Jared Kushner

Jared Kushner is a billionaire real estate developer, a two-time Nobel Peace Prize-nominee, the first son-in-law, and a close adviser to U.S. Pres. Donald Trump, such that he has been called the “Trump whisperer.” His diplomatic work on Middle East conflicts has earned him accolades while inviting charges that he has benefited financially from his relationships with leaders in the region.

Early years

Kushner is the eldest son of Charles and Seryl Kushner, and he was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family. He has three siblings, an elder and younger sister and a younger brother. His paternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors, and his father became a real estate billionaire and significant contributor to the Democratic Party. Kushner attended a yeshiva high school and went to Harvard University, where he graduated in 2003, before earning his law degree and MBA from New York University.

In 2005 Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 federal charges, including tax evasion and witness tampering, and was sentenced to two years in prison. At 25, Jared Kushner took over the family business, Kushner Cos., at a time of intense family upheaval. Those who know him describe it as “still the defining moment of his life”—an opportunity born of family misfortune that he made the most of. He expanded the company into other fields, purchasing the New York Observer as well as launching the Commercial Observer, which covers the global real estate industry. He made a big splash in 2007 when Kushner Cos. paid $1.8 billion for the 666 Fifth Avenue building in Manhattan, which was at the time a record for an American office tower. In 2009 Kushner married Ivanka Trump, the oldest daughter of Donald Trump; she converted to Orthodox Judaism.

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In 2020 Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, and in 2025 Charles Kushner became the U.S. ambassador to France during the second Trump administration.

Combat with Christie

When Donald Trump mounted his first presidential run in 2016, Kushner helped the campaign in several areas, such as social media. In May of that year, Trump asked Chris Christie, a former U.S. attorney who was then governor of New Jersey, to lead the transition team in the event of a victory in November’s general election. That move did not sit well with Kushner, who still harbored ill feelings toward Christie because he had prosecuted Charles Kushner a decade earlier. As Christie recalled in his 2019 book, Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics, Kushner urged Trump to hold off asking Christie to take over the transition, telling his father-in-law, in front of Christie, “I don’t trust him to have this, and you know why I don’t trust him to have it.” Trump went ahead with the selection, but after Trump won the election, according to Christie, Kushner had him dismissed.

White House tenure

After Trump became president, he named both Kushner and Ivanka Trump as unpaid advisers. In 2017, as part of the investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election, Kushner met with staffers of the Senate Intelligence Committee to explain his meetings with Russians during and after the campaign. “I did not collude, nor know of anyone else in the campaign who colluded, with any foreign government,” he said in a lengthy statement.

In 2018 The New York Times reported that Kushner’s family business had received large loans from Citigroup and the private equity firm Apollo after Kushner met with top executives of those companies at the White House. In the story, The Times wrote that “Mr. Kushner’s tenure in the White House has been dogged by questions about conflicts of interest between his government work and his family business, in which he remains heavily invested.” Other media outlets also raised concerns about his business interests.

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Regardless of controversy, Kushner had a big portfolio during Trump’s first administration. He played a key role in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the distribution and production of medical supplies and access to testing. He also helped win congressional passage of a criminal justice reform bill, an issue Kushner took personal interest in after his father’s time in prison. Kushner earned praise from Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York for his work on the bill.

One of Kushner’s most important contributions, and the work that accounts for those Nobel nominations, was in helping to shepherd through the 2020 Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and the Muslim-majority countries of Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Morocco.

Schism over the 2020 election and January 6

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner disagreed with the president’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, with Kushner reportedly telling his father-in-law that he would not partake in any investigations into potential electoral wrongdoing that Rudolph Giuliani was spearheading. (The former New York City mayor ultimately masterminded multiple failed efforts to stop a peaceful transition of power.)

When violence broke out in the country’s capital on January 6, 2021, as rioters tried to halt the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election, Ivanka Trump urged her father to record a video asking the rioters to stop. Kushner was coming back from trying to broker a peace deal involving Saudi Arabia and Qatar that day and after taking a frantic phone call from Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, raced to the White House to see what could be done. He also quietly met with members of Biden’s transition team.

After Biden’s inauguration Kushner and Ivanka Trump moved to Miami to begin a new life with their three children. They were largely absent from Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and after his victory said they would not have roles in the second administration.

In his memoir Breaking History: A White House Memoir (2022), Kushner revealed that he had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2019. He underwent additional surgery in 2022.

Kushner’s renewed role as peacemaker

So, it was somewhat surprising when Kushner resurfaced as his father-in-law tried to secure an end to the Israel-Hamas War. Kushner joined Trump’s Middle East peace envoy, New York real estate businessman Steve Witkoff, in October 2025 to accelerate talks between Israel and Hamas to end the fighting.

The two men flew to Egypt, where they helped allay concerns from Hamas and imposed some of the key compromises in the final deal.

Soon after, Trump announced that the two sides had reached a ceasefire agreement. The president praised his son-in-law, the negotiator, declaring, “Jared is a very smart guy.”

Even as some Democrats were lauding the work that Kushner did in helping to secure the ceasefire, questions about whether he should be negotiating with governments with whom he has business dealings were again raised. For his part, Kushner dismissed concerns, saying in a 60 Minutes interview that the business and diplomatic relationships were symbiotic:

What people call conflicts of interests, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world. If Steve and I didn’t have these deep relationships, the deal that we were able to help get done, that freed these hostages, would not have occurred.

In the last days of 2025, Kushner and Witkoff were at it again, meeting with Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin in a bid to bring an end to the Russia-Ukraine War.

By the middle of 2026, Kushner was again shuttling around the Middle East after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu broke with the Trump administration and rejected a plan that called for Hamas to disarm and the Israelis to leave the Gaza Strip. Hamas agreed to the deal; but Netanyahu, who is facing a tough election battle in October, rejected it. Kushner met with Hamas leaders in Egypt before flying to Israel. At issue is the order of operations: Hamas is insisting Israel leave Gaza before it disarms while Netanyahu says Hamas must disarm before Israeli forced will leave.

Continued business dealings

In December 2025, Kushner was in the middle of one of the blockbuster business merger involving the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. In reaction to Netflix’s surprise bid, Paramount Skydance made a hostile counteroffer saying that it would offer better value to shareholders. Among the financing Paramount said it had lined up included Kushner’s Affinity Partners. The Trump administration would need to approve any merger.