Jared Kushner forced to offer 'tortured' defense of Trump: report

According to a report from the New York Times, Jared Kushner is facing some awkward moments as he hits the airwaves to promote his book "Breaking History," where he is forced to defend Donald Trump while at the same time trying to keep some distance from him.

As the Times' Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni wrote, the president's son-in-law has been strictly sticking with plugging his book on ostensibly friendly conservative outlets, but that hasn't spared him from having to address the laundry list of investigations Trump is facing as well as the former president's claims he was robbed in the 2020 presidential election.

Noting that Kushner has gone to great pains to stay out of the spotlight since the attack on Capitol, his desire to sell his book has put him in the position where he has to talk about the former president -- and it has not always gone well.

Case in point, they wrote, was Kushner being asked if Trump was the real winner of the 2020 election, to which Kushner replied, "I think that there’s different words.I think there’s a whole bunch of different approaches that different people have taken, and different theories.”

When pressed, all he could offer was, "I believe it was a very sloppy election. I think that there’s a lot of issues that I think if litigated differently may have had different insights into them.”

As the Times report states, it is universally agreed upon that Joe Biden won the election, but, "Mr. Kushner’s reluctance to concede as much reflected the contortions he is now attempting as he tries to sell a book whose success hinges on his close ties to Mr. Trump. At the same time, he is seeking to keep his distance from the lies and misdeeds that paved the way for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol."

"After Mr. Trump left office, Mr. Kushner, a former Democrat, tried to rehabilitate his own image by telling people that he had wanted nothing to do with Mr. Trump’s lies about a stolen election; he writes in his book that he was eager to begin a new, forward-looking chapter," the Times is reporting. "But in marketing the book, which is currently among the best sellers on Amazon, he has had to reckon with the darker elements of Mr. Trump’s presidency, including the effort to overturn a democratic election."

Reporting that Kushner, "...receded into the background and evaded responsibility when it suited him, such as when he departed for the Middle East while his father-in-law refused to concede the 2020 election and tried to use the Justice Department to remain in power," the report notes that he now is forced to come up with "tortured defenses" of Trump lest he anger the former president's fans who, he knows, are the main audience for his book," to which Haberman and Karni add, "The friendly venues have mostly spared Mr. Kushner tough questions about Mr. Trump’s role during the Jan. 6 attack. His interviewers have also steered clear of asking about how Mr. Kushner secured a $2 billion investment from a fund led by the Saudi crown prince, whom he defends in his book as a reformer on certain topics."