Jared Kushner, a senior White House adviser for his father-in-law, former President Donald Trump, told Newsmax that his book, "Breaking History: A White House Memoir," allowed him to share information from behind the scenes, including his initial thoughts about Trump's first campaign.
"It wasn't hard to share about myself," he commented in an interview for Newsmax's "Wake Up America," airing Friday. "It has been interesting to watch everyone project things on me or say who I was or wasn't … I spent time during my time in the public eye in Washington working on getting things done, as opposed to trying to be part of that conversation."
The book details what it's like to be involved in the Trump campaign and White House. Kushner is married to Trump's daughter, Ivanka, and admits in the memoir he had some doubts initially about her father seeking the White House.
"I wouldn't say I was not sold on his viability. I just didn't know what to make of it," Kushner said. "He's rising in the polls, and so everything was counterintuitive. I was here on the Upper East Side in what I thought was a very diverse group of people, with the heads of the banks, of fashion, the heads of the technology companies, to the media, and they're all saying, 'Donald, there's no chance.'"
But then, he said that Trump invited him to one of his rallies, so he went to a rally in Springfield, Illinois, with him.
When they got there, Trump was told that he broke an attendance record for the center, which was set 36 years earlier by Elton John.
"He turns to me and says 'Jared, see, I don't even have a guitar,'" Kushner said of Trump.
Then Trump was speaking, and didn't have a prepared speech, "and nobody knew who I was. I was walking around the crowd meeting people. It was old, young, white, black, male, female, and what I saw was the way that they responded to his issues. He was against Common Core. He was against the trade deals that all of the people I knew in the Upper East Side were for."
Kushner said he hasn't gone to any of his father-in-law's rallies since he left office, but he went to several while Trump was still president.
"His rallies are one of my favorite parts of the whole political experience," Kushner said. "He's an amazing performer. And by the way, that's where he does his polls, he connects with the audience. He tries out different policies and different things, he sees how people react. And he tries to get information from the people."
Kushner said he also tries to show in his book that his father-in-law has a great deal of empathy, including with Hillary Clinton after he defeated her in the 2016 race.
"He saw that she'd kind of geared up for many years of her life to get to that position," said Kushner. "He saw how despondent all of her supporters were on election night. The original speech that we had for the victory was, actually you know that Steven Miller wrote … there was a speech that was written – kind of draft that he got – he looked at and said that's not the right sentiment."
He noted that he also tells in the book how he promised he'd call Trump "the second" he got the exit polls from the election, and initially, "they were a disaster. They showed that he basically lost by a landslide."
"I basically told him he lost the election," he said, "and then later that night we found out the data was going more like our models. The polls were all wrong, and I think we were just, we believed we can do it. But we never thought what would happen if we did do it."
He also described Trump's 2016 as being "ragtag," with initially the only surrogates on the first campaign being family members and Rudy Giuliani.
"He didn't have all the politicians," he said. "They were just calling into every radio station they could to say, get out and vote … it was really a wild experience, was quite a night for America."
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