![]() If that were true, then maybe he could be moved by Kushner’s quiet advice, and maybe all his maximalist stances - build the wall, ban the Muslims, bring on the nuclear-arms race - were negotiable. Many were hoping - perhaps desperately - that Trump, a formerly unthinkable president, might at heart be a pragmatic dealmaker. This left many of the staid business leaders in the audience confused about whether Kushner really shared their values and worldview - indeed, whether he had ever really belonged to their world at all. With little experience, and against all predictions to the contrary, Kushner had managed Trump’s way to the White House, and was now poised to be his most trusted adviser and enforcer in the West Wing. It’s safe to say none, however, had foreseen this scenario. Many of the assembled magnates had lunched with him or chatted with him at parties, having known Kushner as the proprietor of a successful Manhattan real-estate firm and the publisher of a less-successful Manhattan newspaper. Jared Kushner at a press conference shortly after Donald Trump won the New York presidential primary. But these days, he carries himself with the assurance of a man who just received the ultimate validation. ![]() He still has a boyish mien and a polite, ingratiating manner. (This account is based on interviews with multiple attendees.) Kushner, the 35-year-old husband of Ivanka, Trump’s favorite child, sat in a director’s chair, wearing a gray sweater and blazer over an open-collared shirt and a pair of gleaming white sneakers. “Jared Kushner is the man,” said Stephen Schwarzman, the private-equity billionaire, as he introduced Trump’s emissary. More than 400 executives, many of them CEOs of major corporations, crowded into the bank’s wood-paneled dining hall to hear first from Charles Schumer, soon to be the Democratic leader in the Senate, and then from Kushner, representing his father-in-law, Donald Trump, soon to be the most powerful man in the world. On a frigid day in December, Kushner visited the Times Square headquarters of Morgan Stanley to address a private meeting that the Partnership for New York City, which represents the interests of the business community, convened to discuss the outcome of the presidential election. But over the past year, something seems to have changed - in his beliefs, in his manner, in his relationship to his peers among New York City’s elite. ![]() Until very recently, and to all outward appearances, Jared Kushner was just another socially striving young businessman with inoffensively Bloombergian political values. ![]()
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