Donald Trump said Tuesday his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, could head up US efforts to broker a peace agreement in the Middle East, despite not playing a formal role in his administration.
“I would love to be the one who made peace with Israel and the Palestinians. That would be such a great achievement,” the president-elect said during a meeting with The New York Times.
Kushner, he added, could be the point man in any peace talks.
The 35-year-old Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband, has been credited with helping steer the then-Republican presidential candidate’s campaign onto a winning path.
But while Kushner has been rumored to be interested in formally joining the White House, the president-elect indicated that a formal role was unlikely, according to a Times reporter’s tweet.
Kushner was hardly a household name outside the rarified world of Manhattan’s media and real-estate elite when Trump began his quixotic presidential campaign.
But by Election Day, he emerged as “Donald Trump’s campaign savior” through his connections to tech giants from Silicon Valley and savvy use of social media, a new profile in Forbes magazine revealed Tuesday.
Kushner headed up the campaign’s “secret data operation. . . like a Silicon Valley start-up,” and propelled the gaffe-prone candidate to an unlikely victory, according to Forbes.
“It’s hard to overstate and hard to summarize Jared’s role in the campaign,” billionaire Peter Thiel, the only Silicon Valley big to publicly back Trump, told the magazine.
“If Trump was the CEO, Jared was effectively the chief operating officer,” Thiel added.
“Jared Kushner is the biggest surprise of the 2016 election,” said Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO. “Best I can tell, he actually ran the campaign and did it with essentially no resources.”
With Kushner on board, the Trump campaign “delved into message tailoring, sentiment manipulation and machine learning,” according to Forbes.
It helped that he knew the right people.
Those included the co-investors in Cadre, an online marketplace for real-estate deals that Kushner helped launch: Thiel, Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Kushner’s own younger brother, Josh, a venture capitalist.
“I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley, some of the best digital marketers in the world, and asked how you scale this stuff. They gave me their subcontractors,” Kushner explained.
“I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting.”
Following his efforts, the Trump campaign went from selling $8,000 worth of “Make America Great Again” hats a day to $80,000.
That generated revenue, expanded the visibility of Trump’s message and proved that the strategy worked.
Additional reporting by Daniel Halper