[csusbpeace] Inside Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s Gilded Florida Paradise—Far From Donald Trump or 2024

From: "raccoon" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> ("bigraccoon1")
To: "CSUSBPEACE@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <CSUSBPEACE@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2022 13:47:54 -0800

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Inside Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s Gilded Florida Paradise—Far From
Donald Trump or 2024

November 17, 2022
Chaos lingers at the periphery, but the Trump-Kushner marriage is thriving in
exile. Pitbull is a pal, Carbone is for dinner, and Game of Thrones is only a
TV show.

Ivanka, Jared: VEM / BACKGRID; Mansion: SplashNews.

It was that point in the day when dinner was done and all three kids were
tucked into their beds in rooms down the hall, presumably asleep, and they
just looked at each other and said, “Are you ready?” before collapsing into
their white sofa on the third of three floors in their mostly white rental
apartment overlooking the ocean. Jared Kushner picked up the remote and
turned on the television. He and his wife were rewatching the first season of
Game of Thrones. There was time to do things like this now that they were
settled into their new life as Florida residents and semi-private citizens.

It was this exact moment that they fantasized about when they decided to
leave “the jackals” (as the couple refers to DC’s native species) and head
for the sunshine in South Florida. Peace. Quiet. HBO. They’d just gotten to
the episode when King Robert pays a visit to Ned Stark, his good, honorable,
loyal, surrogate brother and close counselor. It had been Stark who served as
general in the key battles that made Robert king. Stark, too, by this point
in the season, had settled into life with his wife and five children. He was
content. He needed nothing. He had his family and his fiefdom. King Robert,
less so. He wanted Stark back in the fold, as his protector in King’s
Landing. The king made pleas and promises. Stark thought about turning him
down. Why would he give up a good thing? Stark relents; the pull and the
power are too strong. “Yes” is the only answer.

By the end of the season—spoiler—the king is dead while Stark has his head
sliced off in front of a cheering crowd, including his children.

The couple on the couch knew what was coming. “Don’t fucking do it, Ned!”
Kushner urged the screen. “Don’t fucking do it!”

It’s this story that the Kushners have taken to telling friends who ask
whether or not he and Ivanka Trump would go back to Washington
<https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/11/for-jared-and-ivanka-post-white-house-future-is-an-island-alone>
should their king win in 2024. And one that holds particular weight now that
Donald Trump has officially thrown his hat in the ring.
<https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/11/donald-trump-running-for-president-2024-election>
On the heels of the announcement, Ivanka put out a statement that read: “I
love my father very much. This time around, I am choosing to prioritize my
young children and the private life we are creating as a family. I do not
plan to be involved in politics. While I will always love and support my
father, going forward I will do so outside the political arena.” Jared, for
his part, was in the room with his father-in-law.

For Ivanka, this clear line probably felt necessary. She had been front and
center the last go-around, fundraising and stumping, then ultimately working
in the White House. Without her Tuesday night statement, it could be assumed
that she will jump right back in, particularly because she has kept much of
her life private since they left Washington. It is the first time that she’s
drawn a boundary around her relationship with him—not when his sex life was
the subject of tabloid fodder when she was in grade school; not while she was
his employee for years, first at the Trump Organization, then in the White
House; not while he was putting children in cages. Her work and her life and
his work and his life have blended and blurred, and, for decades, that
worked. She is different now. So is her father, sort of. And so is her
husband, who’s happier and richer and more settled than ever. Why would they
give up the good thing they’ve got?

Ivanka, Jared: Pichichipixx / SplashNews; Apartment: Mega.
It’s not a crazy question, considering the lush life they left before, and
what they reaped for it. Ivanka had her own fashion brand, plus a role
alongside her father at his company and on The Apprentice. Kushner was
toiling away at his family’s real estate firm while piddling around with the
institution that was The New York Observer. They were in love and invited to
the Met Ball. They were really very rich and very pretty and very much on
their way, even if that way was more of a gilded loop through Park Avenue
galas, North Jersey golf, Southampton summers, and yachts on the
Mediterranean and back again, ad infinitum. They gave up their spot on that
circuit as soon as Trump won. In the process, most of their former
acquaintances not only distanced themselves, but publicly registered disdain
for what the couple became part of. Ivanka had to shutter her line over
ethics concerns. Kushner put his investments in a trust, run by his brother
and mom. They both wound up testifying in front of a handful of congressional
committees—including the January 6th investigation—about what they knew
regarding myriad Trump-related misdeeds.

