Jared going to that rally is a fun-house version of Siddhartha Gautama, the cosseted prince who would become Buddha, leaving the palace for the first time. He’d never seen an old, poor, or sick person before. It was like that with Jared. He was overwhelmed by this trip into the hinterland—by the passion of the crowd, anger and need, the connection with Trump. “People really saw hope in his message,” Kushner said in a 2016 Forbes interview. “They wanted the things that wouldn’t have been obvious to a lot of people I would meet in the New York media world, the Upper East Side, or at Robin Hood [Foundation] dinners.”

As Trump’s jet winged east, the enlightened prince buzzed with excitement. He’d gone out comatose but come back awake. He believed in his father-in-law now, believed he could and should win. He believed he’d seen something hardly ever seen by people in the urban centers. While you’d been at a cocktail party, he’d been exploring the river bottom. “As Kushner has told it, the young scion glimpsed a world outside his own Upper East Side bubble, a country roiled by grievance and frustration, looking for the champion Trump was eager to become,” Time explained.

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Jared ran the Trump campaign’s Internet operation. Some say that his work was crucial to victory—the boy-genius thesis. Others say Kushner was essentially ballast. “We’re talking about a guy who isn’t particularly bright or hard-working, doesn’t actually know anything,” Harleen Kahlon, the digital maven who worked for Kushner at the Observer, wrote on Facebook. She said he “has bought his way into everything ever (with money he got from his criminal father)” and that he is “deeply insecure and obsessed with fame (you don’t buy the N.Y.O., marry Ivanka Trump, or constantly talk about the phone calls you get from celebrities if it’s in your nature to ‘shun the spotlight’).” Kushner, she concluded, is “basically a shithead.”

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Trump’s language and that of his followers was now and then tainted by anti-Semitism—that’s what some believed. All the talk of evil bankers and urban elites, the tweet that pictured a pile of money beneath a Jewish star. People protested because people were afraid. Kushner’s participation was especially galling. The hovering presence of this Orthodox Jew seemed to stamp this unholy operation “Kosher.”

On July 5, 2016, Kushner was called out in his own newspaper—“An Open Letter to Jared Kushner, from One of Your Jewish Employees” —by a writer named Dana Schwartz. “You went to Harvard, and hold two graduate degrees,” she wrote. “Please do not condescend to me and pretend you don’t understand the imagery of a six-sided star when juxtaposed with money and accusations of financial dishonesty. I’m asking you, not as a ‘gotcha’ journalist or as a liberal but as a human being: how do you allow this? Because, Mr. Kushner, you are allowing this. Your father-in-law’s repeated accidental winks to the white supremacist community is perhaps a savvy political strategy if the neo-Nazis are considered a sizable voting block—I confess, I haven’t done my research on that front. But when you stand silent and smiling in the background, his Jewish son-in-law, you’re giving his most hateful supporters tacit approval.”

“My father-in-law is not an anti-Semite,” Kushner responded the next day in the Observer. “It’s that simple, really. Donald Trump is not anti-Semitic and he’s not a racist. Despite the best efforts of his political opponents and a large swath of the media to hold Donald Trump accountable for the utterances of even the most fringe of his supporters—a standard to which no other candidate is ever held—the worst that his detractors can fairly say about him is that he has been careless in retweeting imagery that can be interpreted as offensive. . . . This is not idle philosophy to me. I am the grandson of Holocaust survivors. On December 7, 1941—Pearl Harbor Day—the Nazis surrounded the ghetto of Novogroduk, and sorted the residents into two lines: those selected to die were put on the right; those who would live were put on the left. My grandmother’s sister, Esther, raced into a building to hide. A boy who had seen her running dragged her out and she was one of about 5100 Jews to be killed during this first slaughter of the Jews in Novogroduk. . . . It doesn’t take a ton of courage to join a mob. It’s actually the easiest thing to do. What’s a little harder is to weigh carefully a person’s actions over the course of a long and exceptionally distinguished career. The best lesson I have learned from watching this election from the front row is that we are all better off when we challenge what we believe to be truths and seek the people who disagree with us to try and understand their point of view.”

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Peter Beinart, former editor of The New Republic and author of The Crisis of Zionism, went after Kushner in the spirit of the Passover Seder. “Slavery . . . was meant to ensure that Jews would remember powerlessness once they gained power,” Beinart wrote in The Forward,perhaps the most prominent Jewish publication in the country. “Jared Kushner is what happens when that memory fails.” He suggested that Kushner’s alma mater the Frisch School “conduct the kind of after-action report that the military conducts when its operations go awry. Every synagogue where Kushner prayed regularly should ask itself whether it bears some of the blame for having failed to instill in him the obligations of Jewish memory. Even if it is too late to influence Kushner, Modern Orthodox leaders still can work to ensure that they do not produce more like him in the years to come.”

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Jared Kushner moved into the White House shortly after the inauguration, landing one of the best staff offices in the West Wing. Previously occupied by Obama advisers David Axelrod and David Plouffe, it’s just feet from the Oval Office.