With the release of Jared Kushner’s book earlier this month it’s become clear that Donald Trump’s administration was hamstrung from the start by rivalries and outright hatreds that existed among his inner circle.
The ex-president’s son-in-law released Breaking History on 9 August, and while the book itself has largely faced negative reviews — even being called “soulless” by one early critic — one area of the book where the emotions of the New York scion who married into the White House come out clearly is his description of a long-running feud with Steve Bannonformer chief White House strategist.
A longtime supporter of the GOP’s far-right nationalist wing, Mr Bannon latched on to the Trump train early as did the pages of the news site he once helmed, Breitbart News. Upon joining the Trump White House, he became an early architect of the right-wing policies that became commonplace for four years of Mr Trump’s presidency. Mr Bannon was known to have a whiteboard in his office listing numerous topics of interest to him and the right wing during his short stay in the West Wing.
But just a few months into Mr Trump’s term in office, it was clear that the clash of personalities in the West Wing was becoming too much for anyone to bear. In April of that year, just three months after Inauguration Day, Vanity Fair published its first exposé of the tensions between Mr Bannon and Mr Kushner that were already simmering. In it, the magazine’s reporter wrote that the pair’s rivalry was exacerbated by Donald Trump’s unwillingness to do anything about it.
“In every White House, there are competing loyalties and rivalries. That dynamic is normal. What is unusual about this presidency is that Trump himself is not a stable center of gravity and may be incapable of becoming one,” wrote Vanity Fair’s Sarah Ellison.
The reason for the feud was obvious. It was widely reported at the time that Mr Bannon had been the anonymous source for a number of negative stories about Mr Kushner that had appeared in both mainstream media and right-wing publications. The Breitbart chief had sought to paint both Mr Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, as Democrats seeking to undermine the president’s agenda. Others like then-White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, a political operative who previously ran the Republican Naitonal Committee, reportedly engaged in that same practice in return, according to Vanity Fair.
“Senior administration officials told me that both Bannon and Priebus partisans have spent hours on the phone with reporters, planting stories about each other and their colleagues,” reads the exposé.
In one instance, Mr Bannon made clear that he was taking such steps, and would continued to do so. Confronting Mr Kushner in an explosive conversation, the Breitbart chief supposedly snarled, “how f—ing dare you leak on me? If you leak out on me, I can leak out on you 28 ways from Sunday.”
It even led to Mr Kushner taking physical steps to separate himself from Mr Bannon in the cramped West Wing officespace. According to Mr Trump’s son-in-law, he waited until most of the White House’s senior staff had departed for Mar-a-Lago before ordering maintenance workers to seal a doorway connecting his office with that of his rival.
“One weekend while the president and the usual entourage of senior staff were in Mar-a-Lago, I had the White House maintenance team seal off the internal doorway between my office and Bannon’s,” writes Mr Kushner.
That anchoring presence that Mr Trump could not provide was a void that was eventually filled by John Kelly. A retired general, Mr Kelly took a no-nonsense approach to staff management in the West Wing and clashed severely with Mr Bannon over his propensity to leak to the media. Mr Kelly’s dislike for Mr Bannon led to the latter’s unceremonious firing in August of Mr Trump’s first year in office, ending the short-lived stint. Mr Bannon would go on to vow a “nuclear” campaign against Mr Kushner and his wife, but that never materialised and the pair remained in the White House until the final days of the Trump presidency.
And we know now, Mr Kushner takes personal credit for the defeat of his closest enemy in the Trump administration. The passages of Breaking History dealing with the ouster of his rival are some of the few places in the book where Mr Kushner shows genuine emotion, albeit one critics might see as a smug, self-satisfied view of his own importance.
That shone through in one instance where he describes joking to a friend at the time, “at least I was able to get Steve Bannon fired,” when asked about his accomplishments.
Others, according to Mr Kushner, also were enthused to see Mr Bannon fired. Stephen Miller, one of the most controversial White House aides and the architect of Mr Trump’s immigration policies, joked according to Mr Kushner that the ousted Bannon had done little work besides planting negatives stories in the media.
“Stephen Miller joked to Hope and me, ‘I have a plan to split up Steve Bannon’s extensive workload. Hope, you leak to Jonathan Swan at Axios. Jared, you call Mike Bender from the Wall Street Journal. I’ll call Jeremy Peters from the New York Timesand … we’re done,’” wrote Mr Kushner in the book.
Mr Bannon has remained one of Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters since the January 6 attack on Congress and failed attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory. He continues to host his War Room podcast even as he faces prosecution over his refusal to comply with a congressional subpoena related to his involvement in that attempt to change the election results.
Mr Kushner and Ms Trump, meanwhile, have backed away from Mr Trump’s political work in the wake of the attack and even provided testimony to the January 6 committee indicating that they knew Mr Trump was spreading lies about the 2020 election.
The son-in-law of Donald Trump has offered a half-hearted defence of his former boss and current family member in the wake of an FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago, while claiming that despite his seniority at the White House he supposedly has no knowledge of the contents of boxes containing supposedly classified materials retained improperly by the ex-president.