So it was no surprise when reports surfaced in early December 2020 that the
Kushners were eyeing a $32 million plot of land
<https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/11/jared-kushner-ivanka-trump-donald-trump-2024>
on the high-security, even higher net-worth-populated Indian Creek Island
owned by Julio Iglesias. Donald Trump was dug deeply into his election denial
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/us/politics/jared-ivanka-jan-6.html> by
then, helping hatch a plot to stay in the White House. The Trump-Kushners
knew they were getting kicked out of DC—though they did not publicly
acknowledge the fallacy of “the big lie” until she was interviewed by the
January 6th committee—and they knew they were not going back to their old
life in New York City. It was a precarious time in Manhattan for everyone,
not just the Kushners, at that moment. People had fled the city for greener
pastures during the pandemic, and the ultrarich had beat a path to South
Florida, seeking refuge from lockdowns and income taxes. A place where masks
were not nearly as welcome as MAGA hats. Even Florida governor Ron DeSantis,
who’d talked to Kushner nearly every day as the administration figured out
its COVID response in 2020, called to welcome the couple down to his state,
though the two haven’t seen each other since the move.

Even under those hospitable conditions, Kushner wondered what life would be
like for him and his family. It was unclear if he would be able to raise
money for the private equity firm he planned to open; or whether their kids
would be accepted into a private school, which they had struggled with in
Washington; whether they would find a circle of friends willing to be proxy
pariahs who would inevitably be doxed online; whether the same Daily Mail
photographer who watched them every morning on their way into the West Wing
would finally leave them alone. Whether there would be consequences for their
association with Trump, or whether, maybe, they’d be celebrated.

Mostly no one took Donald Trump literally or seriously when he said that he
could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, apart from the
advisers and confidants in his circle who knew it was likely true. They saw
how, for years, nothing stuck to him, and he’d freight-train right through
minor blows, all the way to the White House. It’ll make you lose sight,
staring too long at Trump's singular impunity, which is what happened to the
not small group of people around him who mistook his ability to get away with
things for their own. Allen Weisselberg and Paul Manafort. Steve Bannon. The
Michaels, Cohen and Flynn
<https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/12/michael-cohen-predicts-trumps-post-presidency-legal-drama>.
Rick Gates, Roger Stone. Hope Hicks hadn’t been able to find a job outside
of conservative circles. Sean Spicer wound up on Dancing with the Stars.

The only person in Trump’s orbit who seems to share the ability to survive is
Jared Kushner. Kushner was always under scrutiny in Washington. He skated
through when his security clearance was questioned by intelligence officials
and overridden by his father-in-law. His close personal relationship with
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, even after US intelligence agencies
concluded that MBS had approved the 2018 killing and dismemberment of
journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was called into question, as was the deal made by
a real estate firm linked to the Qatari sovereign wealth fund to invest $1.2
billion to bail out a Kushner family-owned building in midtown Manhattan
after Kushner was involved in negotiations around the diplomatic blockade in
Qatar. And Kushner was deposed in the Mueller probe as well as the January
6th investigation.

The walls were filled with framed front pages featuring Kushner, signed by
Donald Trump, a World Cup jersey with Kushner written as the name at the top
and the number 26—a nod to the fact that Kushner negotiated the World Cup
coming to North America in 2026.

Despite the fact that his hands were on pretty much everything in the Trump
administration—including a botched testing plan
<https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/how-jared-kushners-secret-testing-plan-went-poof-into-thin-air>
in response to COVID that threatened the lives of millions of people—he left
Washington without dimming his own prospects. Some six months after President
Biden was sworn in and Trump flew off into the sunset, Kushner announced he
was launching the investment firm, Affinity Partners. It was a name Ivanka
came up with before they left Washington, initially for a payroll company to
continue to pay their two White House assistants. By the end of the year,
Affinity had raised $3 billion, $2 billion of that from a fund led by bin
Salman. Kushner told investors that his own fund would focus on US-based
investments as well as those in the Middle East, and act as a continuation of
his diplomatic work in the White House. Earlier this year, Affinity Partners
announced that it would invest millions of Saudi dollars in Israeli
start-ups, which would mark the first time that money from the Saudi Public
Investment Fund would be directed to Israel. Kushner told The Wall Street
Journal
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/jared-kushners-new-fund-plans-to-invest-saudi-money-in-israel-11651927236>
that getting Israelis and Muslims to do business together would “focus
people on shared interests and shared values,” and that his work on the
Abraham Accords while he was in the White House needed to be “reinforced and
nurtured to achieve its potential.”

