Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE meets with Jared Kushner, November 11, 2026. Abdulla Al Bedwawi/UAE Presidential Court/Handout
One of President Donald Trump's biographers, Michael Wolff, wrote in his column Thursday that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s combination of diplomatic influence, family access and Gulf-backed wealth represents a breakdown of government safeguards and a failure by the media to investigate how he accumulated so much power.
Kushner secured a $2 billion investment from the Saudi royal family after leaving the first Trump administration for his hedge fund. He scored additional backing from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Now he has returned as an international negotiator for the administration, but without any oversight, financial disclosures or even a national security apparatus around him.
Wolff expects the newly elected Democratic House and Senate to likely have Kushner in sight as they reinstall guardrails on ethics requirements and disclosures.
He cited a new book, Princes and Thieves, by Matthew Cole, which he said "offers an explanation. It centers its story on Kushner’s relationship with the world’s two richest men, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ), the headman in the UAE, and Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (MBS), headman in Saudi Arabia, and how Kushner became a prime beneficiary of their money and machinations."
Wolff said that there is an "extreme need for an explanation" and the "Trump-era press" has done little to demand it while Kushner hides "in plain sight" with "the grift across his forehead." People are evidently "so cowed and stupefied by the combination of his own lack of substance and the enormity of his influence and self-dealing that they just look at their shoes."
The biographer confessed that, in his books, he's tried to explain Kushner's rise to power given his lack of experience. He wondered if Kushner was able to make it to the top office because he could oversee "areas too complex for his father-in-law to understand or want to think about."
Wolff recalled one time Trump advisor Steve Bannon saying that Kushner's real success was “when the going gets tough, Jared gets out of the room."
Cole's book offers a different interpretation that Wolff concedes is "much better" than his own. Kushner was not the mastermind of anything. Rather, he was an inexperienced intermediary whom sophisticated Gulf rulers cultivated and manipulated. His access to Trump, admiration for wealth and transactional outlook allegedly made him useful to foreign leaders seeking influence.
Now Trump is using Kushner as an "unofficial" Middle East negotiator, far outside of traditional diplomatic channels. He has no training as a diplomat or negotiator, which may be why he's been unable to craft a deal with Iran or between Russia and Ukraine.
Cole's book alleges that Gulf money supported influence operations and Kushner’s financial interests. However, those allegations remain disputed, and Kushner has issued denials and legal threats about it. Wolff said that it almost sounds like a spy novel the way Cole wrote it.
"Indeed, the immersiveness and fluidity of the narrative — edge-of-your-seat stuff — may have given ammunition to some reviewers’ skepticism. They are more suspicious of the cogency of Cole’s explanation than they are of the persistent lack of explanation for Kushner’s accomplishments," wrote Wolff.
But that's the important point, Wolff said. "There is no world in which Kushner’s accomplishments happen without a hidden deus ex machina," he wrote. Kushner allegedly deployed "a step-by-step primer of skullduggery and diplomacy, producing a vastly more detailed and useful account of Jared Kushner’s remarkable journey than any other to date," said Wolff.
Kushner ultimately prevailed, navigating Trump's flood of problems and, as Wolff added, his "jealousy and whims," while ending up with $2 billion in his pocket for his hedge fund.
Meanwhile, Wolff contends journalists became so accustomed to extraordinary Trump-era scandal and corruption that they failed to investigate Kushner’s position. He wrote that CNN apparently canceled promotional appearances by Cole after Kushner threatened legal action. The Guardian framed its coverage around Kushner’s denial, rather than Cole's book. But Wolff defends the reliance on unnamed sources, arguing that secrecy is unsurprising in reporting on powerful people and alleged influence schemes.
That said, Wolff cautioned that some details were plausible rather than proven, writing, “Plausibility is not truth.”
Ultimately, he found the book to be a persuasive explanation for an otherwise puzzling matter.
The more important argument, he said, is that Kushner’s growing fortune and ongoing diplomatic role deserve greater scrutiny.