The Voice in His Ear

When Reince Priebus wants to talk with the most powerful aide in the West Wing, he steps out of his corner office, walks down the hall toward the Oval Office, and knocks on the door of Jared Kushner—sometimes twice. Priebus may be the chief of staff, but it's he who waits for Kushner, the 36-year-old senior adviser and son-in-law to President Donald Trump, and not the other way around.

Kushner's been called Trump's "secret weapon," his "secretary of everything," the "super secretary of state," and, during the campaign, the "de facto campaign manager." To Forbes writer Steven Bertoni, Kushner was the Trump campaign's "savior." To Trump's chief strategist and alt-right operator Steve Bannon, Kushner is a "globalist" and a "cuck." To Kellyanne Conway, the president's counselor and former campaign manager, Kushner is an essential part of the team. "Without Jared, Donald Trump would not be president," she tells me. "And with Jared, Donald Trump will be a more successful and transformative president."

To elites repelled by the president, Kushner is either a reasonable figure doing his best to moderate Trump's most odious characteristics or a conspirator (who should know better) complicit in the neo-fascist Trumpian project. To certain elements of Trump's base, Kushner is a suspect operator who has installed a gang of like-minded Goldman Sachs Democrats in the administration. And if the swamp isn't drained, it will be their fault.

He may be all or none of those things, but what nobody in the White House or in the president's orbit would deny is that Trump trusts Jared Kushner above all. He is Trump's well-heeled, respectable avatar, the better angel of the president's nature. As the husband of Trump's daughter Ivanka, Kushner is practically unfireable. But his role isn't a case of reflexive nepotism—from Trump's perspective, Kushner's advice is valuable precisely because he's not going anywhere. Even the most steadfast of aides have their personal biases and agendas, but to Trump, Kushner has just one loyalty: to his father-in-law's and his family's legacy. More cynically, Kushner and his wife have more at stake—professionally, financially, socially, and perhaps even politically—in the success or failure of the Donald Trump administration than just about anyone besides the president himself.

So far, the White House has Kushner's fingerprints all over it. He introduced Trump to Gary Cohn, the COO of Goldman Sachs, and encouraged the incoming president to tap Cohn as the director of the National Economic Council—which Trump did. He cultivated speechwriter and nationalist ideologue Stephen Miller, working closely with Miller throughout the campaign and now in the White House to find Trump's voice. He elevated veteran White House aide Dina Powell, a friend of his and Ivanka's, to a high-ranking position on the National Security Council staff.