Kushner built out a team of about 30, including veteran private equity guys
and a slate of people from Trump’s White House, including his longtime aide
Avi Berkowitz as a partner. Others had served on the National Economic
Council, the Council of Economic Advisers, the White House policy team.
Miguel Correa, a retired two-star general who was on the National Security
Council, joined as a member of the geoeconomics team. They took up office on
the entire ninth floor of a 12-story building, at a time when office space
everywhere was dirt cheap, and while the space was under construction, they
leased a spot on the 12th floor, across the hall from billionaire investor
Carl Icahn’s. As soon as you swing open the door to the office, the ocean
smacks you in the face, floor to ceiling, so that the sea of standing desks
and concrete floors and otherwise starkness of the space disappears. The
walls were filled with framed front pages featuring Kushner, signed by Donald
Trump, a World Cup jersey with Kushner written as the name at the top and the
number 26—a nod to the fact that Kushner negotiated the World Cup coming to
North America in 2026. The Trump connection may be a red light for some
would-be dealmakers, but it hasn’t stopped plenty of others. Roughly 400
companies sent Affinity pitch decks seeking funding in the first year or so,
though they have only invested in four so far.

Saudi: Balkis Press/ABACA/Shutterstock; Fox n Friends: John Lamparski/Getty
Images; Ivanka, Jared: Katerina Sulova/CTK/AP Images.
Less than a 10-minute drive down Collins Avenue is the home where Jared and
Ivanka will eventually live with their children, in Indian Creek, though it’s
not the lot that some outlets initially reported. They purchased a
six-bedroom, 8,500-square-foot Spanish-style mansion on 1.3 acres in April
2021 for $24 million. Gates to the property, built in 1994, open to a
reflecting pool. It is flanked by manicured hedges and tens of palm trees.
The interior opens to double staircases, and out back, they are currently
constructing a guesthouse that abuts their private dock. It sits directly
across the road from the island’s golf course and just a few homes down from
the palace that Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen were building for their family
until the divorce. Icahn lives on Indian Creek as well, a skip away, as do
hedge funder Eddie Lampert, and the former Mr. Elle Macpherson, real estate
tycoon Jeffrey Soffer. Known as “Billionaire’s Bunker,” the island is gated,
guarded, and separated by a bridge that you can only get over if security
lets you. The Kushners’ home is the first one you see going in and the last
one you pass going out.

The apartment they are currently renting occupies three floors in one of
Surfside’s most expensive buildings, a pyramid-shaped condominium right on
the beach, developed by Sapir Corp., which teamed up with the Trump
Organization years ago to build the Trump SoHo hotel and condos in New York.
The building has a private tennis court on the roof, and a 75-foot indoor lap
pool, though the Kushners have their own private outdoor pool and yard. It is
one of the most prestigious and luxurious addresses in an area built with the
express purpose of providing prestigious and luxurious addresses to rich new
buyers, even though its proximity to the beach’s boardwalk means that it’s
hardly very cloistered. Despite the fact that Jared and Ivanka are far from
the constant spotlight, they have chosen homes that don’t allow them to
totally recede. As one person who knows the Kushners put it, they’re still
Trumps, at their core. “To some degree, they will never be able to escape
attention entirely,” that person told me, “and they will never entirely want
to, either.”

Kushner basked in the spotlight all summer with the debut of his memoir,
Breaking History. Multiple people had advised him to get down all his
experiences while Washington was still fresh in his head. He thought it could
serve as a guidebook for those working in the private sector but are
considering entering public service. The book’s initial draft, which he
scrawled out over the course of months, came in at 1,000 pages, though he
eventually brought on a ghostwriter to whittle it down.

The book was something that bore his name and his name only. Not his
father’s. Not his father-in-law’s. There was an added significance of it
being in the Times, a paper that carefully reported on him through Trump’s
White House, the paper of his former home and of the people there who cast
him out.

From the jump, there was an intense focus on making sure that Breaking
History hit the New York Times best-seller list, particularly once that paper
savaged it in a review. Let the paper’s critics destroy me while they have to
print my name at number one, the thinking went. He lined up a slate of
conservative media appearances, many of them on Fox News programs (meeting
the contributors he’d spent so many days watching in the West Wing, where the
channel was perennially switched on, felt almost surreal for him), without a
single interview with anyone from mainstream networks, moderate cable
channels, or down-the-middle newspapers. The book topped the list its first
week, albeit with the taint of a bulk-sales dagger
<https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/10/is-the-gop-gaming-the-new-york-times-bestseller-lists>.
It remained on the list for five weeks. Kushner felt like he was on top. The
book was something that bore his name and his name only. Not his father’s.
Not his father-in-law’s. There was an added significance of it being in the
Times, a paper that carefully reported on him through Trump’s White House,
the paper of his former home and of the people there who cast him out.

