chief, is a nationally syndicated columnist.