The detailed account in the memoir – due for release next month – provides new insight into the pernicious environment inside former President Donald Trump’s West Wing. Coming just as the former president prepares for a 2024 campaign, excerpts from the book reveal how violently the Trump team backfired from the administration’s earliest days, and how mistrust and resentment affected all aspects of governance.
Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser writes that Bannon once yelled at and threatened him in the Cabinet Room after Gary Cohn, a senior economic adviser, informed Kushner that Bannon was leaking negative information about him.
“Steve, you gotta stop leaking Gary,” Kushner told Bannon. “We are trying to build a team here.”
Kushner writes that Bannon replied, “”Cohn is the one leaking on me. …Jared, right now you’re the one undermining the President’s agenda,” he continued, eyes intense and voice dropping to a scream. And if you go against me, I will break you in two. Don’t fuck with me.'”
In “Breaking History: A White House Memoir”, Kushner questions his own response and says he was “woefully unprepared” after Bannon, “a black belt in the dark arts of media manipulation”, declared war on him. CNN has reached out to a spokesperson for Bannon about Kushner’s book.
Once, Kushner writes, he was urged by Reince Preibus — Trump’s first chief of staff — to call a New York Times reporter to conjure up a story that Priebus and Bannon had been kicked out of an Air Force One trip to the amid Trump’s displeasure. with its senior executives.
“Why are you coming to Florida for the day? I don’t need you there. Stay here,” Kushner told Priebus and Bannon, before referring to the attorney general’s decision at the time, Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from the FBI’s Russia investigation. interference in the 2016 presidential election.
“There was no reason for Sessions to recuse himself, and this is going to spell disaster,” Trump said, according to Kushner.
But after Kushner phoned Maggie Haberman of The New York Times at Priebus’ request, he said Bannon blew up on him.
“How dare you run on me? If you run on me, I can run away from you 28 ways starting Sunday,” Bannon said, according to Kushner.
“Admitting that I had yet to show any major political success in my seven months in government, I joked: ‘At least I was able to get Steve Bannon fired. That partly saves the world from a immediate disaster,'” writes Kushner. , noting that his friend told him, “You don’t get credit for this…you’re supposed to do this.”
West Wing aides mocked Bannon’s responsibilities after he left.
“Stephen Miller joked with Hope and I, ‘I have a plan to split Steve Bannon’s massive workload. Hope, you run to Jonathan Swan at Axios. Jared, you call Mike Bender from the Wall Street Journal. I call Jeremy Peters of the New York Times, and… we’re done,” Kushner writes.
One of Trump’s last acts in office was to pardon Bannon, who had been accused of defrauding donors of more than $1 million in a fundraising campaign supposedly supporting the border wall in Trump. Despite their acrimonious past, Kushner says he did not oppose the pardon, citing his own father, Charles Kushner, who also received a pardon from Trump.
“Seriously?” Trump told Kushner, according to the book. “Would you really be for that?” After all he did to you?
“Bannon single-handedly got me into more trouble than anyone else during my time in Washington. He probably leaked and lied about me more than everyone combined. He played dirty and got into the mud of the Russia investigation. But now that he was in trouble, I felt like helping him was the right thing to do,” Kushner wrote.
Last week, Bannon was found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to testify or provide documents to the Jan. 6 committee.
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