For years, the Kushners had been ostracized by the places and faces they once
orbited, and some of that remained once they moved to Florida. When Louis
Vuitton held its tribute to Virgil Abloh’s final collection in Miami in
December of 2021, Jared and Ivanka were invited to attend by Alexandre
Arnault, whose family owns LVMH and who has long known the couple and worked
with them to open a factory in rural Texas, by which the White House—and
Louis Vuitton—could tout job creation in the heartland. The Trump-Kushners
did not walk the step-and-repeat, but inside, they were seated alongside
Wendi Deng Murdoch, another stalwart friend. The couple was also not invited
to media investor Aryeh Bourkoff’s annual invitation-only MediaSlopes
conference the first year after they left DC, despite the fact that they had
privately remained friends through the White House tour.

There is probably no amount of money or time—never mind concession or
disavowal—to bring them back to where they were pre-circus. But Jared and
Ivanka were never going to be the same people. Washington hardened them, both
infinitely expanded and wildly contracted their world. They were both too
toxic and loathsome for their old crew, and far beyond them in other ways.
It’s hard to imagine they will ever be invited to the Met Ball again, but
they will never again care about going. By virtue of their position, they
were in palaces and situation rooms and oval offices instead of ballrooms and
yachts on the Adriatic, involved in national security negotiations, and key
members of internationally significant investigations instead of social
seasons and fashion weeks. It is safe to assume that wherever they travel
now, they are meeting with a billionaire or politically powerful person who
lives there; and vice versa when those people visit Miami. As one person put
it to me, once you’re in that circle, you’re in.

Ivanka has taken up surfing and wakeboarding, and is learning breathing
techniques. She wears a little red kabbalah bracelet on her wrist. So does he.

And maybe they didn’t really have many true friends before all of this. They
had old friends and many acquaintances, sure. They had business relationships
with a simulacrum of intimacy making up most of their social lives, in the
way that all wealthy New Yorkers do. In Washington, they had not friends, but
buddies in the trenches. In Florida, they’ve found their crew. There’s
family, for starters. Jared’s parents, Charles and Seryl, keep an apartment
in a building nearby, and his brother Josh and Josh’s wife, model Karlie
Kloss, bought a $23.5 million home nearby. In terms of friends, they exist in
a few different worlds. There are their neighbors in Indian Creek with whom
they’ve become close (the island has its own mayor, who asked Jared to be the
witness for his daughter’s wedding within months of the Kushners moving
down). There are new friends they’ve made from their kids’ school. Jared and
Jeff Zalaznick, the restaurateur behind Major Food Group’s Carbone
<https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/08/how-chef-mario-carbone-built-the-most-celebrity-studded-restaurant-on-earth>
and ZZ’s, both of which opened up shop in Miami, are inseparable, according
to multiple people. They golf together, along with music entrepreneur Steve
Stoute. Zalaznick seated them at his table for the group’s Carbone pop-up
during the Formula 1 race in May, and offered the couple a membership to ZZ’s
new private club, where Ivanka hosted her 40th birthday dinner for her
girlfriends–some old, some moms from their new school (for her 41st birthday,
she had 20 girlfriends for dinner, at which she posted many photos smiling
and celebrating with the group). They’ve become friendly with Miami’s
official mayor, Francis Xavier Suarez, and its unofficial mayor, Mr. 305
himself, Pitbull. He takes a walk on the boardwalk before work most mornings
with friends, or with Ivanka, and eagerly accepts midweek invitations to play
golf with his buddies. There are no sideways glances when they walk in any of
these restaurants or clubs, according to people who have seen the couple out
and about. People are asking them for photos, to come to events. “No one
cares anymore. They’re all rich and spending a lot of money,” one person who
is around them socially now told me. “That’s the equalizer, and it’s stronger
than anything else they’d agree or disagree on. Though it happens that they
mostly agree here.”

At many restaurants, owners and servers pat Jared on the back, a thank-you to
Trump pushing to open businesses back up during the pandemic. After one
Affinity staff party, which Kushner hosted at a kosher restaurant nearby
their office, the owner picked up the tab. He left a tip that was big enough
to cover the tab, and then some.

It’s more peaceful than he could have imagined, Kushner tells friends. Less
flashy, more fulfilling, is how he puts it. At the beginning of the year, he
set four priorities for 2022: family, religion, health, and work. Ivanka, for
her part, has taken time to find her footing. Until recently, she mostly
stayed mum on social media, apart from photos and videos of her in Poland
with Ukrainian refugees, or handing out aid after natural disasters. As she
found her footing and her friend group, the posts got more frequent—boating
trips with new mom friends, family travel photos, a handful of images from
her sister Tiffany’s wedding at Mar-a-Lago, at which she was a matron of
honor. She has taken up surfing and wakeboarding, and is learning breathing
techniques. She wears a little red kabbalah bracelet on her wrist. So does he.

They’re spending more time as hands-on parents, certainly, and more time as a
couple, as they’ve faced the unexpected death of her mother, Ivana, over the
summer, and his bout with thyroid cancer, which he first dealt with quietly
while they were in Washington, and again in the summer, when the two traveled
to Minnesota to the Mayo Clinic, where he underwent a second surgery. By all
accounts, they are a true partnership. When his book launched, Ivanka posted
about it more than Jared, blasting emails to her father’s fundraising list
and posting to her 7.5 million Instagram followers. Jared joined her this
fall to accept a posthumous first-grade Medal of Merit on behalf of her
mother from Czech Republic president Miloš Zeman. Jared played Instagram
husband, snapping photos of her at the event and around Prague–an art he
tells people he has mastered over the years.

It is both spin and sin to speak of Miami and New York, of Floridians and New
Yorkers, as equals. John Updike knew this when he said that people living
anywhere else were, in some sense, kidding. I venture a guess Updike would
agree that anyone choosing to live in Miami over New York is all but dead.
Again, though, Kushner could be the exception. Life is better for him in
Florida. He’s richer than ever. He’s raised his money and sold his book
there. He’s found his people who, if they don’t peacock full MAGA, they at
least seem to be comfortable enough with the association. He believes that
meetings in Miami are better than they were in New York; that, at this point,
everyone he could want to meet passes through Miami and comes to do business
in a way that they don’t anywhere else.

He still waxes romantic about the time in New York before all of this, in the
city of his 20s and early 30s that was ruled by the likes of Mike Bloomberg
and Graydon Carter, Ron Perelman and Peter Kaplan. That version of the city,
he tells people, is over. Now he and his new friends have the opportunity to
do the same for Miami—a city waiting to be rebuilt and a group of people like
him ready to imagine its future. It’s a soft power he is exercising behind
the scenes. This year, he brokered a meeting between Mayor Suarez, the
president of the Miami Dolphins, and FIFA president Gianni Infantino to
negotiate bringing one of the 2026 World Cup games to Miami. They walked away
with a game set.

The room was full when Kushner took the stage in a conference room filled
with palm trees and upholstered swivel chairs in Riyadh at the end of
October, for the sixth annual three-day Future Investment Initiative
gathering, nicknamed “Davos of the Desert.” It’s the same Saudi royal-run
conference that just a few years earlier, just about every leader in both the
private and public sectors boycotted because of Khashoggi’s murder, and, this
year, was still not attended by any member of the Biden administration, after
weeks of public disagreements over an oil cut led by Saudi Arabia and Russia.
American investors turned up in force regardless. Jamie Dimon and David
Solomon, the CEOs of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, took the stage on the
first day, as did Ray Dalio and Stephen Schwarzman. Kushner’s former White
House colleagues Steve Mnuchin, who also started a private equity firm that
raised money from Saudi investors, and Anthony Scaramucci were also on the
schedule. Kushner was onstage alongside former Italian prime minister Matteo
Renzi, in a discussion about “peace and prosperity.”

It was not unlike the sorts of panels that Ivanka sometimes sat on in her
White House years. In the early days of the Trump administration, she’d flown
to Berlin in order to take questions alongside German chancellor Angela
Merkel, Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, and Christine Lagarde, then head of
the IMF. In those days, whenever I asked anyone who really knew her if she
would one day run for office, the response was probably no—the goal was to be
someone on that sort of stage, but without the election. She had been the
shiny star, the vastly more famous and poised one in their union, the one on
her way, wherever that may take her. That was her stage.

As Kushner prepared to step into the spotlight before an audience of the
richest, most connected, most powerful people in the world, Ivanka was
capping off a three-hour dinner of her own at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The
company: her friend Kim Kardashian.

[csusbpeace] Inside Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s Gilded Florida Paradise—Far From Donald Trump or 2024

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